InboxDollars was another one of the online surveys and work-from-home side hustles we tried and tested for you was InboxDollars.
Now that we have feedback from several of these online work-from-home low-skill task sites, they all feel like a dubious scheme.
My wife Pam has tested Mechanical Turk and Inbox Dollars and felt they were trying to lure people away to buy or enroll for products and services.
That concerns me if I put my consumer scam expert hat on for a moment. If you are a less sophisticated consumer and trusting, then before you know it, you could be led, accidentally or intentionally, to give up personal information or commit to purchases.
My opinion is to avoid all sites that say they will pay you to take surveys, play games, or do small tasks.
Pam’s Review of InboxDollars
When I heard about InboxDollars and was asked to test it for you, I was excited to try it out.
I had high hopes that I could possibly make some money doing surveys.
I signed up and immediately earned $5.00 for just signing up. How cool was that?
At first, my options were surveys for my opinions. I completed a couple and then was told I didn’t qualify for them even though the data I gave them was kept.
After two days and four hours of work, I’d earned a total of $8.26, including my initial earnings of the $5.00 for signing up.
My choices of earning changed.
My options were to download games to play to earn money. The problem with these games were you needed to spend money to make money. For me, that’s gambling, not earning.
The other option I was recommended to partake in was opening bank accounts if I opened an account with $25, they’d give me $75. Opening all of these accounts can’t be good for your credit score. Plus, I don’t want my information out there with these random companies.
The Final Straw
My final straw was when I wanted to cash out my $8.26. I couldn’t get the cash directly, I had to get it on a gift card, and the lowest amount I could get was a $15 Starbucks card. I kept getting daily emails about how I was almost there to cash in my rewards and offers of how to earn $5.00 or more to get to that amount.
Every time I tried one of those surveys, it was either closed, or I was denied for not having the right criteria for the survey. After four more days and four more hours of trying to get to $15.00 with no success, I gave up.
So even though I made more money with InboxDollars than with Mechanical Turk, I was paid $0.86 from Mechanical Turk. I’ll never see the $8.26 I earned from InboxDollars because I didn’t meet the $15 threshold.
For doing about 13 hours of surveys, I brought home $0.86. I hope I don’t have to report this on my taxes this year.