How to identify scams on Amazon Mturk
Amazon Mechanical Turk, nicknamed Mturk, is an online crowd-sourcing system through which computer companies outsource short tasks that can't be done by computer to anyone in the world willing to do the work. These tasks are called HITs, short for human intelligence task. The type of work and pay rate are determined by the employer, called the Requester. That work has attracted hundreds of thousands of workers seeking to earn income, be it stay-at-home parents seeking to work a few hours after putting children to bed or freelance writers and programmers looking for extra projects to fill in the week and the budget. Unfortunately, this mass of people around the world seeking work for pay has led to a surge of scams masquerading as HITs. Recognize common elements that indicate scams among the HITs and avoid losing time, privacy and even your own money.
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Instructions
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Be wary of a HIT description like "Please test our email system" or "Must enter valid email address." Any minimally qualified system administrator can create test email accounts on her own server to test websites. They could also create test websites on free systems like Hotmail or Gmail to test their application or server. This kind of HIT requires giving your email address, which will result in you being paid pennies for signing up for spammers' mailing lists.
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Be wary of a HIT description that includes the requirement to sign up for a free service. You should never have to complete an offer -- which is a legally binding contract -- to be paid on Amazon Mechanical Turk. And the service may start out free but switch to paid if you do not cancel in time, and that might be difficult to do. This is also a violation of Amazon's policies and can be reported to them by clicking on the "Report this HIT: violates the Amazon Mechanical Turk policies" on the bottom right of the HIT webpage.
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Be wary of a HIT description like "Completion requires clicking on a link in an email sent to you." A legitimate system administrator creates test email accounts on his own server to test websites. He can also create test websites on free systems like Hotmail or Gmail to test the application or server. This kind of HIT requires giving your email address, which will result in you being paid pennies for signing up for spammers' mailing lists.
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Be wary of a HIT description like "We need people to help test our signup form" or "Test our form -- must enter valid information." Any service you sign up for in the test can be interpreted as a legally binding agreement for service. You may not be able to prove you only signed up as part of a signup-system test. Additionally, the scammer gains your email address for spam lists.
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Be wary of a HIT description like "Test our landing page" or "Test our homepage." A website can be tested by any user's computer on the company's own network. Legitimate companies hire Web designers who have educational credentials and job experience in finding and fixing these bugs. If they are concerned about the quality of their landing page, any intern or minimum wage college student could test the links and fields for them.
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Be wary of a HIT description like " Click on our link, stay on the page at least X seconds." A requirement of duration of stay on a website is an indicator that a process will attempt to connect or load while your computer is connected to the website. The website may be used to connect to your computer and read information stored on your computer or applets and other scripts in the website may be programmed to load viruses on your computer.
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Be wary of a HIT description like "Help test our software." Legitimate companies hire software developers who can create any software or operating system environment needed to test the software. Random variables on unknown users' computers would render such HIT tasks useless. Real software testers control the testing environment and log the full results of the test.
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Tips & Warnings
Be suspicious of any survey that pays over 50 cents. Actual surveys for pay through legitimate services pay less than this. The only typical exception on Amazon Mturk are those survey links that contain a .edu domain, which is part of an actual university or school's system.
Avoid the HIT if the time to complete a survey is less than fivev minutes but an entire page of information is requested. This is a sign that it is designed to collect your information without even paying you pennies for the information.
Never enter personal financial information into a form for an Amazon Mturk HIT. No financial information is required for payment by the Requester; payment is made from their account to yours when they accept the payment, initiating a pull of money from their prepaid account on Amazon Mturk to your account.
References
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Comments
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I did a hit that paid $20 and I had to put a debit/credit card in for my credit rating. I was told the information would be deleted afterwards, cause they signed me up for some free first month 14 dollars a month after that cancel anytime. I did get the 20 bucks, but they send me emails, which means they didn't delete my information I guess. What should I do?
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I don't have very good experience with mturk. Why should they suspend accounts? Requesters reject the work is enough. Moreover, they can block which is more than enough. But suspension? If they think of quality work then they should consider accuracy or approval rate. In their policy, they already mentioned that they do not guarantee for quality of work and requesters use the site at their own risk. Then why do they need to suspend? And if suspension is so much required then they should make a criteria like suspension of one day for one percent decrement in approval rate or two day suspension when a requester blocks a worker etc.. My HIT approval rate has been more than 97% and I got bonuses also. But they suspended my account when more than 200 hits were pending worth of about $50.
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Anonymous
Apr 15, 2011
Ok, I would keep that in mind....:)
