HITs to Avoid on Amazon Mechanical Turk

The world is hard enough making money online and with the low wages on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) it’s even more difficult. To add insult to injury, there is a small contingent of requesters that want to exploit the workers of Mturk in the worst possible sense of the word.

But how do you know who to work for and who to avoid? Well, below are simple guidelines to follow.

You should avoid HITS that involve:

• Secret shopping
• Testing a website that requires that you enter personal information
• Testing software - I recommend you avoid any HIT that asks you to download and test software. The risk is too high (you don’t know what you’re getting) and the reward is to low.
• Free trials that ask you to sign up for a service
• Surveys that request you input personal information (Although request from academic sources and have a human subjects disclaimer are usually good to go.)

The above HIT examples to avoid are usually ones posted by scammers. There is a big risk that you will be opening yourself to any number of problems, plus you very well might not get paid at all for taking on this risk.

If you want you can review my two previous articles on Turker Nation, a forum for Mturk workers, and Turkopticon, an online database with reviews of requesters by Mturk workers.

In many cases, these types of bad HITs should not be on Mturk at all since they violate Amazon Mechanical Turk’s Terms of Service, but review is lax and enforcement is almost non-existent. My recommendation is that you should avoid any or all of these. The risk/reward ratio is just too skewed to the risk side.