July 2007 Archives

Update, 8/16: My surgery went fine but I had to be re-hospitalized for complications. Doing better and back online at least part-time; my inbox is quite full of junk, so if you mailed me with a question and haven't received a reply, PLEASE re-send. Thanks for your patience and for your continued support!

I'm having surgery tomorrow and will be offline for at least a week, perhaps two. In the meantime, please visit my sister site, AdLibCorner.com, for the answers to rewards program trivia questions -- this site is a must-bookmark! Also, because my inbox will no doubt be clogged with junk when I return, if you need a response on something ASAP, please put, "URGENT!" in the subject line when you email me. Thanks, and see y'all back soon!

It might help folks new to rewards programs to know which programs the veterans are doing and how well they pay -- to give you an idea of which sites to focus on. These are the sites that have paid me recently.

QuickRewards.net: In the last 30 days, I've cashed out for (and received) $120 in Amazon GCs from QR. How'd I do it? Cashback for purchases, playing trivia and Guess My Number daily, clicking to visit websites, reading emails, and completing free offers on the website (providing an email address where I don't mind receiving spam). I received my GCs within 48 hours (usually less) of cashing out each time -- 6 different cashouts this month. QR is awesome...you can choose PayPal instead and cash out as often as you want with NO minimum required to request your earnings!

Jellyfish.com: Have earned $103.45 since 6/1. How'd I do it? Cashback, playing games (Smack Wheel...no wins on Outwit yet), and through referral purchases. Can't say enough good things about JF -- great cashback, love the Smack Shopping reverse auction, and fun member chat. They'll be selling a car on their reverse auction very soon, too!

Ebates.com: These folks pay quarterly by check. I earned $109 this past quarter, between cashback and referrals. They have great rebate rates. Just avoid installing their Moe Money Maker rebate reminder program because it can interfere with your receiving cashback from other rebate sites.

Gather.com: Earned and received a $20 Borders GC this month. How? They had a promotion going on where you would earn the GC by referring 5 friends to the site. You can also earn points (redeemable for cash or prizes) just by posting messages. Wish I had more hours in the day!

CreationsRewards.net: In the last month, I cashed out for (and received) a $5 Amazon GC. How'd I do it? Clicking on email offers (also using a spam email address, a different one from QR's) and playing trivia on the site. Received the GC the day after requesting it. I don't put enough time into this program or I could be earning a lot more.

Winzy.com: Earned and received a $5 Amazon GC from Winzy this month, thanks to a referral winning $5 -- you win when your referrals win! You can win just by doing searches on their site. I tend to forget about this one, too, so it's nice to get an email saying a friend won me a prize!

There are other great programs out there, and I do them as well, but these have been good earners for me this past month and I thought they were worthy of a mention here. If I can recommend programs to you based on what you do online (shopping a lot at a particular store, NOT spending money online but still wanting to earn, liking to do those "free trial" offers, etc.) please send me an email and I'll get you pointed in the right direction!

Visitors to BountyZoo.com this weekend were in for a surprise -- the "page not found" error was gone and instead, members were immediately forwarded to Jellyfish.com...without any kind of explanation, "we're sorry for bailing on you," "screw you, we're keeping your money," or anything.

I have a private message in at Jellyfish to one of JF's founders for clarification. Did Jellyfish "buy" BountyZoo's membership, or their domain (not according to WHOIS info, which still has them owned by someone in New Zealand)? Does JF have any intention of honoring BountyZoo's past debts? And -- I think this is the big question -- why would Jellyfish, a year-old company with an impeccable reputation, want to be associated with a company like BountyZoo, which has been plagued with complaints for months?

Thanks to Andrew of RewardsDB.com for the heads-up, and I'll update this as more information becomes available.

Update, 1:45pm:
When asked about this in chat today, SmackDaddy (the Jellyfish chat administrator) said that, "Smack Daddy and Jellyfish have nothing to do with BountyZoo...Smack Daddy heard that they are linking to us and JF has no relationship with them whatsoever."

Update, 7/19:
BountyZoo.com is no longer forwarding to Jellyfish but is now going to a search engine results page. Pretty safe to say the program is permanently shut down.

Like many of you, I wasn't too shocked that the SixQuestions.com rewards program disappeared some time around early March -- they hadn't been paying out members' earnings, and for a year or more the site just seemed to be on autopilot. There has been a "We are currently upgrading our system. Please try again later" page holder in place since March. But is SixQuestions' owner, David Hanley, really hard at work on his site?

If posts made by many people on this website are any indication, Hanley's been hard at work, all right...just not on SixQuestions.com. HUNDREDS of people are complaining that Hanley has been spamming them through information obtained from their registrations on CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com. Turns out he has at least two other companies, SixQ.biz and Hanley Roe LLC, that supposedly specialize in staffing and placement services. The first site's categories are a straight ripoff of Craig's Lists' and is chock-full of Google Ads -- very unprofessional. The second site has nothing but contact info (the copyright notice on it is from '05).

Once he has your email address, he emails you back with the link to a form to fill out with more of your personal info. What he does with this is a little unclear -- some say they are sent to HotJobs.com, one person said her PayPal account was immediately hacked, some theorize he's just trying to get hits to his Google AdSense ads on his ste. If you click through to view "their" available jobs, you'll be sent to Indeed.com, a site that pays website publishers to bring in traffic.

Meanwhile, SixQ.biz's contact phone number is a voice mailbox, and his office address is some sort of business complex that doesn't have him listed as a tenant.

Tabatha's been doing an outstanding job of investigating this, starting in late February. Major kudos to her for documenting this scam and disseminating the information so fewer people get suckered. Remember, folks, information is currency on the internet. You provide it, they can sell it.

An amusing aside -- Dave's MySpace page. He made his page private on 7/3, but luckily Tabitha got a screen shot. :)

Dave did renew his FiveQ.com domain, but he hasn't gone to the trouble of taking down the "this page has been hacked" graphic that was apparently posted on 2/19 (right about the time SixQuestions.com was hacked and eventually taken down). Maybe getting hacked turn him over to the Dark Side of the Force, hehe. Who knows?

In addition to monitoring the comments posted on this website, I also try to monitor the buzz on rewards programs on message forums to see which ones are getting high marks and which are going down the crapper. I've been hearing a lot of negative things lately about BountyZoo, and I wasn't much surprised to see today that the site is down. Not sure exactly when this happened but it appears to be within the past few days.

Ripoff Report has gotten three non-payment complaints for BountyZoo in just over two months. Click here to read them.

There are a handful of complaints about BountyZoo here on Flyertalk.

There are complaints about BountyZoo on the Fatwallet forums here and here.

And last (but certainly not least), you'll want to read the comments posted on my review of BountyZoo here.

Of course, until/unless we hear directly from the site, we have no idea of whether this site outage is temporary or if they've permanently pulled the plug. Either way, here are some contacts you can use if you'd like to pursue unpaid earnings with BountyZoo:

Aboutus.org's entry on BountyZoo including some contact info.

The UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) offers consumer advice through their Consumer Direct website.

The UK Trading Standards Institute's website has a lot of consumer advice -- no time to wade through it right now but perhaps someone will have luck finding a good agency to complain to.

The UK Advertising Standards Authority website has a complaint form but it's unclear whether they can help without copies of the ads from BountyZoo's website.

The forum for BountyZoo's UK sister site, GreasyPalm, is located here. Worth a shot, maybe?

If you have other suggestions -- and I'd love to hear from someone from the UK to find out how these things are best handled in England -- please respond with a comment. My apologies to those who may have lost money in this program.

Upromise was down this weekend as they revamped the site to make it more user-friendly, and I think they've succeeded fairly well -- the new look is more intuitive, with the main menu options, "Earn," "Save," "Pay," and "Family and Friends" and "Resource Center." Under each of these choices is a drop-down menu to narrow down your destination even further -- for example, under "Earn," you'll find options for Online Shopping, Dining, and Travel. Much-improved navigation, IMHO. Join Upromise here if you're not already a member!