Paid to Read Survey Fraud
Have you heard of the Paid to Read online ‘industry’? As affiliate marketers, I’m sure many of you have come across this scam in one way or another. If you haven’t, let me briefly explain. These websites will supposedly pay you for filling out forms, reading emails, taking surveys, or clicking on links. Depending on how they are set up, they provide different money making schemes to the webmasters who own the sites.
Although there are varying levels of legitimacy to these programs, the most fraudulent version is the one I will discuss for this article. It involves an affiliate marketer setting up 2 websites. The first website is a paid to read website, the second website is a legitimate website. The paid to read website acts as a backdoor funnel, encouraging visitors to sign up for offers which are hosted on the legitimate website. The webmaster generally pays visitors $1-$6 per offer they complete (via paypal). In turn, the webmaster makes anywhere from $20-$50 per completed form.
Here’s are some of the ads that came up when searching for “paid to read” on Google:
If you click on the ad, you’ll notice the paid-to-read landing page is hosted on a website which explains to the visitor how he can make money by filling out free offers. The visitor then enters his email address and fills out some basic information on the paid to read website. He is then taken to a ‘members’ section which looks like this:
The user can then click an offer, and is taken to a webpage hosted on the server of the ‘legitimate’ website. He is then redirected to the offer.
The reason the webmaster is using two websites is to help cover his tracks. It’s common practice that affiliate providers will check the originating landing page for TOS violations before payout. So if the merchant visits the referring landing page, it checks out without suspicion.
It surprises me that these types of websites are so apparent, yet the affiliate program providers (take a hint CJ) do little to curb this deceptive practice.
