Craigslist Survey Sites – Why You Should be Careful When Joining!

If you are a user of Craigslist and interested in working from home, you have probably seen many ads there for paid surveys.

Many survey sites advertise there, but are these sites worth joining and are they even legit?

The short answer is that some of them might be, but there are also many scams.

Below, I will explain why you have to be careful before joining a Craigslist survey site, and how you can spot the ones to stay away from and which ones might be worth joining.

Why do survey sites advertise on Craigslist?

Craigslist is a huge portal when it comes to people looking for jobs, housing, items for sale, etc. So by advertising there, a company has a good chance of getting out to a big audience. At the same time, it is often free or at least very cheap to advertise your product or service here compared to other places.

These things combined does however also mean that many people are attracted to this opportunity, and not all of them are legit or offer legit opportunities.

So, therefore, there is the risk of finding an offer that is a scam. Craigslist does have good ways to try to block spam, but on an online portal where everything happens so fast, it is not possible to block everything that is not legit right away.

So in relation to paid surveys, there are some signs you can look for and that you have to be aware of before joining a site you see advertising on surveys on Craigslist.

What do survey sites that advertise on Craigslist offer?

In general, many of the ads you see for paid surveys on Craigslist will have something in common. That is that you will be able to make thousands of dollars by answering online surveys from wherever you want to.

These ads are aimed towards people that are looking for the freedom of being able to work from home online and being able to make a living from this.

I will however right away say that it is definitely not all ads for survey sites on Craigslist that are scams and not worth joining. In general, I would divide the types of survey sites that advertise here into 3 groups:

• Scam sites
• Referral links
• Genuine offers

Type 1 – The scam sites:

The Craigslist scam survey sites are often the sites that promise you huge rewards for doing surveys. They will promise that you can make thousands of dollars a month on their site. That is just not realistic to make that kind of money on surveys.

It definitely is possible to make some nice extra money by taking surveys, but if you see a site that claims you can do it for a living, you should stay away from it.

So if an ad promises this, there are good reasons to be skeptical. Often the links on these ads will take you to a page where it will turn put you have to pay to join the panel.

That means that they will try to make money from getting you to sign up to a certain panel – but legit survey panels are always free, so this is more a way for them to make money and not you.

Below you can see a picture of an ad that clearly promises unrealistic earnings.

It promises you can make up to $7000 a month and makes it sound very easy and realistic.

It is NOT true that you can make this amount. Even if you join all of the best survey sites, you will not be able to make this much.

In this particular ad, I also tried to follow the link (which I did not find any reason to include in the picture as I do not want to send traffic to a page like that).

Once I was on the website itself called homesurveylife it looked like you can sign up for survey sites, and also on the site, it promised extremely high rewards.

Once I clicked join, I was however taken to a page that was trying to get me to sign up for some streaming service. As you can understand this is clearly an example of a scam site that uses Craigslist to try to recruit people.

Ads like this will usually be taken down quickly by Craigslist but some might slip through the filter or not have been banned yet. So be very skeptical if you see claims like this.

Type 2 – Referral links:

Some survey ads on Craigslist are advertising for a legit site but just advertised by a person that is already a member and is sharing a link to promote the site to earn a small commission himself.

That is in itself not a problem, and I also use referral links myself sometimes – that is a way to cover the costs of running PaidFromSurveys.com.

The problem is just that sometimes people get so eager to earn a commission that they start using the same tricks as the scam sites and start promising you that you can make huge amounts of money and become rich on the site they promote.

I personally get annoyed when I see ads like this as I am using referral links sometimes myself, and think it is sad when people use tricks like this.

To refer people is very fine, but it has to be done in an honest way and not with fake promises, in my opinion.

And it will give the sites advertised like this a bad reputation as they will not live up to the expectations, even though they might be legit sites, but just promoted by somebody that promises too much.

Below you can see an example of an ad for Vindale, but behind the link, you can see some extra numbers which mean it is a referral link.

Vindale Research is a legit survey site, but this is an example of someone trying to promote it by promising unrealistic earnings.

It will not make you $1500 immediately. It might, however, sometimes offer high paying surveys that will make you $50 per survey but these are quite rare.

So this is an example of someone trying to trick people to join a site with false promises to make a small commission him/herself.

Be aware of these types of Craigslist survey ads as well as they unfortunately often are there. Again, they will likely not be there for long as they will get banned, but they might be there for a little while so you need to be able to spot them.

Type 3 – Genuine offers:

There are also legit companies that themselves use Craigslist to advertise genuine survey opportunities when they need members for their panel.

These will usually not promise you thousands of dollars but simply just tell you about the opportunity to share your opinion and at the same time get paid a bit for it.

Below you can see an example of an ad that is legit in looking for survey participants.

It does not promise you can become rich, but emphasize on the chance to share your opinion. And the company also have a phone number you can call and an actual address you can visit.

Many of the genuine survey options on Craigslist are paid clinical research studies. These can definitely be worth participating in so it can be worth keeping an eye out for these there.

How you can spot which survey sites are legit on Craigslist

From the above, you can see that there are several different kinds of survey ads on Craigslist.

Some of them are legit and some of them are scams or at æeast deceptive.

I have already hinted at some of the things that can give away which ads are what, but will now go a bit more into details about this to give you a clear idea about which ads you can trust and which ones you should stay away from.

Warning sign #1 – Claims you can become rich:

If an ad promises you that you can make thousands of dollars or become rich from doing surveys, do not believe it.

It is just not possible even on the best sites. However, some legit sites are also advertised like this, so an ad that promises this should not be disregarded because of promises like this alone.

Warning sign #2 – the site itself:

To be sure if a site is legit or not, it is best to visit the site itself and check it out.

There you can look for the signs it is a survey scam site.

But in general, if the site itself also promises you that you can become rich from surveys, or if it costs money to join, you should stay away from it.

Honesty sign:

As mentioned, there are also sites that are advertising survey opportunities very honestly on Craigslist.

They will usually be focusing more on the opinion aspect of it and not so much on the “get rich” aspect of it. Also, they will often have a phone number included or an actual address for the company itself.

Can you make money on Craigslist survey sites?

Yes, you can find survey sites advertised on Craigslist where it is definitely possible to make money. The best opportunities, in my opinion, are the ones that are more local and do not promise too much. And it might not even then be online you have to give your feedback.

Craigslist is a portal that is mostly aimed towards local opportunities and can be great at finding such opportunities.

But if you are interested in doing online paid surveys from anywhere in the world, there are better ways to find the legit sites. Just please remember that paid surveys will not make you rich.

How do you find legit survey sites online?

If you want continuous access to paid surveys, the best way to get this is by joining online survey platforms.

There are plenty of opportunities like this for legit paid surveys online.

Which are the best options depends a lot on the country you live in. But to get an easy start, you can check out the best survey sites in your country here.

These are all legit and do not promise too much. So if you want to earn some extra money on the side, these sites are a great place to start.

If you have any comments, questions, or have any experiences with Craigslist paid surveys yourself, I would love to hear from you in a comment below.