Completing Free Offers Online for Money: Beware

Everyone loves earning a bit of extra cash every now and then, and this is exactly why many people join sites like CashCrate.com or SendEarnings.com. These websites promise that you can earn money by filling out surveys or completing free offers, and the truth is--you can! But there's still a catch.

Each time you fill out an offer for a free gift card or enter a contest for a new car, you're putting your own personal information out there for the world. And trust me, you'll be doing this a lot too, because it takes a lot of offers to add up to a substantial amount of money; most of them won't even earn you a whole dollar. Offers will ask for almost everything about you: name, age, birthday, address, phone number, email, etc. What do you get out of this? Maybe forty cents and the junk mail in your inbox (and mailbox!) increases exponentially. Plus, you can expect calls from those wonderful telemarketers that never know when to give up.

Why not put in false information and just take the credit for filling things out anyway? Sounds like a win-win situation, right? Wrong. CashCrate, for instance, will cancel your account the second it realizes you're faking it.

Now, I participated in sites like this when I was sixteen years old, and let me just share that experience with you. It wasn't all bad; I got paid twice, with each check totaling about twenty dollars, before I eventually gave up. Getting the checks gave me a feeling of accomplishment and made me feel like I had actually earned my own money for once. But it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

The offers were time-consuming; every day I went through and completed as many of them as I could, and all the while I was hoping I'd earn enough money to be paid that month. Boredom would often set in after the first few forms or after a particularly long survey, and so I'd leave the site for the day. My e-mail inbox became impossible to sift through, with hundreds of spam messages appearing literally overnight in both the main inbox and the junk mail. I began receiving promotions through postal mail as well; I even received free diapers for my "baby" and tons of information on pregnancy. Try explaining that to your parents when you're a sixteen-year-old girl who is not pregnant. So many telemarketers called our house that my mother went so far as to change our phone number, and at one point, I got a DVD in the mail that came with a bill. They were charging me for it! A supposedly "free" offer backfired and somehow ended up ordering me a DVD that I had never heard of. Luckily, I was able to contact the website, and they allowed me to send it back for no charge. That DVD situation opened my eyes, and I quit using the site before it could possible cause me to owe anyone else money.

If there is anything I would like you, the reader, to take away from this article, it would be this: beware of these kinds of sites. You may earn some extra cash, but you'll also repeatedly share your information over the internet with every type of advertiser. Get your money the old fashioned way; get yourself a job and work for it.

Sources: Personal Experience