More Scams to Watch Out For

December 3rd, 2008 · No Comments

Today’s batch of scams cover such things as Video Game Testing websites and places that claim to let you earn money for clicking on ads in e-mails, but promise huge sums of money.

In the first category we have such sites as GamerTestingGround.Com, GameTesterGuide.Com, Only4Gamers.Com, and GameTesterGuide.Net. If you visit these sites (which if you do, I advise inserting “THE FOLLOWING IS A LIE” before every sentence you read on them), you will see them making lofty promises of being able to get you jobs testing video games for $10-$80 / hr in the comfort of your own home! The company will mail you their pre-beta games for you to test and you can even keep them for your console etc!

Ok let us apply some logic here as to why this is too good to be true. What game company in their right mind would mail out pre-release copies of their video games wherein you or their competition could see what they were coming out with, pirate it to the internet etc? They wouldn’t! Almost all video game testing is done in-house down the hall from the developers or they bring in focus groups to test different usability aspects.

Also, video game testers in the real-world (not this fantasy land these sites are in) make around $9-$10/hr and work 8 hour days for weeks at a time testing every fine detail of games. Trust me, this is not actually enjoyable after the first day. If you talk to real game testers who have done these focus groups or temp jobs doing game testing they spend months playing the same game over and over and over. Wii bowling is fun right? Probably not after 3 months straight of playing it 40 hours a week I bet.

So if you are really curious about what these sites do offer, several people out on the internet have kindly tried them and let us know: a bunch of scammy PDFs full of affiliate links, a few links to job applications for game testing jobs (nobody has ever heard back from these companies though), links to get paid to take survey sites, and other useless junk. This is pretty much what you get with 95% of the sites i’ve seen selling easy money get-rich quick schemes of some sort or another.

The second type of scam that i’ve seen that is very prevalent on the internet these days are the paid to click e-mail sites where you click on a link in the e-mail and sit on the site for a minimum of 30-60 seconds and then your account is credited with a high dollar amount. The idea isn’t really new but the money on offer is ridiculous. Sites like E-mailPTR.com and ComfortableIncome.Net claim high numbers per email, with the former claiming each e-mail is worth $888 and you can cash out once you get to $888,888! They claim to have paid out $248 million dollars! Wow, a company doing $248 million in business and we’ve never heard of them? Notice on the site there are links to $555, $444, $333 per e-mail sites?

Just to verify and assuage the curiosity of my readers I joined up with E-mailPTR.Com and ComfortableIncome.Net. I even paid the “Diamond Upgrade” fee on E-mailPTR.Com out of spare blogging money (I didn’t mind wasting $20 for some research). Now, if you read the fine print on E-Mail PTR they claim that you will get paid out of the site’s monthly profits and that payouts are requested and then paid out the 10th of the following month. What the site owner doesn’t tell you is that once you request upgrade he wants you to be a member for at least a full month after that (at the upgraded level) before you can request payout.

So, being a good little member I dutifully waited a month and clicked a few of the e-mails he was sending out to earn some extra cash. I mean, who can resist $888 for 30 seconds of their time!?! The e-mails from both comfortableincome.net and e-mailptr.com come out on the same day within a few minutes of each other and you are always sent three. Does this seem suspicious to anyone else?

What should raise your suspicions even more is that the paid e-mails being sent out every three days consistently all seem to cover similar sites (both e-mailptr and comfortableincome’s paid emails cover the same types of sites and even each other!) that revolve around get-rich quick schemes.

What turns out to be happening is that one set of scammers owns tons of these types of sites and links them all back in together. If you recall prior articles i’ve written on this subject (just check the scams category on the left to see them), you will remember that the scammers love to buy up other domains and do fake reviews and anti-scam messages where they pretend that they have done research for you to weed out all those “other scams” and then link you back into their “100% great site”.

Examples of this for the GameTesting scam include sites such as IHateScammers.Com and NoScams.Info. Both of those sites have fake reviews claiming to have found the only non-scam video game testing sites and then link to several sites that all have the same sort of text on them with changed names.

Anyway, back to our story about how i’m making $888,888 by spending only $20! So, I waited a month and then requested payout, then waited until the 11th of the following month before complaining and asking where my money was. The site admin had been responding to my e-mails prior to this when I questioned how I could get my free weekly ads to all members as part of my platinum membership (this is a manual process supposedly but after I sent him some ad text he never sent any of my ads). I waited a week and e-mailed him again and then requested payout again.

I checked my PayPal account at the end of November, nope still nothing. I joined the site in September and racked up $950,000 in my account to cash out, and each cash out costs me only $6800! Too bad we are working with monopoly money where my $950,000 is worth a few hours of wasted time and nothing in actual dollars.

I don’t suspect that the scammer will ever reply to my e-mails since I started asking for my payouts when there are none to be had, but I did want to make sure that nobody falls for these types of scams. I know you think to yourself, this is surely a scam, but what if? Well, I can fulfill your curiosity by confirming that you do, indeed, never get paid anything by these sites.

Remember, something for nothing doesn’t work mathematically. If you need further proof look at the prices they claim to charge advertisers to advertise to their whole membership on e-mailptr.com For an $888 solo e-mail to all members (they claim to have 9,000), it will cost you $6800. I don’t think they want monopoly money for that, but the question is what advertiser would be so stupid to pay $6800 when they could get the platinum member upgrade for $20 and get unlimited free WEEKLY $888 solo e-mails to all members? Also, the e-mailptr site would be incurring liabilities of close to $8 million dollars in potential payouts for every $888 solo e-mail they sent to all members (if this wasn’t all fake monopoly money), when they are charging the advertiser only $6800 for this priviledge.

Man, if this kind of fuzzy math worked in the real world we could buy $10,000 gift cards on the $1 value menu at McDonalds.