01 December 2010

Good Offers, Bad Offers, & Offer Tips!

Good Afternoon Swaggernauts!

Last night I ordered a $50 Amazon card, this morning two $5 Amazon cards.





I have enough swagbucks for one and a half more $5s so I have to earn a few hundred swagbucks today!  I bet you know what that means for the blog..

Yep! Special Offers! Not just bad ones this time, but a couple of good ones too!  First let me show you something that made me chuckle on last nights Swag hunt.


One right after the other, offers for Equifax credit check / credit monitoring. Two different swagbuck payouts. The obvious 1st question is, Why would anyone choose the lesser payout? Sometimes there are similar offers on several walls, and while Payout is usually my first criteria, I look at each offer because they are not always exactly the same.

In this case, the 1,088 offer has 3 - in - 1 monitoring, identity check protection and offers a 30 day free trial. The 1,020 offer doesn't mention identity protection, and says it includes "Credit Watch Gold" and also has 3 - in - 1 monitoring. It's only a 7 day trial however.

I'd say do the 1,088 one, especially since I've seen posts on Facebook about it crediting quickly today. 

(Oh my Gosh I'd say try these cookies I just made too. NOM NOM NOM they are good! Oatmeal Craisin cookies - with cherry infused cranberries instead of raisins. WoW, YUMMY!)

The bad Super Rewards offer I posted about on Monday came to a quick resolution this morning. They credited me 17 swagbucks because I fulfilled the requirements, but of course made no mention of contacting the advertiser to pull / fix the offer. One can only hope! I'd still say avoid it unless you want to have to do screenshots and an inquiry. Then again, if enough of us do it and inquiry the same offer, maybe they will do something about it!

In Positive TapJoy News (so rare, I know)  I found two easy insurance offers last night that don't require you to input anything other than your state or zip code. One is for 25, and the other for 34.

Save Over $500 a Year on Car Insurance for 25    Select your state from the drop down menu. A tab and a new window will open with a list of companies and "Get Quote' buttons to the right. I'm not sure if the TAB or the WINDOW has the tracking cookies so I did the following for both pages - I clicked on two different insurance companies. A new tab opened for each. One of them had another State Selection button so I did that and left both quote screens up for about 5 minutes. Closed them all out because I get impatient. About an hour later the 25 credited.

You Could Save Hundreds of Dollars a Year On Car Insurance for 34    Input your zip code / state (can't remember now sorry) and do the same as you did for the offer above. Click, open pages, let them sit a bit, and check back for swagbucks later. This one also took about an hour to credit.

GO TAPJOY! You finally did Something right!

I found another good offer on Gambit. They are number 2 on my poodoo list right now, but I have pretty much emptied everything BUT insurance offers from the other walls.

I did the Gamehouse Fun Pass 7 day free trial. This is the second time I've done it. The first time I believe I found it on PaymentWall, but I can't remember for how much. That time, I had issues with the downloader for games and couldn't even USE the Fun Pass, so it was logical to cancel.

This offer is currently on a couple of offer walls. Gambit has it for 900. TapJoy has it for only 510. It Pays To Shop The Walls!

By the way, some of these free trials, like the one above, Can be done more than once. Often, if you use the same credit card (or in my case, prepaid Visa gift card), you may get your free trial but not your swagbucks. You may not even get the free trial, being a previous customer. I happen to have two different Visa gift cards, so I just used my second one, and had no problems. The swagbucks rolled in about 20 minutes after completing the sign up.

This time I can download and play games- but so far the games I've tried all end up being STUCK- as in, I can't exit them without alt-tabbing out, starting the task manager, and ending task. Not so good. Probably going to cancel again... *GRIN* I love it when they give me a perfectly plausible reason to cancel. Then I don't feel like I'm somehow cheating the system LOL.

Now on to a couple of quick BAD offers. You know it was coming- I can't do a serious swagbuck hunt without running across at least one.


This isn't a BAD offer so to speak, it's just a DEAD offer. Waste of time. You are supposed to enter a contest and submit a phrase "What if ...."  for a chance to win a trip to New York City. I completed this offer before but never got my swagbucks. My bad, I forgot to inquiry it, and it fell off the Viewed Offers list. Too late now! So I decided to try it again.

Well, The contest is closed, no more submissions accepted, therefore no way to complete the offer for swagbucks. I wrote them asking them to remove it as a dead offer, but until they do, don't waste your time. 108 swagbucks would have been nice though...

The last item is a 680 swagbucks offer from TapJoy for eMusic. You sign up for a 30 day free trial and get 50 free MP3 downloads.

This is one of those times I am really glad I use a prepaid gift card instead of a regular credit card. I filled out the sign up information, inputted my card information and clicked SIGN UP. Instead of being taken to a confirmation screen, or a further information screen, or even a denial screen, I was sent to a "Thank You! Please enjoy this Special Offer as our way of thanking you for joining,"

It was an offer to sign up for a 2 month free trial to 2 magazines, either People, Time, Sports Illustrated, or Entertainment Weekly. I recognized this offer as one I'd done for several hundred swagbucks a couple of months ago- but this wasn't through the special offers screen, I would get no swagbucks for signing up.

I could find no way to get off that page. No skip, No Thanks, pass buttons. No mention of eMusic by name anywhere on the page. Trapped. Dead end.

I tried to log into eMusic but could not, as I was never taken to a "create a password" screen. I checked my Visa gift card statement and sure enough, there was a pending charge.

PANIC! Started feeling a little sketchy there. Thank GOODNESS I use the gift card, no matter what it will not effect my credit if some scam has occured. That's what it felt like. A scam using the eMusic sign up as a front to get your credit card information.

First thing this morning I called eMusic to find out what was up. The customer service rep knew nothing about TapJoy, nothing about the magazine offer, stated that it couldn't have had anything to do with them. I explained (won't go into it now) how it must be embedded in the sign up form. Anyhoo, point is, apparently it was a valid attempt to authorize my credit card but was for some reason declined. It wasn't a matter of insufficient funds, they could not explain why it cancelled, but implied it was a glitch and would I like to try again.

No Thank You. Not on the phone, not for no swagbucks, and not with this kind of sketchy, shady stuff going on. The lady said she would forward the complaint to corporate to see what might be happening with TapJoy and the magazine offer.

I suppose this may or may not be a bad offer. I would suggest you stay away from it, despite the tempting 680 swagbucks. Something is not right. For one thing, whether I completed the offer or not with a successful sign up, there was NO RECORD of me even attempting the offer on TapJoy. No way for me to report any offer problems to them. eMusic couldn't even explain why I was denied, they have no explanation why I would be trapped in a magazine offer, and I still don't feel 100% sure some third party didn't grab the credit card number.  

Gift card. Gift card.

I keep saying credit card but it's such an important difference. If you are using a real credit card for these offers, you really should switch to something like the Visa Go-Tag. It Covers Your A$$.

That's it for today's offer meltdown. I'm sure I will have more good and bad in the coming couple of days, as I have about 600 swagbucks to earn.

One last tidbit and I'll be signing off for the day-


Last night we got a typical frustrated question about special offers on the Swagbucks Facebook wall. The poster was asking what the heck to do when they ask for a confirmation email, and you can't find it. Well, my answer is FIRST : Don't let it get lost!

As soon as you do the offer, check the email used for the offer. Look in spam IMMEDIATELY so it doesn't get bogged down and lost. Create a folder in your email for confirmations- if you want to be Very organized you can have a folder for each offer wall, but a simple "Confirmations" folder should be enough. Whether the confirmation is in your inbox or spam, move it to the confirmations folder immediately. That way if you have to do an inquiry, you know right where to look.

If you do open an inquiry, and  they want a confirmation email, this is what you need to do. Open the confirmation email, and "FORWARD" it. You are not going to hit SEND, you just want to see the entire email, including the "header" which shows what date / time the email was sent To You. Instead of sending it, just highlight and COPY it all, top to bottom. Paste that into the inquiry comment box.

Sometimes you Will forward the email. You will know because the inquiry page over on the special offer wall will say "Please forward the confirmation email to support@whateverCo.com with Inquiry #XXXXX in the Subject line."  PaymentWall is one of those that asks you to send screenshots and confirmations by email. Most of the others do not.

If an offer requires you to get to the "end of an offer path" and see a quiz result, or confirmation code, Take A Screenshot when you get there! There's a 50 / 50 chance you will need to submit a ticket, and you can't go back after the fact to get the screenshot. Pay CLOSE ATTENTION to the offer requirements. That's where you get the offer companies by the proverbial gonads. If they ask you for a confirmation email and the requirements don't mention needing one, If you have screenshots to back up your claim, point out to them clearly and politely that the requirements do not state a confirmation email is needed, nor was one sent, but you have screenshot proof that you met the requirements.

If they still deny you, report the Inquiry ID and Offer Company to Swag Bucks via the Contact Us link on the home page. Send them the same proofs. They will take care of you, as long as you are using valid information for the offers! :-D

Lastly, don't submit an inquiry as soon as you are done, even if you have a feeling it won't credit *chuckle* Even if the offer states it reports on a 15 minute delay, or receive swagbucks in minutes, sometimes it takes a while for them to come through. I've done so darn many of them that I can kind of tell when I need to inquiry, depending on the type of offer, and the company, but that's not really a guideline I can give you. Each users experience is different. I will wait anywhere from an hour, to a day, before submitting an inquiry. In the case of PaymentWall, I will look at the feedback / reviews and see what others say about how long the offer takes to credit. That gives me an idea of how long to wait.

That's it for today! I hope those two insurance offers credit you. I hope you have better luck than I am having today!

Until Tomorrow Swag Friends..

HAPPY SWAGSURFING!!!

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