$800 a month for hosting a chat bot - too good to be true?
Actually no, or at least I don't think so.
I recently received an email from a representative of a company called 'Edutech' offering to pay me $800 a month to host adverts for them on my web site.
I thought this sounded too good to be true, so I did a bit of digging and discovered they're a company which connect students with 'professional tutors' who help them write their assignments on a fee per assignment basis.
The chat bot, which I installed on my secondary blog to test it, takes students to their site... all it is is this (bottom right hand corner, it opens up when you click on it, but otherwise it's quite unobtrusive).
(Rather satisfyingly I had to head to Chrome to get this screen capture, Brave blocked it!)
A couple of further email inquiries convinced me the company were genuine - i.e. it is actually a company with a registered name, legal team, contracts, rather than a scammer, so I went ahead and installed the chat bot on my main site.
20 minutes later they'd sent me $800 via PayPal, from 'Edutech', Malta. No contract necessary.
Needless to say this all feels a bit wrong, but I can't for the life of me see what I've got to lose - if my traffic takes a hit, or if people complain about said chat bot, I can just delete the widget early and send them back a portion of the cash - this whole relationship seems based on trust.
They could of course dispute the payment (I've had a couple of people do that on PayPal, clearly scammers 'cos there's nothing I can do about it as a seller of digital products) but it's a genuine company, and it strikes me as a lot of money to risk for one advert.
I guess morally it's not the right thing to do - but then again my site is mainly for A-level sociology which is 100% assessed by exam, so for my primary target audience tuition aimed at assignments makes little sense, and for anyone else getting a little extra help with their assignments so what, money already largely determines what grades people get anyway!
If anyone knows of anything I should be worried about with this deal, please do let me know. I'm still sitting here thinking this is too good to be true, I keep checking my emails for bad news, and I'm going to just let this $800 sit for a few months, I can't quite believe it's real!
If it is real, this is the easiest money I ever earned, even if it only lasts a month!
$800 isn't surprising at all if you have good traffic. These academic type offers make huge amounts of money when a client signs up.
Well that’s good to know... my traffic is insane in May/ June - much less in August, could be an issue... time will tell!
A bit unsettling, I can see, but payment through Paypal - my business account was cloned recently with payments appearing all over the world. The first I knew was a letter from the bank telling me I was overdrawn and they were going to charge me for telling me ... we sorted it out, and when we were tlking about security, one of the things they advised was using PayPal as an extra layer of security between bank accounts.
I think PayPal is pretty secure... I can’t see what they can do with just my email... it’s publicly available anyway and I check PP every day. Just have to monitor this I guess!
That must have been a shock!
That's what I understand - that Paypal offers additional security. In fact, they advised me, if I was using a new website, that using PayPal was a good protection (rather than using a card). It was a shock yes, but unusually I knew exactly how much in there and what I expected to go out. When I was on the phone to the bank and we were checking the payments, it was for stuff I would never buy and from places like Singapore, Germany, Luxembourg, Jamaica ... it was all refunded (including the charges) and they were very sweet about advising me about how to prevent it. PayPal was one Extra protection I wasn't aware of and the other was not saving your card on any websites, however reputable.
Haven't you had an approach like this before? Some time last year?
Good to know they’re secure!
I just deleted all my cards except one from every site I use.
Never had an offer quite like this. !
Congrats man! thats great, they have scouted your website :) Hey, next month introduce them to crypto?! They are already in malta anyway hahahah
Their location actually makes total sense to me!
I should base myself there, or Panama maybe?!?
😂 Ive been using preseach and recently got to the withdrawal threshold and was exited because it would be my first free money from something online for doing nothing, and last thing i knew they were 6 cents each equalling 60usd.. I went to check on CMC and now they are 0.007 hahaha!
That will sure continue helping tipping the scales and make up for these crypto prices! Sounds like a great way to leverage your blog! Seems like a good idea for Steem in the long term!
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Looks to be a lot of money for nothing 🤔
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Tell me about it! I'm keeping a close eye on it for sure.
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Maybe for this month, dont give any seed words ect into that particular device?! And afterwards get it scanned for skimming bugs?
Yes fair point... everything's secure here anyway - 2FA and offline storage of anything super sensitive so I'm not too worried about that.
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