While a good percentage of the work on Amazon Mechanical Turk is legitimate, although low-paying, I've been encountering scams on the site more frequently as of late. I have noticed patterns of behavior by the individuals submitting the HITs which allows them to get a lot of effort out of people for nothing or next to nothing. And if you do end up in a dispute with a Requester, you can forget about getting any assistance from Amazon. They won't lift a finger to help you; you'll be on your own. So here are the things I've noticed which you should watch out for or avoid altogether.

Be very careful about accepting HITs where the base pay/reward is low (usually 25 cents or less) but which promise significant bonuses upon completion. I did this one HIT for a Requester called Geneva Resort (the same HIT has also been posted under the name, L-PAL). It involved writing an essay and taking a vocabulary test. All told, it took between an hour and an hour and a half to complete. The base pay was only a penny, but I did it because a bonus of nearly $12 was promised. Well, Geneva Resort approved the HIT and paid the penny, but they never paid the bonus. I contacted them multiple times; they never bothered to respond to me. And as far as Amazon support goes, they say they don't "mediate any issues between Workers and Requesters." They do enforce payment of the base pay/reward if a HIT is approved, but they don't make Requesters uphold their promise to pay out a bonus. So I'm just going to have to write off getting paid for all of the work I did on that HIT.

Another way Requesters get out of paying for work done on their HITs is to allot an extremely short amount of time to complete the HIT. You see, you have to complete the work, get your completion code and submit that before the allotted time expires. Because once a HIT expires, you can't submit it to get paid. There was this one instance where I accepted a HIT from a Requester, called Suan C, without paying attention to the time requirement. I completed the HIT in one sitting (10-15 minutes, max), got my completion code and went back to the MTurk site to submit it, but the timer had expired. I contacted Suan C, and like Geneva Resort, they never responded. And again, Amazon did nothing. So always keep a close eye on the timer and skip HITs which have a ridiculously low completion time set on them.

Here's the last thing I've noticed Requesters do. A lot of HITs will state the estimated completion time right in the title. That is nice, since you can compare the estimated time to the allotted time. However, many Requesters lowball the estimate. I've lost count of the number of times it's taken me 2-3 times longer to complete a HIT than what I was anticipating. And while the Requesters did allot sufficient time for me to complete the HITs (which means I got paid), I ended up doing a LOT more work than I was expecting to have to do for the advertised pay.

Overall, I'd say Amazon Mechanical Turk is a convenient way to make some pocket money, but be prepared to not always get paid (or get paid much) for the work you do. I'd view this as an option of last resort, more than anything else.

Edit: I just wanted to add one quick update. Matt See is another Requester whose HITs you should avoid. He also doesn't respond when you try to contact him, and he DIDN'T PAY for work done on one of his HITs.

When I first joined Mturk, it seems like a good way to earn extra tinny money. I did not suspect it to have so much problem since it is a big company.

HOWEVER! You only realize it is a scam because it WON"T pay you! Not to say all the tasks are paying out very low rate considering the time you put there.

First, You cannot get your payment from Mturk like transfer to paypal or bank account directly, instead, you have to use their AMAZON PAYMENT to receive your payment as one and only way they give you. For signning up, you have to provide you SSN and Driver license, all those sensitive information. I have never use any product so far that require you that.

Second, after you get your earning from Mturk finally to be transferable to the AMAZON PAYMENT account, which is after 10 days of your first Mturk hit(which I think more that it is truly a scam, because during this period, you will do more hits and won't get paid instead of just doing one hit and find out it WON"T pay you), you have them ask for your bank account and need you either log in( type your account and password) to be able to verify, which I feel very uncomfortable with. Or upload your bank statement.?
Who the hell do you think you are? Federal government? You don't have the right to do that, prob into people's privacy and their sensitive information!

Third, how much money I am trying to withdraw? Only $13, yes, that is all I earned from 2 weeks of endless survey, less than $1 a day. And yet you require for a transferring-one- million-dollars type of verification process?

Forth, the customer service is irritating and useless. They just don't provide any way for you to directly call them, when you call, the person will tell you, he can't handle it, but someone from the "correct" department will email you back!

Fifth, when you finally get the reply, it is so official, they don't even look into your individual case but give you a general reply. Which tell me to do the things I already did and the second email they ask me to upload bank statement? WHY? I already verified my bank account by logging in and answer the security question! What do you want from me? This makes me feel very uncomfortable that the company is trying to dig into my personal information so much.

And now, they still don't pay me anything and it is 5 days after I called them reported this issue. So I think they are scam for sure at this point. If you have similar experience, comment below. We can file a CLASS ACTION together and sue the company to death!

This is a site used by marketers and Universities to collect low cost survey data and repetitive task completion for minimal fees. In many instances, workers who complete tasks as per the directions receive payment.

However, as anyone who has been burnt by these scheming requesters who mess it up for all of the others well knows there are certain unscrupulous requester types who use the Amazon.com mturk system to ends more sinister than access to an unsuspecting pool of cheap labor.

These requesters follow a self serving ethic presumably motivated by the ease with which they can reject work and save themselves the fees they have already agreed to and are required to pay. A stiffed worker has no recourse through Amazon. There is no appeals process or investigation by Amazon. A requester can only be reported before the worker has any experience with her and only for a very narrow range of complaints evading work payment is not one of them. It gets worse. The rejection and any untrue reason(s) provided by the requester through the automated Amazon system in bad faith have a deleterious impact on the profile of the workers who have already been denied payment for their work.

The Congress needs to take a deeper look at this mturk system, which conceals these types of business practices behind the shield of a contract worker arrangement provided by the shrink wrapped, boilerplate adhesion language in their TOS. Legislature and the courts need to further assess the whole system to gauge its compliance with basic levels of public policy, acceptable in the reasonable standards expected in an industrialized nation.

If such systemic false pretense routinely engaged in by those requesters who make use of the mturk system to actively pursue the above-mentioned practices does not enumerate as the key elements of material fraud, then how else is it reasonably described?

There is no rating system of the requesters provided by Amazon. Mturk workers are in the dark when accepting a work hit that could result in non payment by one of these unscrupulous requesters meeting the above definitions. In the interim, a plug-in such as the one provided by Turkopticon can provide some minimal measure, though incomplete because of its 3rd party implementation, forewarning to the mturk worker pool.