Cash Crate Scam

Are you a mom trying to earn extra money from home, a college student needing cash, or a freelance writer looking to supplement your income? Please allow me to save you time and frustration by sharing my experience with an online work-from-home job opportunity that was recommended to me as a legitimate, paying site.

I am a freelance writer. While I am getting started, income is tight, mainly because I am working on a book that will pay down the road. My husband thankfully works a good day job, so we are not starving by any means, and in fact we feel far more blessed than many in this current economy. However, I became fed up the other week after we carefully did our budget, and still came up short of meeting expenses. I reasoned: I'm an intelligent woman who should be able to bring in some extra income through small online jobs. Why shouldn't I explore online opportunities that allow me to stay home and write, but also gain us some extra cash? I logged on.

Last year, I had spent months researching legitimate work-from-home opportunities in case I ever needed the information. Now seemed like the perfect time to try one out, so I pulled up the one survey site that had been frequently recommended as legitimate and paying: www.CashCrate.com. Imagine my disappointment when, after spending nine hours on the computer filling out surveys, I had made only $3.20 - that is an hourly rate of $0.35. To put that in perspective, it is far less than your average unskilled worker in India makes! [For anyone who is interested, the Indian government recommended a minimum wage of US$265 per month for unskilled workers in March 2008, according to the Independent Bangladesh newspaper. Worker riots were sparked across the country because businesses tried to resist that wage as too lavish!]

The Cash Crate website took me to a long list showing names of marketing surveys and the pay rate for filling them out. The typical range was from 25 to 80 cents per survey, with a few stand-out surveys paying $1 or slightly more. This would be worthwhile if the surveys could be completed, and the survey taker could actually be paid for his or her time. I soon learned why the time needed to complete a survey was not listed on Cash Crate. I ran across numerous surveys that wanted me to purchase items or sign up for special offers in order to receive "free gifts" or "enter to win $50 grand!" before the survey would be considered completed, and payment for taking it would be forthcoming. The legitimate marketing questions were loaded at the start to gain your free information.

These surveys wanted permission to send my email address all across the Internet to their "partners" who also "want to give you special offers" in exchange for your bank account information, your next of kin, and a copy of your will. All right, that is a bit of an exaggeration, but these surveys would take 45 minutes to fill out, be replete with personal questions about your purchasing, eating and sleeping habits, and those of your household, and then tell you at the end that either you "did not qualify" for the remainder of the survey (most sites do not tell you why you did not qualify) or that if you did not fill out a "bronze, silver and gold" set of "free" offers (some requiring only a little bit of your hard-earned cash), then the survey would not be considered finished.

The bottom line is that you can only ever complete a handful of paying surveys, while most surveys spin you back and forth ("You're almost done!" "You've almost won a Dell laptop!" "Keep Going - You're About to Finish and Be Entered to Win a Lexus!") to suck free marketing information from you while attempting to con you out of your money. Cash Crate may pay you something, but at the same time it makes the income of unskilled workers in India look like that of kings! On the brighter side, I did end up with many free quotes to save money on car insurance, a matter that has been on my "to do" list for months. On the other hand, my email keeps coming up with "New Offers!" and I have become practiced at hitting the "Mark as Spam" button.

I am (sometimes unfortunately) not a woman who gives up easily. Cash Crate has just enough legitimate surveys to keep you hooked and thinking you may make some fair money after all. The more the site led me on, the more I determined that I could not possibly have wasted hours of my precious time for next to nothing, and that if I just kept on going, I could bring in some income... so I kept on going until I had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that yes, indeed, through Cash Crate you really can waste hours of your time for next to nothing in payment! The best I may have to show for these hours is a $50 J.C. Penny gift certificate that might or might not show up in the mail, but I had to spend $25 to get it in the first place.

Bottom line: Don't believe online testimonials such as those on Craig's List about how someone made $20 their first month on Cash Crate, and then $320 their next month, and it keeps getting better! The only way these people are making money is by referring people to the site, which pays you for sending over your unsuspecting friends and family. I understand from professional employment offices that there are real work at home opportunities on www.RatRaceRebellion.com, but the key to understanding that website is to know the work-from-home advertisements have not been checked for legitimacy (the sponsors of the website told me via email the ads are included simply because the site has to make enough money to offer its services) so you must sign up for the free email job leads listing to see the work-from-home opportunities that were vetted as legitimate. These job leads are typically available for skilled workers to do full-time at home, but are most commonly medical transcriptions or ezine editing jobs for experienced editors with chock-full resumes (and most of the transcription jobs also require two years of experience in that field before consideration.)

There are legitimate work from home opportunities out there, so don't give up! But don't waste your time or money on Cash Crate, either. I love the quote that a fool learns from his own experiences, and a wise man learns from the experiences of others. Please learn from my foolish gullibility! A good rule of thumb is that if you have to pay for the privilege of doing work, the website is simply making money off of you. Happy job hunting!