The latest online scam: Get paid for Google reviews

You start with ‘easy’ tasks like ‘Google reviews’ but it gets murky pretty fast. Read on.

by Vrushali Lad | @msvrushalilad

If you’re like me – self-employed, always looking for a side hustle – chances are that you’re trawling the web for part-time work opportunities. In my spare time, I look for writing opportunities online, check LinkedIn for projects, ask around for work, take a break to sigh at my bank balance…then start the process all over again.

All of this is well and good, but do know that you’re being watched. And this is where this gets weird – you soon begin to get messages inviting you to join ‘Safe, 100% returns’ opportunities that require only a few hours of your time every day. All you have to do is ‘fill out surveys’ or ‘write online reviews’.

So far, so good. I got yet another WhatsApp message recently telling me to join a community of online reviewers and get paid Rs 50 per online review. Digging further, I learnt all I had to do was follow a link that the ‘company’ sent me, give a rating between 3 and 5, and a one- or two-line ‘Google review’ of the hotel or restaurant (please note: these hotels and restaurants do exist. You don’t have to have visited them, but your review is duly noted on Google. There are legit agencies hired to do precisely this to increase ratings for their clients – in this case, hotels and restaurants).

I was expected to join a Telegram group where a ‘receptionist’ would allot the Google review links. Once I completed three tasks, I had to notify her on the chat and get Rs 150 credited to my account in under five minutes.

Completely mystified but also because I’m nosy, I did the three tasks. Lo and behold, I was paid Rs 150 from somebody’s UPI ID. Not from a company account, but a private UPI ID belonging to an ’employee’ of the ‘digital company’.

This is so weird, I mused, and then came the first of the clinchers. So this reviewing business goes on all day. The more you complete, the more you earn – BUT…

• After every three such ‘tasks’, comes a ‘shared economy’ task. What this means is, you pay the company a certain sum of money (Rs 2000 if you are a newcomer) and this can go up to Rs 1,50,000. Then a guide is assigned to each such person, and they tell you what to do. Once this task is complete, if you have invested Rs 2,000, you get Rs 2,800 back in UNDER 10 MINUTES.
• Since the process is fully transparent – the ‘receptionist’ was at great pains to keep telling me this while I tried to probe this thing further – you can invest any sum and get a handsome commission in under 10 minutes of completing your task. On the Telegram group, I saw some others who invested Rs 50,000 and shared screenshots of getting Rs 65,000 back. That’s Rs 15,000 in commission. Suppose you do this same thing four times a day, you’re effectively using the same Rs 50,000 over and over to earn Rs 60,000 in one day. Oh, if you ‘invest’ Rs 1,00,000, you get Rs 50,000 as commission. You do the math, my head is spinning.
• The ‘receptionist’ wouldn’t tell me further till I invested Rs 2000. I pondered about this for a full 10 minutes, then thought, ‘Let’s do this’. I was sent yet another UPI ID to pay the Rs 2,000, and await instructions. Next, a ‘guide’ messaged me on Telegram and gave me instructions on what to do.
• I was logged in to a bitcoin platform. It was the first time I ever saw it; I still don’t know what bitcoins are and how they are currency in the first place. As instructed, I followed some steps, input my email ID, and logged out. The guide gave me a ‘billing token’. I presented this to the receptionist, and 15 minutes later, I received Rs 2,800 in my account. That’s Rs 800 in earnings. Job over.

What if I refused to do the so-called shared economy task? I was told that my payment for doing the restaurant Google reviews would be cut from Rs 50 to Rs 20. If you’re sufficiently desperate, you’ll do as they say. If you participate in the ‘shared economy’ task, your commission for posting Google reviews increases from Rs 50 to Rs 100 per review.

After this, I shut this thing down. Blocked all the Telegram numbers and didn’t return.

What’s going on, really? My accountant explained thus: What happens is, you win your commission a few times, and are emboldened to invest larger and larger sums. You started with Rs 2,000. Next, you’ll put in Rs 5,000. Soon, you’re throwing in Rs 50,000 or more. But here’s how you’re setting yourself up for a world of trouble:

• These commissions are landing in your bank account. Good luck explaining why and how multiple deposits are being made to you from different sources daily.
• When you are one of the ‘regulars’, you are no longer simply being registered on the portal. Soon, you’re being asked for more information. Your savings account number. Your PAN/Aadhar details. If the investment is sufficiently large, the scammer tells you that Government of India regulations make it mandatory to enter GSTN or other important financial details like PAN.
• You see where this is going? Your data is being mined while you are busy ‘earning’ through this entirely dubious channel. After a few days of this, you are no longer allowed to invest sums lower than Rs 75,000. And while you tell yourself ‘So what, at least my money is coming back to me and I’m earning a profit’, next comes the big one: there comes a day when the entire operation suddenly and silently closes down. Your money has vanished, and so has the ‘digital company’. The Telegram group suddenly doesn’t exist, you have been blocked so you cannot correspond with the receptionist or anyone else, you cannot log in to the bitcoin platform (because you were not logging on yourself, your ‘guide’ was doing that for you) and it seems like the whole thing existed entirely in your imagination.
• You cannot do anything about it, and you’re probably too ashamed to report it. You’re the dumb one who fell for it. Talk about gaslighting.

What lessons do we learn from this?

• There is no financial entity paying interest as high as this. The maximum that NBFCs and mutual funds can do for you is 10%. Any person or institution offering 30%, 40% or higher ‘earnings’ is simply up to tricks. Stay away.

• No legit company pays via individual UPI IDs. It’s always through a company bank account.

• The only thing to do when you receive such messages on your phone or email, is to block and report them. Nobody pays total strangers on the Internet large sums of money, unless they’re looking to extract a huge chunk in return.

Has this happened to you? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

(Picture credit: https://mediatrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Image-Scams-header-1200×680-1.jpg)