Scamming, Spamming.....and Sugging (Vindale Research)

Member Name: bollinger28

Product:	Vindale Research
Date:	24/01/09 (976 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Maybe be possible to make a lot of money if you're very careful?

Disadvantages: Spam. Personal outlay may be far greater than any reward you may receive.

Vindale Research bills itself as an online survey site...and therein lies the first problem. They're not really a survey site, nor are they a genuine market research company. They say they'll pay you to complete surveys and review products for them. Indeed their flashy website blurbs "Would you like to join the finest minds in research? Share your opinion? Get paid between $5 to $75 for each survey you complete? You've come to the right place!"....... WRONG! You've ended up in totally the wrong place...Vindale Research want you to sign up for third party offers, trials and campaigns - all of which earns them huge amounts in referral commission, and you'll possibly end up out of pocket.

Let me explain further. Vindale offer surveys with payouts of $5 to $75, which is a lot higher than the majority of online survey sites. Sounds too good to be true? It is! What Vindale Research is doing is inviting their panel members to sign up for various product trials and passing on a fraction of their referral commission to said member once they're completed a survey. It's not illegal, but it is a little bit unethical and rather deceptive. It works like this - Vindale offer you $40 to sign up with an online dating site and trial it for a certain period. When you've completed your evaluation survey for Vindale Research, they allegedly pay you $40. The trouble is, the online dating site requires you to pay an upfront registration fee of $30, and you're going to have to use your credit card to do this. Thus you've only actually made $10 from Vindale due to the initial $30 registration with the dating site. Added to which, the onus rests solely with you to cancel your trial with the dating site...and they have all your credit card details.

Moving onto the second problem with Vindale, is the confusion with some of these third party offers. It's down to you to make sure you carefully read the terms of agreement and the cancellation policy on the trial/product you've signed up with, or you may find out that you've registered with a programme that you never wanted and you can't cancel without jumping through all sorts of hoops.

All in all Vindale is not offering genuine market research. What Vindale Research is doing is known as "sugging". This wasn't a term I'd ever come across before, but when I undertook further research into Vindale, I kept coming across this term time after time. Sugging is a term used to describe a company that tries to sell products under the guise of market research. The official definition from the US Marketing Research Association is:-

"Sugging: The use of a marketing research survey to attempt to sell to the public. The misuse of the survey process compromises legitimate marketing and opinion research surveys conducted by professionals. It also causes distrust among the public and affects the reliability of all public opinion research. The government has legislation outlawing telemarketing calls selling under the guise of research. The Council for Marketing and Opinion Research (CMOR) is very active in the protection of marketing and opinion research and the public opinion"

In a nutshell, Vindale Research claims to offer well paid survey work, but is, in reality, attempting to sell you something. Vindale is making massive commission/referral fees for itself when you sign up to any of its programmes, and they only pass a fraction of it back to their panel members.

I was invited to join Vindale Research via a message in my private guestbook from another member. Having tried and tested most of the online survey sites around, I was keen to add Vindale Research to my portfolio. Their website looked good - professionally laid out and plausible, plus they were offering surveys rewarding you from $5 to $75 each. Regrettably and stupidly I didn't do any independent research, I just plunged in and signed up straightaway.

Quite frankly, alarm bell sounds started to ring for me when I first signed up. I was taken through pages and pages of "offers" before I was able to complete my registration. Did I want further details on website x or programme y? No, I didn't...but I still had to trawl through 3 to 4 pages of offers in order to complete my registration, ticking a "no" box against every single offer it presented me with. I was also asked to supply details on my insurance expiry dates, the financial products I owned and all sorts of stuff that really wasn't relevant for paid survey work.

I did, however, persevere - as I just thought they were compiling a more incisive and accurate profile on me in order to match me for more relevant survey work. I then received a series of emails (three in total) confirming my registration and what they describe as "an educational introductory series", which explained all about Vindale and the way they worked. Basically this was a load of old marketing spin - clever language disguising the fact that you'd actually be laying out hard cash and jumping through a complicated series of hoops before you'd qualify for any actual earnings from Vindale.

However, once I'd received my third introductory email from Vindale, the paid survey work they'd been fan-faring finally started to arrive. Exciting stuff hey? NOT. What did arrive in my inbox, were survey invites asking me to sign up with various different programmes, so that I could evaluate them. Unfortunately, most of these programmes required registration with an upfront payment with a credit card...MY credit card. The promise was that once you'd signed up and "evaluated" the site, Vindale would send you a survey offering $30 or $45 to tell them what you thought of it. In the meantime, you're out of pocket and responsible for ensuring you remember to cancel your registration with the third party programme. The third party has now got all your credit card details, so if you forget to cancel they're going to carry on charging you.....

In all I had about four "survey" invites from Vindale before I decided enough was enough and I pulled the plug on them. All four "survey" invites required me to sign up for a trial or evaluation, and they ALL required me to use my credit card to sign up with them. As I'd then be responsible for cancelling these trials or being liable for the costs, I backed away in alarm. I'm not interested in any survey work that may end up costing me money, so I declined every single invite. Just in case you're wondering, the sort of trials they try and get you to sign up with are things like dating sites, gambling sites, online DVD rental and so. As you're probably be aware, signing up to gambling sites always requires a cash deposit, so you have to give them a minimum of $10 and you may (or may not) hear back from Vindale with a survey invite for $25 to $30 in the future.

Sometimes you might get a request to sign up for "free" trials for things like laser eye correction or "no win, no fee" legal help...but you can bet your bottom dollar, your telephone is going to start ringing as these companies start to pester you to make appointments for consultations.

And what of the payments from Vindale if you do successfully manage to evaluate these sites? That I can't tell you, as I never signed up for any of their "offers". However, I do know that you needed to earn at least $50 before Vindale paid out, and that payment is made through PayPal. However, to add to the early warning system on Vindale, several forums speak of lack of payments from Vindale. Members have reached that elusive $50 payout level and then mysteriously found their earnings have dropped by $2 overnight for no reason whatsoever, taking them just below the payout threshold. Have a read of the user comments about Vindale (http://www.surveypolice.com/vindale-research) on the Survey Police website. Vindale is on Survey Police's unverified survey companies list, and the member comments are all rather damning - the words scam, rip off, beware and stay away seen to be a recurring theme.

Oh and as for their claim on their website that they're 100% spam free, that smells suspiciously like a pile of horse manure to me. After I'd signed up with Vindale in late October, my spam emails seem to have increased by about 75%. My ISP Orange has to work overtime to filter them into my spam folder. Before October I was receiving about 6 or 7 spam emails a day; since the advent of Vindale, I get between 25 to 40 spam emails very single day. Call it a coincidence? I think not. It's funny how the increase in spam can be traced directly back to the date I first encountered Vindale!

My conclusion, in case you haven't understood the tone of my review, is avoid, avoid, AVOID! Vindale Research are a bunch of scam artists of the highest order. In my opinion, they're unethical and dodgy. I reckon Vindale is selling on its member's personal information to all sorts of unscrupulous website sharks. They're being paid handsomely for all these referrals, and you're the poor mug who'll be out of pocket. They're not a genuine market research site, but they've very cleverly angled their campaign to make you think you're going to be undertaking well paid survey work. In reality, you're the one who is possibly going to end up out of pocket, as you'll be the one using your credit card to sign up for all sorts of trials and product evaluations. Unless you're very canny, and remember to cancel all these trials and product evaluations, you're going to end up with a lot of dodgy transactions on your credit card statement. Added to which, from reading various blogs and forums, some of these companies inviting you to sign up for "free product trials" via Vindale are a bit dodgy in themselves. For example, various users report it is nigh on impossible to cancel their subscriptions to some sites (i.e. book clubs) and you end up paying all sorts of dubious looking fees long after you've completed your free trial or received your "free" product.

You might disagree, and you might have made lots of money from Vindale, but this is my personal experience of the site...and it seems I'm not alone in my analysis. If you don't believe me have a read of the eye-opening article at:- http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/767931/ beware_of_vindale_research_scam_paid.html (remove space before the "b" of beware). I really wish I'd read this before I signed up with Vindale Research. Although I'm not out of pocket financially as I deleted my account almost immediately, I still have to contend with all that daily spam.

NOT recommended in the slightest. Avoid, avoid, AVOID!

If you're feeling brave and you want to chance your arm (not to mention give your flexible friend a thorough workout), please find below Vindale's contact details:-

Vindale Research
Suite 541
243 Fifth Avenue
New York
NY 10016
USA

Telephone: 1-877-484-6325
Fax: 1-866-841-3898

Website: http://www.vindale.com
Email: surveys@vindale.com

Further damning articles can be read at:-
http://www.surveypolice.com/vindale-research
http://www.zses.com/vindaleresearch.html

Summary: Dodgy site craftily billing itself as a market researcher...it isn't!