I know I should really just get over this scam site but I just kept receiving emails from them still! Somehow my reviews are so popular and interesting that people are still reading, commenting, agreeing and disagreeing with them! (Just let me be a little narcissistic to vent some of my frustration lol) OK, and then I made a stupid decision to go back to them...more about it below.
Anyway, the reason I'm writing this is not only to vent and be narcissistic, I am actually here to provide some red flags I discovered while using the site and after some research. But its for you to judge if you want to believe it or not!
1. Manipulating the Trust score!
Before I start, I've to let you know that the Trust score or trustworthy score (whichever I don't care) will affect the rate you get for reviews. What I observe is that if your score is high (100 or above), you probably get at least $9ish as regular rate for even the lowest paid category. But if your score is say negative then it'll be in the $5-7 range (or lower). I confirmed this by checking against another account.
*Both were taken on 1:59AM on 27 April and for the images based category.
Why I say they manipulate the trust score is I went back recently to take a look at what the readers commented and try resubmitting a few reviews. Just a quick note, your rejected reviews are still stored in their database and there's no way you can delete them. So I just click resubmit and try my luck. Surprisingly one of my reviews got accepted (when I didn't even change anything) but at a low rate, and that's when I realised that my trust score bar is empty after just 1 day!
I don't know to consider myself lucky or not, but I happen to take a screenshot to prepare for this post and I actually took a "last shot" of my positive trust score.
See the picture provided, my score dropped from to 90ish to negative in just one day! The reason they gave is that some readers find my reviews not helpful. Err... Sorry but the statistics disagree. Apparently I see an increase in helpful votes. (There are more agrees than disagrees too)
I don't know how they calculate to cause the great drop in trust score but it's just ridiculous. Unless some hater is spamming and voting all my reviews as unhelpful, the drop shouldn't be so drastic!
I guess we all know what dropping the trust score means, right? It meant that the writer have to write much more reviews to be able to cash-out now that they're paid much lesser. The difference can be close to 10 reviews!! Yes, because that happen to me, I was just about 7 reviews away from cashing out (calculating at average bulk rate) and now, I'm back to 15.
2. Making things difficult.
I don't know I feel it's either that the admin don't know what they want or get knock down by car hence suffer from concussion frequently, or just that they want to make things difficult. Just see the picture below and you'll understand what I mean.
*Picture read from downwards up, according to the date at the bottom.
3. Constant Unreasonable Rejections
I guessed I covered this in my previous post already. They'll start to reject almost everything you submitted once you're near the payout limit. So basically they have this new "Combo Meal" now - drop your trust score so that you can't earn much per review and then they selectively give you hope by accepting 1 or 2 of your reviews.
I know this sound stupid but when they accept one of my reviews that I resubmitted, I became hopeful about cashing out and I wrote 2 more reviews and resubmitted 3 old ones (editing them carefully obviously) and well ... rejected again, ALL OF THEM. I tried writing a few more, only to get rejected over and over again. Any then the cycle repeated, my trust score plunged again till the rate I get is pathetic.
And that's when I got the "wake up slap". Yes, a slap right across my face for being stupid to be trusting them again!
These are my recent painfully observations with them. I also realised that they have been creating accounts in reviews site to start a war with people who wrote negative comments about them and paying bloggers to write positive reviews about them. They're back to scam again!
I can only say its rather unscrupulous for them to be doing dirty tricks like these to make cashing out difficult. It only shows that they're not willing to pay or just simply dragging time so that they can con more reviews out of their users.
My final advise is to STAY AWAY FROM REVIEWSTREAM.COM!
