You should always be aware of companies that offer expensive gadgets if you spend a little time in testing or surveying a product!
When companies ask for your opinion, you definitely would find it be flattering enough and would believe that whatever they are offering in return is actually true!
Some companies might ask you to fill in a simple survey and get an iPhone for free!
There are some companies that promise you of small products, such as entering a survey and receiving a trial pack of products genuinely for free. Such surveys are totally okay, as you will anyway get a product that is for free and there is nothing at stake.
Also, they will keep sending you mails and on filling details or by responding, you might win small freebies.
However, you need to be careful of companies that claim to offer you expensive gifts such as iPhones, computers, MP3 players or mobile phones. It is obvious that anyone would fall for it and would wonder if they could get an expensive gadget costing hundreds of dollars for free without any significant effort involved.
You do not have to worry at all, as they are definitely fake and is a scam.
Online product test are not all about signing up, earning and then receiving stuffs you actually need to venture time and patience as well as the skill to write and create a wonderful review for the product that was entrusted to you.
What is the scam?
Generally, the gadget they ask you to test would not be available in the market yet.
As of now, the next big thing is certainly iPhone 7: it is not yet available in the market and as rumors have it, it is much better than the previous variant and has incorporated a lot of changes that actually would make it a game changer among high end smartphones.
However, the reality is that you do not know anything about the product yet and there is a high chance that even the top executives working in the company will not have much idea about the product until the official launch of the product as it would be unveiled only during the official product launch.
Similarly, it is applicable to computer games as well. Scams usually target people who are fans of gaming and somehow offer them a beta version of the game before the official launch of the product and gaming addicts would badly want to lay their hands on the game and download the file provided and install it.
Hence, the best case of making sure that you will not fall into victim of such tactics you need to read tons and explore, discover the actual process of product testing, the steps on to becoming a product tester. To know more about the jobs inside market researches such as this: online product testing.
What happens next?
The next time you receive a mail of offering a product or game that is not yet released officially, it could be one of the multiple scams as listed below, or could be a combination of multiple scams:
- There might be a requirement for you to test a product. However, they might prompt you to purchase a guide to test the product, which would cost around $30 and you will receive pages of nonsense for paying the fee. In a few days, you will realize that you will never receive the product that has to be tested either!
- The mail might insist you to be a part of a testing panel and they might ask you to pay a fee for signing up for the panel. Some ask you to set your card on auto payment for a small fee, say $5 and you will realize that it is a scam after the first payment. You might also forget to deregister your card from auto-payment and it might continue debiting from your account on a monthly basis.
- Similar to the Nigerian advance fee scam fraud, they might ask you to pay a small fee to share confidential details and will state that they will share certain legal documents with you once you pay. However, you will eventually realize that you have been scammed.
Although the offers might seem to be good enough, they will definitely be scams. No one would offer you a high end or expensive device for free or for just signing up!