by Erik Setser

Created on: May 22, 2009

As the old saying goes, not all that glitters is gold. As an addendum to that though, the brighter the flash, the more likely there's something to hide.

Online surveys most certainly will not pay your bills, except perhaps your Ramen Noodle and Mac 'n' Cheese expenses. Worse still, the more money they claim you can make, the more money you stand to lose. These sites fall into two categories, and in some cases, a single website can fall into both.

On the one side, you have the sites that require an upfront payment and/or a monthly fee to become an advanced member, VIP, gold member or whatever they choose to call it. This will get you the higher paying surveys, after you complete a dozen pages of detailed information about yourself - even though most of your surveys won't pertain to any of it -, if there are any surveys to be had at all. So often, it turns out that there are either no additional surveys offered for upgrading, or they'll claim that your demographics don't qualify you for any VIP offers. Would've been nice to know that ahead of time, huh?

Besides, given how many online money-making offers are scams, it would be nice to see some proof of the product. By that, I mean aside from stock photos, flowery testimonials signed in initials, and obviously fabricated phony bank statements. Let the user test drive what they're going to be getting. Include a contract agreement, binding the website to present the exact same perks and pitfalls that a paying member would get, and the user to purchase a membership - even just for one month - if they choose to cash out their earnings from the trial period. Of course, that won't happen. These companies expect trust but refuse to offer any in return or contractually bind themselves to their claims.

The other category - which again isn't mutually exclusive to the first - are those who require trial offers to be completed. The two most common are trial memberships through stamps.com and freecreditreport.com. However, the fine print on many of these sites, will either obligate the trial member to become a paying member before being eligible for cancellation or they'll end up charging the user a regularly monthly fee quite unexpectedly. No communication will be offered in the meantime, though they'll certainly make themselves known after that first fee is withdrawn.

The cancellation contact information is usually tucked away, and the process ends up being a chore. What this means is that the user ends up losing money

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