05 Jan 2025 - AJ
So, way in the heyday of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk I tried it (it’s still around! though very tough to make more than a bit of money and can almost be a full-time job).
I think I filled out a couple of surveys and watched/reacted to a couple of ads. It was a long time ago - fifteen years ago, I’m thinking - and I don’t remember making much money, maybe a dollar total if that, don’t think it was enough to try to transfer out or anything. Since I was just testing the platform and had a full-time job, it wasn’t a big deal.
And at the level of stuff I was doing, I wouldn’t expect to make more than a couple of cents, to be honest. The same holds true today - an employer is not going to pay hundreds of dollars to a person in a first-world country when they can hire someone else in a developing nation for a much smaller amount to do that button pressing for them - if not completely automate it. And those are the kinds of ‘tasks’ used in this week’s scam, the task scam.
Let me put it in vague math terms. I’m currently a remote worker. The amounts that these scammers usually quote, a thousand or two a week? I make somewhere along those lines. But I work 40 hours a week in a position that is not entry level at all (you need either a degree + experience or lots of experience for it), that requires specialized knowledge and is not ‘press this button to optimize this listing’, it’s more ‘this machine is making weird requests and needs to be investigated’.
You can make legit money working remote as an independent contractor - especially if you can do translations or are one of those amazing people who know how to do mechanical stenography (the really speedy typing court reporters do) - but that’s not the kind of thing that you’re randomly contacted about.