Unlike our previous scam warning, this one isn't based on secondhand reports. It was a direct experience. I was ripped off by Survey Sampling International and I'm sharing this post in the hopes of finding and assisting anyone else who was shortchanged in the same way.
About The Company
Survey Sampling International is actually one of the more established and tenured market research companies in America. Founded in 1977, they got their start conducting offline research doing phone surveys, which they apparently still do today. But they are better-known to internet workers for the gaggle of paid survey companies they run. Given their longtime presence in the marketplace I am somewhat surprised they are this blatant about making fraudulent offers, but I guess they are at a point where they feel they are too big for anyone to assert their rights effectively.
If you do surveys by logging into an account at one of these sites, there doesn't seem to be much of an issue other than that they aggressively close the accounts of people who are participating at more than one of their sites, even though these sites don't necessarily make it clear that they are all under one company's umbrella and that accounts with multiple sites are a grounds for account termination. If you stick to one site, and log in to do whatever low-paying surveys are on offer, you don't seem very likely to have a problem.
Fraudulent Email Offers
The central issue I'm here to talk about today is deceptive email offers that the company may periodically send to you outside the framework of the survey sites. They'll send these to the email address you put on file when you create your account.
These email offers are for much more in-depth surveys that require connecting to an outside site for some sort of more bandwidth-intensive activity. In my case, they offered the opportunity to give responses to a television broadcast in real-time by connecting to an outside URL with a streaming video player. Obviously, this constitutes a hit to your personal bandwidth cap, but (at least in my case) they also ask for an hour to 1.5 hours of unbroken participation. No bathroom breaks, and periodic random "attention checks" to make sure you are still there.
Personal Details
In my case, they offered what I felt was very fair compensation for this time and this bandwidth expense -- $40 for a little over an hour the first session, and then $45 for about an hour and a half the second time. The offer was CLEARLY for $40 and $45 in actual currency -- no legalese subtext/footers, no qualifiers, just "we will pay you X amount of $ for doing this."
What I ended up getting after about a week and a half was only a little over $22. I waited a few days to see if that was simply partial compensation, but nothing else came. So then I used the "contact us" form available by logging into your account, and waited for over a week with no reply whatsoever.
After digging up a couple of customer service email addresses from Google, I finally got a reply from the "Survey Points Club Help Desk." They offered a BS excuse, and when challenged for a detailed explanation, said they were escalating the complaint to the "rewards center" -- very likely a fictional entity, as I then got no reply whatsoever for a week and a half.
Once again I turned to Google, and got the email address of Ms. Susan Evans (Susan.Evans@surveysampling.com), listed customer service POC for the company. Though Ms. Evans did not respond to me personally, emailing her had the magical effect of getting the Help Desk to respond out of the blue the next day. More BS excuses for the partial payment were offered. When I asked to be put in touch with someone farther up the management chain who makes decisions about survey compensation, I was given back a wall of insulting and condescending nonsense, told "you've been paid enough" like I'm a child asking for candy, and communication was completely shut down.
As you can infer from this blog, I work as a freelancer. Though this wasn't a formal offer of employment, I see this conceptually as being no different than a deadbeat client making a partial payment and trying to skip out on their responsibility. And as I do with deadbeats who don't want to pay as agreed for my time and labor, I'm going after them with every tool available to me, and I encourage you to do the same. Arrogant companies who think they're entitled to just casually rip people off need to learn that these actions translate into negative financial consqeuences for them, one way or another. Even if I don't recover my money, there's principality here.
Ripped Off By Survey Sampling International? Here's What You Can Do
Obviously, the low dollar amounts involved here make an individual civil suit untenable. Since they are also headquarered in Connecticut, that adds extra complication if you aren't already present in that state.
I would encourage you to contact an attorney about the possibility of a class action suit, however. They may have similarly shortchanged hundreds or even thousands of people. Class action lawsuits do not cost participants anything in terms of legal fees, and state borders do not really matter. I believe there is a viable case to be made in terms of false / deceptive advertising and dealing in bad faith. Though these types of suits usually involve a purchase of consumer products, you agreed to make a "purchase" in terms of investing your time / labor / bandwidth based on their offer, and that offer turned out to be deceptive at best and outright fraudulent at worst.
Aside from that, consider these other and more low-impact avenues to at least increase public awareness about their shady doings:
* If you were ripped off through Survey Points Club or a similar branch that works with a loyalty points program for another company, get in touch with that company's brand management division. They should be informed as to how their brand is being negatively represented by one of their partners. If a gift card of some sort was offered as payment, similarly contact the company the gift card is for about how this sheisty market research company is damaging their brand. You can see the companies they are connected to in the picture above, through various different survey fronts -- Amtrak, JetBlue, Accor and more.
* File a complaint by mail with the Connecticut Attorney General's Office.
* File a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
* Review the company on Yelp and Google. They can't delete these or have them censored or removed.
* Review the company on SurveyPolice, one of their primary recruiting sources for new survey takers. Though SurveyPolice seems to have a somewhat cozy relationship with Survey Sampling International, that doesn't seem to go far enough for them to delete negative reviews of their services, of which there are many.
* Spread the word on Twitter, addressed to @SSITweets. They can't make tweets from other people's accounts disappear!
* And, hopefully needless to say, stop taking surveys for them. Companies like this usually make anywhere from $2 to $20 per survey that you take for them, so withdrawing participation and encouraging enough others to do so doesn't take long to represent a disproportionate loss of revenue for them.
From my experience this company pays a very paltry amount compared to other survey sites -- you're lucky to see 50 cents per survey and a more common amount is 10 to 20 cents. Many other survey sites pay 10 cents for surveys you were screened out of in a minute! A better going rate is $1 and up per survey, and there's a number of sites where you can get that now -- eRewards, SurveySavvy, and Pinecone Research just to name a few.
I totally agree with you, they just suspended my account with their Opinion Outpost site for no reason when I attempted to cash out my balance. This is happening to many other users and it appears what they are doing is selecting a certain percentage of accounts, they make up an excuse to close the account when the member attempts to cash out. The individual amounts for each account are small but by continuing to select a percentage over and over month after month and year after year it adds up to a good profit. If they did this to everyone it would look too obvious. They are a scam and an illegal fraud.
ReplyDeleteWow, well put & great information. It's the principle of the matter. If you ever want to help me out, I got semi-scammed by Endurance (Mepco) auto warranty.
ReplyDelete