I recently heard about CashCrate and thought I would check it out. I wasn’t lucky enough to find any CashCrate reviews, so I had to write my own…
Basically you get paid for filling out short surveys and giving your email address to spammers. 
The sign up is simple enough. It only takes about 30 seconds and once you complete that, they take you to the below screen.
Here you select which offers you would like to complete. You click the offer on the left and once you complete the offer, then you click the submit button. Cash Crate then verifies that you completed it and then adds the funds to your account.
UPDATE: Cashcrate isn’t really operational any more, but for a very similar way to make a little extra money, check out Survey Junkie.
All of the offers I have done so far are actually very short and easy to fill out. Only taking about 30 -60 seconds to fill out for each one.
The problem is that it is difficult to tell how much of the offer you need to fill out.
So for example, the “Running Shoes” offer above gives you the below screen…
I think this is all you have to actually fill out to get paid, BUT as soon as you press submit it takes you to this screen…
So, now they are taking you down a trail to get a $150 gift card, which you are going to have to jump through about 1000 hoops and sign up for credit cards and a bunch of other stuff to actually get it.
I wish they would have a screen that says, “you have completed this offer,” but they seem to just try to confuse people into filling out additional offers that were not part of the CashCrate offer.
But like I said above, I think all you need to fill out is that first screen with your email address in order to get your $1.00 for that offer. Others ask you survey-type questions, some want your physical address, etc.
Well, that just sounds too easy
A lot of companies run their businesses completely off of email lists. So, you are getting paid $1.00 to get added to their email list. It may or may not be worth it to you. But I can almost promise you that you are going to start getting a lot of spam in your inbox
How to handle this
I have a few different email addresses that I use. One is only given to businesses. So, any time I sign up for anything that I think could possibly add my address to a list I use that address. That email gets hundreds of emails a day, so I only check it when I am specifically looking for an activation email or something similar.
My review of Cash Crate
It seems like a decent way to make a few extra bucks. I filled out about 7 offers (they have hundreds available) in 15-20 minutes. It would have been shorter, but I was following some of their deceptive rabbit trails.
After filling out the offers my my account shows that I have earned $2.90 and have $4.40 pending. As CashCrate verifies that I filled out the offers, the money moves from the pending earnings to July’s earnings. They say it can take from 5 minutes to a couple of hours for them to get approved.
They also have a generous referral program, so you get a cut of everyone who signs up from your referral link. I guess I will see how successful that is after I post this article.
I am going to continue using them, but only because I am not going to give them my personal email address.
I would love to hear from people who have used it so far. Is there anything I am missing?
(Added 08-27-08)
I have now been using Cash Crate for a little over a month and just discovered something that I need to let everyone know about. I just got off the phone with the phone company to try to get a charge removed from my bill for a service that I “signed up” for via CashCrate. Apparently I checked a box that said I agree to allow them to bill me. They then sent an email to confirm and I didn’t respond, so they charged me. I argued and they did reverse the fee, but make sure if you use CashCrate or some of the similar programs that you watch what you are filling out. It was MY fault, but there are obviously some companies trying to catch you not paying attention. For what it’s worth…
(Added 09-22-08)
ok, I am upgrading my warning on CashCrate.com – I now have 2 more stinkin things on my phone bill!! Unbelievable, I don’t think I missed these, I think they are just scammy companies… I can’t pass the blame on to CashCrate itself – but it is the companies that put surveys on their site… But either way, fighting to get these charges off my bill is not worth what I have made from them… I would not recommend CashCrate any more and if you are considering using them I would be VERY CAREFUL…
