mTurk is place for slaves, people who don't get job anywhere, start working at this place and declare themselves as a (so called) Freelancer, but here Freelancer is synonymous for Free Worker/Slave. These people work for hours to earn pennies (even you can't buy underwear from those), as they are free from job, they(worker) start projecting themselves as a wise, deserving and over paid worker. Wake up dude here you are purely slave, nobody cares you, neither requester nor amazon. After working here you may earn small money or requester may reject your entire work (even you are maintaing good standard of work). They are free to reject and nobody regulate them even amazon don't bother(because amazon already has got his commission). Amazon also has rights to suspend your account for any reason they like. Amazon projects that they don't charge any commission from worker, which is true but look at this point(extracted from "Amazon Mechanical Turk Participation Agreement") "After Suspension your remaining Prepaid HITS balance (if any) will become the property of Amazon Mechanical Turk. " Smart? No they are purely some bunch of Crooks. They suspend your account to increase their Bank Balance(Since they already have huge balance). You may categorize this as a case of "Soar Grapes". But stop laughing at me! If they can forfeit my money then next is yours. Beware! I am going to post here same exploitation faced by many worker, i have extracted these cases from this forum, you may find them in various threads. Some of them are like my story (sadly its me or other, every one is crying). by annachie13 Junior Member Join Date: Jul 2010 Posts: 3 Turk will not protect its workers?! I woke up to find that 65 HITs were rejected simultaneously for the same reason, by the same requester. The reason they gave was absolutely impossible due to the nature of the assignment, and they copied and pasted this reason into every single rejected HIT. I have a done couple hundred HITs for the same requester in the past, all of which were accepted. In fact, out of thousands of HITs, I have had only one rejection, ever. It seemed to me that the requester decided to take my work, and not pay for it. The problem is, besides losing time and money, it has severely hurt my score, and Turk is threatening my account. I wrote to Turk, and they informed me that they do not have a policy to investigate or protect their workers, but that they would take it into suggestion. I am shocked. They claim that they do not get involved, but yet they threaten my account on behalf of a requester, and they will not look at the issue. Their suggestion to me: go talk about it on the forum. Seriously? A company like Amazon does not protect its workers, especially that we have to go on faith that we will ever be reimbursed? Has anything similar to this ever happened to anyone else? Because I'm about to walk away from the site entirely. by kenmturk Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2010 Posts: 1 Why was my account suspended? I've been diligently working on tasks the past week and have successfully completed over 1000 hits, and today while I was writing an article, I went to click submit and it said my account has been suspended? To my knowledge I've done nothing wrong and done every hit I've submitted properly... can anyone tell me possibly why and how to go about getting it un-suspended? by vazrakar Member Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 62 Unfair What should be the minimum pay for each hit? Because, if the hits which are accepting turkers from US , pays more . For the same hit , they pay less to indians. Do you agree with it. by rdoney Junior Member Join Date: May 2010 Posts: 2 Suspended account Mturk just suspended my account without giving me any reason. I called Amazon, all they did was e-mail the mturk people. Why would my account be suspended? by aakay4u Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 19 Beware of mTurk I had been working at mTurk since Jan 2009 and within a month had built up an impression that at last have got a genuine site to work for earning some money. However, they according to me are the biggest scamsters, even worse than the PPC site owners. mTurk can suspend your account any moment and forfeit all your money without even bothering to give proper justification. Simply, they will state that due to violation of their TOS, the account is suspended and all earnings are forfeited. If you claim the money earned prior to suspension, they will say that they can’t do any more business with people whose accounts are suspended. Here is a detail of the money which they claimto have sent, but i did not recieve any cheque. Out of my $xxx earned there, i recieved $xxx and they ate all my money towards the end. When i kept on asking for money, they suspended my account. Despite doing xxxxx tasks there, my approval was a little over 99%. 12 Dec., 2009 AQLJEOT16YQWT-00000L7X You withdrew: US$ xxxx The exchange rate applied was: INR xxx per US Dollar The amount you will receive via cheque is: INR Rs xxx 29 Dec., 2009 AQLJEOT16YQWT-00000RBJ You withdrew: US$ xxxx The exchange rate applied was: INR xxx per US Dollar The amount you will receive via cheque is: INR Rs xxxx 13 Jan., 2010 AQLJEOT16YQWT-00000UV5 You withdrew: US$ xxx The exchange rate applied was: INR xxx per US Dollar The amount you will receive via cheque is: INR Rs xxx 28 Jan., 2010 AQLJEOT16YQWT-00000YQ2 You withdrew: US$ xxx The exchange rate applied was: INR xxx per US Dollar The amount you will receive via cheque is: INR Rs xxx 13 Feb., 2010 AQLJEOT16YQWT-0000141S You withdrew: US$ xxx The exchange rate applied was: INR xxx per US Dollar The amount you will receive via cheque is: INR Rs xxx My account was suspended on Feb. 17th, 2010, and all the above mentioned money which i was supposed to get before suspension has also been forfeited. It’s understandable that they forfeit all earnings which has not been disbursed, but these cheaters can also forfeit all the earnings which has been disbursed. I would strongly ask newcomers to be careful about their autocratic nature . There are much better places to work for like oDesk and elance.com where i work now and i fine that they are transparent and honest unlike mTurk. NOTE: From Aug, 2009 till Dec, 2009 i had not done a single HIT at mTurk and then till Feb 17., 2010 was not even blocked by a single requester. HELL WITH THE CROOKS OF mTURK SHAME ON AMAZON Here's the reply when i asked them to reissue the cheques. Greetings from Mechanical Turk. Because your account was suspended due to activity that we believe violates the Participation Agreement/Conditions of Use, any remaining funds on the account are forfeited. This suspension officially terminates all your activity on Mechanical Turk. Should you try to open another account, it too will be closed. I'm sorry that we're no longer able to do business with you through Mechanical Turk. Did I solve your problem? by Tiger Member Join Date: Nov 2009 >>>This mTurk thing is heavily loaded in favor of the people who run them and the requesters. <<< You're absolutely right there. I can only urge you to keep writing to them in spite of the initial "Sorry, can't do anything for you" response. I have read more than once that people have made some progress when repeatedly sending inquiries to them, explaining the situation, demanding an explanation etc. Even mention your lawyer, just mentioning might help. My guess is that at first a simple mturk employee responds with the cut/paste answer.
jackisback version 2?? I can feel your pain, though. Had I been a subject to an unjust/unfair treatment, I too would have felt frustrated. Yet despite of that, I'd also like to mention that if you're looking for making a living through mturk, I guess it's your fault in the first place. Since there have been quite a few cases of abrupt suspension of accounts, & having no experience of it myself, I can't comment on that issue. I don't know on what basis mturk chooses whom to suspend. Maybe they're having a lottery system in which I haven't got lucky to be chosen as yet BTW, has your account been permanently suspended?
Wow Well i am not a good writer, But thanx for pointing out my mistakes, i want to protest against my suspension but seems language is main barrier .....any way keep laughing I think some people are trying to Glorify MTURK, they are surely from mturks social media department and doing some damage control for new worker to join their fraud making business. Even some of my friends are also facing suspension. I think INDIAN on their Hit List. They are also trying to prevail some propaganda that Indian have poor English and their mass suspension is justified. Firstly they categorize their work as Human Intelligence Task, but as you know those tasks are mockery of Human Intelligence, for doing such kinda work they are expecting some Expert in American English from Cambridge or Harvard University. But i accept that for Article Writing Job, Good English is essential, but those type of work are rare on mturk, since i never tried to accept those HITs as i know my strength and weakness very well. Dear! We know our local language far better than what you know yours but sadly our is not world language. Alright, then why only Indian and American are allowed to Disburse their payment? Not rest of the world? Dude! Wait for the day when all Indian will be able to Speak Correct English. That day forget about Mturk, Indian will surely rule the world. We believe in hard work, work is worship for us, you (mturk) can't discourage us. Today i am frustrated not because they have looted my hard earning. But, I am frustrated because i can't teach them any lesson for playing with my emotion and wasting my precious days that i devoted to complete those work. For your knowledge:- I have completed more than 11000 HITs with more than 98.9% accuracy (was 99.99% till 9500 HITs aprox) After their routine job(suspension), I tried to contact customer care, they replied:- Our system detected activity on your Amazon Mechanical Turk account that we believe violates the Participation Agreement/Conditions of Use, and we have terminated your Amazon Mechanical Turk account effective immediately. Our Participation Agreement outlines the terms of our program and, since our suspension criteria are proprietary, we do not specifically publish or share them. Additionally, we do not disburse funds for suspended accounts. ...................................................................................... Simple Copy paste as they are the best in this practice. After thorough inspection of "Amazon Mechanical Turk Participation Agreement" i found that (i) I was not using robots, scripts or other automated methods to complete the Services; as it was purely hard work, i worked hours to earn a single dollars (since it was frustrating), (ii) I was not submitting work directly to a Requester; as i know they already have thousands of slave (like me) out there, (iii) And i provided all information correctly as asked by them, these are few example, even i don't find a single reason for suspension until i reach at this point in their "Participation Agreement":- your remaining Prepaid HITS balance (if any) will become the property of Amazon Mechanical Turk. Now this is the point that they don't want to share, and it is their proprietary. Right? Mturk is The Great Swindler . ... .... ..... I Googled and found its not only me but thousand of other facing same treatment. Next time I'll try to post those scam stories with proper link. If you are experiencing same pain, please share.
Mostly, they're already aware of it when they start working on such kind of HITs. And even if you've blindly accepted the HIT before checking out what it requires you to do, you can always return them. While I agree that there are numerous exploitative jobs (HITs) being stashed out on mturk, they aren't forcing you to work on them. It's up to you, take it or leave it. I haven't come across anyone such. Don't get me wrong, but are you deducing that from what you yourself used to do before your account was suspended? And I hope you aren't suggesting that one should rather sit idle than work on mturk if they're jobless. If one has a better option that one can go for, one would surely go for the better one. And I'm gonna ask the fellow members to ignore the whining (or should it be 'bragging'? Sorry, but you see, I'm also an Indian & my English also sucks big time ) about the greatness of Indians.
Dear Friend, I am really sorry if you don't like my thoughts and the way i tried to start this issue, yes i was a fool who believed someone's suggestion and joined that, its true that nobody forced me to join mturk, but i want to make it public with my own thoughts and words. I can't make everyone happy with my views, i think you are the unhappy one, please don't take it personally, all comment made earlier was related to me, i was Jobless and not able to earn more etc. Also, i would like to congrats that your account is still working and you are really earning more than others are just dreaming (i hope you are loyal toward mturk, just because of this reason and you are a real worker). Sorry that you are embarrassed ) about the greatness of Indians(if you are really an Indian). Please forgive me for any of my derogatory comment (if you find it). My intension is not to stop anyone from working and killing time but trying to aware that how one can play with your emotion and misuse their time. Rest choice is your. Dear all, please use your own heart and brain.
While I'm a real worker (just out of curiosity, are you always this paranoid?), no, I'm not making a fortune from mturk. Sorry to disappoint. Besides, do you mean that I should be loyal to mturk only if I'm "earning more than others are just dreaming"? Otherwise (i.e. if I'm not earning much from mturk), I should blog against them & pan them down? Hm, analyzing your thoughts, I'm beginning to wonder who was really at fault towards your account's suspension. Though I feel that the misinterpretation was deliberate & intentional, I'd provide a clarification just in case. The embarrassment smiley/emoticon was w.r.t. my low level English, & therefore it wasn't placed after "Indian" but was placed after "my English also sucks big time". Are we clear? Crystal? One more clarification: I'm really an Indian. But yeah, I'm neither proud nor ashamed of it. If your definition of "Indian" includes that one MUST be proud of it, then for you & your likes, no, I'm not an Indian. Anyway, regardless of all this, as I mentioned earlier, I can understand your pain & frustration. What's done to you may (well, I can't be too sure; now, can I?) be unjust & unfair, but there's no need to drag nationality in the midst of it all. Well, you're free to register your thoughts & I'm free to register my disagreements, if any, along with my thoughts.
Well i thought this is a serious matter, but i am disappointed that you people are fighting unnecessarily. I think first man must be heard if his allegations are true. After analysis of complete thread i found that many people are facing abrupt suspension of accounts, Hmm............ can anyone please suggest me how to avoid this? I don't want to become a victim and don't want to take a chance. I am sorry for your account suspension. "My country, right or wrong" is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober." Justfight, shame on you but, I love my country, I Proud be and indian, Long Live INDIA.
Whatever, dude. I'm not here to please you. I can argue the matter further, but it's too off-topic & I, for one, am not here to discuss such issues. Besides, I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to trolls & idiots, among others.
Dear Ruler only an Indian can understand the value of being an indian. I am sure you are an Indian. God bless you. Well its seems either you have closed your eyes or your eye sight is not Crystal Clear. I can feel (Surely i can) your pain that you are not able to buy a piece of glasses, that is why your eye sight is weak. Stop working here (if you are really a worker) neither you may still not able to purchase your own underwear (like i did and now i have purchased my own Car and Mac rest is coming in future. please don't ask how, Yes its again due to my hard work). Please go up and inspect my first post, All poor worker who are facing unjust suspension are from India. Sorry but i am not able to find a single case of other national. No wonder if you show disagreement again with my findings. I am sorry to say that you really can't feel our pain. (Sorry if you find it rude) Only an Indian and top of that a worker can understand my pain, with these words you are proving you are an amazon associate(i received same Plastic sympathy from amazon when first time i tried to contact them). Now everyone know that why your are loyal toward Mturk. Again! Again! and Again! you are trying to prove that my campaign is unnecessarily. Well i know what irritate you. Any way, next time i am Going to I.G.N.O.R.E. You. As you don't deserve to be heard. Dear All, As promised earlier i am going to publish here some other Mturk's dubious scam references from other website Here is First: URL: http://hubpages.com/hub/Mturk-a-scam-site Heading: Mturk, a scam site? It is very unfortunate that Mturk is showing signs of becoming a scam site. In the front page itself they show tasks that can't be done by the workers. The requester give 3 minutes time to complete the tasks that require much more time. The requester ask the workers to join some sites that is against mturk's terms( Mturk admin must wake up from their sleep at least now before they lose their reputation. They also suspend workers accounts with out giving any warning. Any legit site would give warning if a member commits a mistake. If a worker makes a mistake the requester can block that particular member but why should Mturk suspend worker account. It is not at all fair. The worst thing is Mturk keeps the hard earned rewards of workers( This is what scam sites do. The site allows scam requester freely and suspend innocent workers and keep their money. Comments raja 3 months ago Yes, You are right. Mturk is now filled with scam requester. It is mere waste of time to work on this site now.There is non sign of correcting their mistakes. All Mturk workers very unhappy with the site's performance now. Amazon's reputation is sinking because of Mturk. kevin 7 weeks ago i made $150 in 4 days . . most of hits are scam. but we have to search for a better hit always . . . mturk changed my life and i just love turking. . . my daily earning is about $40 and i Turk 10-12 hours a day . .. Dear All as you see in comment part only some non-Indian is happy. RAJA is an Indian Name and Kevin is not (tough and don't vouch any of them) But prima facie evidence i am right.
lol, I work at my leisure on mturk & that's just about it. No, I don't find that rude. You're kinda right there. Just because you don't find one doesn't mean there doesn't exist one. Besides, maybe you're unable to find because you're not looking for it. And don't even bother to ask me to point out some non-Indian facing such suspension issue to you. That's none of my concerns & I'm not gonna bother myself with that. Oh, please do. I'm not forcing or gagging you & making you hear me out. Hope you'll be able to follow that successfully. Let's see. Finally, w.r.t. your off-topic ranting , I'm gonna overlook it. As I said earlier, I've neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to trolls & idiotic statements & sentiments. And I won't be quite surprised if Ruler is but your alter-ego.
I worked on mturk a year ago, My account was suspended suddenly, I wrote to mturk, I got reply that i violated TOS, So the suspension is necessary. As far my knowledge I did nothing that violates TOS. I thought that any Indian account having more than $1000 in total earnings, will get suspended. I am pretty sure that mturk is not for indians. Mturk is purely a scammer,No one can justify their act. I request everybody who reads this post don't suggest mturk to anyone, even to your enemy.Hits with low reward with high work is only for indians, Those who are turking outside india can get better reward HITS. They think Indians will do anything for a penny. SHAME ON MTURK That's right. MTURK IS FOR SLAVES
I am keeping my finger crossed, i have $120 in my account, still functional, going to verify it hopefully i'll get my money, but its scary after seeing another post here and confirming that mturk is a scammer HalfBaked! have you blocked ataur.rahman1 ? Waiting for his more posts. Also, someone help me please, i want to know whether working on Many Tab at same time is violation of mturk's TOS?
If you mean accepting too many HITs at the same time, I guess it's a violation of mturk's policies & leads to temporary suspension (for a day, maybe) of your account. I'm not sure, but if you keep repeating it despite of facing temporary suspensions several times, your account might face a danger of permanent suspension (again, I'm not sure since I haven't faced such a situation myself, but faintly remember reading something to that effect in one of their replies to my query long time ago). I don't understand why would you need to ask that, shouldn't you know that? Anyway, I don't think so since his username still exists on the member list & there's nothing mentioned to that effect on his profile page. Well, just check out the post above yours!!! jk. Yeah, I reckon that it was turning into quite an unhealthy discussion. I hate it when people use their nationality as an excuse for such issues, especially when it's not the case. Hell, I'm an Indian myself & know quite a few Indians for whom mturk is functioning quite smoothly till date (but yeah, none of them are using it to earn their daily bread). I tried my best to ignore as much off-topic part of the other posts as I can & tried to keep my comments related to mturk (after all, that's what this forum is for, right?) as far as possible, but I'm not sure if I succeeded entirely. I don't like being indebted & thought that a reasonable payback was due. And if that means a ban, I wonder if I could help it. Won't be an entirely new experience though, since I was on a voluntary ban till some time ago
I understand that you are a genuine turker and i am not, How many you know (indians) having their account actively even after crossing $1500 in total.Do you post your total earnings screen shot here.If you do, I can believe that mturk is genuine and is for human intelligence.
As mentioned earlier, I only turk at my leisure. And looking at the rate I've been turking lately, it'll take me quite a while to reach that figure. May I ask what made your mind change your suspicions for that upper-limit figure from 1000 to 1500 overnight?
Some time i accept 2-3 HIT at same time and work simultaneously on each HIT, I open all HIT on separate Tab, i am doing this because i have slow Internet connection. I click on automatic acceptance box on every Tab, while i work on first tab, second takes some to time to load, after submitting first HIT i move on second tab in between third tab is in process to load, after completing second tab i move on third and so on. Its saves my idle time. Twice or thrice i have accepted 10 HIT at same time(but i don't do this always). Now my problem is more clear, is this a violation of TOS? justfight please reply to my query as i heard that you are an amazon's associates, i think you can answer it properly than any one else. Please help. I really don't know that how to find someone, whether he is still active or not(as i am new here, even this is first time that i am using any forum) Can you please elaborate this? so that i can answer you properly. Hello, Have you tried to work again after suspension of your account?
The problem might be lying somewhere therein, IMO. But I can't say anything for sure. How I wish I was & whatever you heard was true!!! I'm merely a Provider on mturk & that's all there's to it. I can only answer to the best of my knowledge, which again, is not always accurate. Never mind, that won't be necessary.
justfight Can you post here how much you earned so far from mturk Is there anybody (Indian) who crossed $1000 and active for 3 months after reaching that can post here,so that i can assume that my opinion was wrong about mturk