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With so many paid survey scams those days, and so many websites promoting those scams, often it is difficult to determine which is real and which is the ugly, especially for survey newcomers. However, there are ways you can identify them and avoid them:

1. Please remember: Never pay anyone to do paid surveys and get paid. Legitimate paid survey sites are always FREE to join and cost absolutely nothing to take surveys and get paid. If anyone ask you to pay or provide credit card information, walk away!

2. The most common scam sites work like this: They claim they are paid survey sites and ask you to sign up and provide your personal information. They then turn around sell your information. Those are email harvesting sites and often those sites are overly simplified, no company information etc, all they ask is your name and email address, and you won't know what's going on until you register. If you see a site like this, walk away.

3. If you come cross a site that you are not sure if it is legitimate or not, please be sure to check their privacy policy. If you are not happy with their policy or they don't have a privacy policy, stay away. A legitimate company's privacy policy should state something like "We do NOT reveal or sell your personal information to any third parties..." in the "How do we use information collected" section.

4. Please be aware the difference between paid surveys sites and paid offer sites. Many paid survey beginners are confused about this. Paid offers sites are the ones you get paid for signing up offers and sometimes you need to pay (therefore provide credit card information) to sign up non-free offers. There are some paid offers sites advertise themselves as paid survey sites - those are scams in my opinion since they are dishonest and misleading.

Please note: there are a few paid offer sites do have "daily paid surveys" which they pay $1.00 or less for each survey, but their "main business" is still paid offers.

5. Stay away from the websites (free or paid) promoting known scams - usually those sites promise you make thousands of dollars doing paid surveys, and lot of them claim that they have a list of 300+ or 400+ or even 500+ paid survey sites. (The truth is there are NOT 300/400/500 sites that actually pay!) - They are just promoting anything they can find for commission, and they can NOT be trusted.

6. Trust your instinct - sometimes you just have a gut feeling about a scam site just by it's look and feel. In this case, you are probably right, trust yourself and walk away.

7. You can always do your research for a certain survey site. Fox example, type "A survey site" in Google, you might find "A survey site is a scam!" listed among the top search results!

8. Finally, remember NEVER provide sensitive personal information to anyone, never give out your driver's license numbers, credit card, bank account information. I have never has a survey site requires me to provide these information to get paid.

Doing paid surveys is not going to make you rich, but certainly it's an easy and fun way to make extra cash. Hope this article will help you cut through the hypes and get a good start with paid online surveys. For more information about paid surveys, please feel free to visit my site, you will find the best FREE lists of legitimate paid survey companies, more paid survey tips, as well as honest paid survey reviews.

Copyright 2008 Mei Lynn