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Amazon Mechanical Turk has a rating of 2.56 stars from 63 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers complaining about Amazon Mechanical Turk most frequently mention customer service problems. Amazon Mechanical Turk ranks 151st among Work At Home sites.
This is great for me as a small side income. Pay a bill here and there it's obviously not a full-time job but if you're a stay at home mom it is a great way for extra money. It's very small pay it first but as you keep going some jobs will pop up you qualify for with higher pay. I have done my first transfer and everything went smooth. No problems yet. Hopefully it continues to go smooth
I changed phones and phone numbers, thought I had updated all my apps to use the new number. Turns out I forgot about Mturk. When I try to log in it tries to send a verification txt to the old number. I explained to customer service that it offers no other way to verify me. Not even through email. After going back and forth with customer service through email, and getting responses from them that look like copy/paste answers...I told them to shut the account down. It was a waste of time if they won't give support for there service. Id rather use the QMEE app. They pay better.
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.
I originally reviewed Amazon Mechanical Turk as a good place to work for a little extra spending money, and I still stand by that review. However, from a customer service aspect it is horrible.
Be careful of the HITS you accept. If you are doing HITS for a new requester. Do only a few HITS first and wait and see if they reject or accept and how long they take to do that and pay you. You could waste hours and have many HITS rejected (without knowing why) which will bring down your rating and could cause AMAZON to freeze or block your account.
Amazon also randomly suspends accounts because you will be treated as an algorithm and not a human.
Be careful about keeping money sitting in your account without moving it quickly. You could get suspended for unknown reasons and lose your earnings. This happens quit frequently. Suspensions happen for real reasons to protect the site but also for reasons unknown with no fault of yours.
Reaching customer service and resolving these problems tend to be futile and you will likely be given a canned response email. It still can be good place to make extra money, just be aware of what could happen and protect yourself first.
Tip for consumers:
Be careful. They do not monitor what happens very well. They use algorithms to terminate workers and refuse pay. Hits are rejected often and it is almost impossible to take recourse. Even though Amazon itself has a good reputation Mechnical Turk is on the shady side of outsourcing. Employees for Amazon have no idea about Mechanical Turk and there is no customer servicce line for Turk employees. If they don't want to pay you, they won't and they will and can shut down your account.
They do not mention the criteria for approving or reject your registration.
Our account review criteria are proprietary and we cannot disclose the reason why an invitation to complete registration has been denied. If our criteria for invitation changes, you may be invited to complete registration in the future.
Thank you for your interest in Mechanical Turk.
Sincerely,
Amazon Mechanical Turk
https://www.mturk.com
I approach everything I do in good faith. Thus, I expect promised compensation for my efforts. Requesters frequently offer poorly constructed HITs that cannot be submitted, as they may require a code that is never generated, or they cannot be completed for any other reason due to erroneous coding. Requesters can reject on a whim but are not required to provide a reason, although workers can contact requesters. The ONE time I was rejected was because the requester was unable to comprehend the mTurk report received, on a HIT for which no completion code was required in order to submit, although she claimed that it was required (?) and only emailed a copy of her report that showed my worker ID# without any supporting evidence that there was a completion code required. Amazon took her side and let the rejection stand, although she got 15 minutes of my time and all of the data from my efforts for free. Not a good result. Another example came from a HIT that I completed BEFORE it notified me that I was not qualified. I contacted the requester who stated that the HIT had NO qualifications, despite my remitting a screenshot to both Amazon and to the requester. He refused to pay and once again I wasted 15 minutes, he got all the data he'd asked for, and Amazon refused to either discuss the issue with him or to work on my behalf. Then Amazon expected me to troubleshoot their platform for free. The only conclusion that can be made is that mturk is for people with a lot of time on their hands, who are happy to do often mindless penny-ante HITs with no expectation of compensation. I enjoyed some of the HITs, not only because those requesters paid as promised, but because the HITs were fun or interesting. Some HITs are reasonably well compensated but those are few and far between.
Another issue-more an annoyance-is in mturk's filters. I filter HITs to show only those for which I qualify, but I still get a lot of HITs for which I'm not qualified. My list also shows HITs in any of several languages that I do not speak.
If you need to earn money to pay bills, this isn't the place. If you have free time and don't care about the money, go ahead and have some fun.
Mturk has become worst then before, when mturk increase requester commission percentage to double from 20% to 40%, all requesters gone away. Few are left, because they don't have any option. Why don't they decrease requester commission percentate to 20% those who are giving 1000's and lacs of hits.
Now mturk become worst, all requesters left mturk because increase in commission from 10% to 40%. In 2013-2016 boom in work, daily 10 to 20 projects to work, but now 1 project in couple days. I don't know who is head of mturk, he is worst person.
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