So the other day I was looking around at job opportunities in Austin, TX when I happened to come across job entitled New Media Marketing. As you can see the description was brief yet somewhat intriguing so I figured I’d submit my resume and see what happens. The following day I get this email:
Hello,
Thanks for your email, we appreciate your desire to work with us.
About the Position:
Our company builds and maintains websites for hundreds of businesses
across the world. Often our clients websites will go down for hours at a
time without notification, causing them to lose lots of valuable time, money
and potential new users/ customers. Having the site tested at regular intervals
helps our clients save money and insure that their site is always working at maximum
functionality.Your job will be to visit a list of websites that we provide to you, observe the site
and spend a few minutes looking at various pages of the website (ie clicking links and exploring
the site as though an everyday user would. You may also be required to test other site functionality
such as the sign up process and follow up process to make sure an end user would fully understand this.
You will be required to interact with the site as an end user, ie fill in forms, submit comments etc.
You will be required to spend around 5 minutes on each site and perform important actiosn which we will
outline in detail for that particular site.Many of our clients also use our services not only to test their websites but to also test their follow up marketing
procedures and their own marketing staff. You may receive follow up emails or contact from the companies and you
will be required to act as a mystery shopper to test their all round strategy. You will report back on the follow up
so they can monitor their own staff activity. To this end you will be required to act interested in their products/ services
or websites and not reveal your own project.Users will be given access to private areas of client websites which includes back offices, product download pages etc.
As a result successful applicants will be required to sign a NDA agreement. All sites have been tested and are virus free
and completely secure.You will be paid $17.50 per hour on a bi-weekly basis. You will be required to work a minimum of 16 hours per week
and a maximum of 40 hours per week. We will provide you with the projects and a timescale to complete them in.I have attached a small test project for you to complete to access your suitability for the role.
Please read the instructions carefully and then return your completed project back to me as an attachment.Once I have your completed test I will notify you if your application has been sucessful.
If you have any questions then please let me know.
I look forward to working with you in the future.
Donna Maxwell
Training and Recruitment Executive Manager
1-646-292-7145
Just from reading this I was suspicious that they were going to have you going around to websites clicking on adsense ads or something. I received the email from the address @trigemedia.com so I figured let me see what these guys are about. If you visit trigemedia.com it’s a parked domain.
Attached to the email was their test which included 6 links to websites which would redirect to a different domain. Four of the six forwarded to a survey page in which, according to the rules, I was suppose to fill out. In the email above you can see where they tell you that IF contacted you should pretend as though you were actually interested in the product or service. The other two links went to pages where I should just upload a image, or check navigation.
Here’s my theory, and although I think it’s somewhat genius, it is definitely a blackhat affiliate strategy and deceitul:
This is a part of one of those survey affiliate programs or something similar to CPAlead. Which means every time he can get someone to fill out a survey he gets paid. So while your thinking that the reviews that you’re writing actually matter, most likely they don’t and it’s just to make you believe that your doing something more than giving your information to companies so that they can constantly bug you to purchase their products or services. I honestly don’t know if you’d ever even get paid.
I’ll post more later on this, after further investigation.
Oh yeah, if you go here you can see that they’ve posted this everywhere in Craigslist.
Posted under Other
This post was written by Coyol on October 16, 2008
