While millions of people are making money through surveys, still there are many who believe that taking paid surveys fruitless exercise and they looked at it as a scam. Let us examine why this impression has been generated about the paid surveys despite their positive role of being income generator. This impression firstly comes from people who do the surveys thinking that you can have free lunches, which is far from the reality. In this world there are no free lunches. Most of the paid surveys envisage you to sign up trial offers as a condition for getting paid. And you need a credit or a debit card for signing up trial offers. If you do not have a credit or a debit card you should not attempt to take online surveys.

Another related issue is that in majority of the surveys signing up of a trail offer is a necessary condition upon which is dependent your ability to receive payment. If you are not willing to sign up trial offers for some reason, please do not join a paid survey group.

A connected area is that when you have signed up, if you need the product/service you may continue with it. In that case your credit card will be charged. So, while doing surveys and signing up trial offers, you should be aware that you will be charged for the product/service automatically if the offer is not cancelled before the trial period is over. Many users who are either not willing to sign up or who get charged for the product/service as above they feel cheated and term these surveys as scams.

Before joining any survey, you must read the terms and conditions governing their surveys and make sure that you can comply with the stipulations. Do not join if you are not sure of being able to comply with those stipulations.

One commonly voiced complaint is that the user is not getting paid immediately on signing up of trial offers. This certainly is not possible for the survey sites need to verify their sign up info which takes time. Another common complaint is that they do not get paid even after 8 weeks which the survey companies give as the time-frame for approval.

While so doing they lose sight of the fact that unless they have signed up through the link provided by the survey, their sign up information may not be detected by the system of the survey company. Cognizant of this fact, survey companies do draw the attention of the users to preserve the emails received from the advertisers in confirmation of sign up till they are paid. The users, however, most of the time overlook this stipulation and delete these emails; and later on land into problems. Do not overlook this condition for your own benefit.

From the above discussion, it is clear that not all free paid surveys sites are a scam. Many of them are providing gainful earnings to the users and are thus agents for generating supplementary earnings. Many of the complaints of these being scams come from those who have not read fully the terms and conditions and are demanding payments for the surveys where they have not complied with their part of the transaction. There are many reliable survey sites – www.freetojoinsurveys.com and their associated survey/job sites and the like. There are may be a few unscrupulous survey sites and you cannot blame the whole survey industry for the wrong doings of such sites.

There is a greater need for regulation of activities of such sites through the organization like Better Business Bureau and Survey Police who can effectively espouse the cause of the users who have been denied their rightful claims. But that should not be the reason for condemning the whole survey business and dub them as scams.

These organizations can take a lead in handling consumer complaints effectively and work as mediators between their survey sites and their users. They can also come out with code of ethics for survey sites and ensure their enforcement even if it be voluntarily. They can give due publicity about the genuine survey sites and the role that they play for the benefit of general public in earning money working at their home. This could also include bringing out a list of survey sites which are delivering as per their promise and are genuine.

Given below are some precautions for the survey users taking surveys:

• Stay away from the company that makes money out of the "registration fee" or members fee. You must be paid to work. There are some survey companies that are free to join, but only offer a limited number of survey’s, and pay a couple of bucks per survey.

• Do an interview, show what you can do etc. Look very carefully before you get involved in this, and ask lots of questions until you are satisfied. Legitimate survey sites often go into more detail to suit you to the right surveys.

• Take surveys as per rules of the survey company. Do not overlook their specifications. If taking surveys where payment is dependant on your signing-up of trial offers, preserve confirmation emails till you are paid.

• Read all of the fine print too and ask questions if it's vague or you don't understand it. Think twice about submitting your personal information to any paid surveys site that does not provide a clear privacy policy or arouses your suspicion in any other way.

• Also read disclaimers, terms, conditions and any other fine print. Avoid sites that do not answer your questions in a satisfactory and timely manner.