Swagbucks (Detailed)

All right, if you're on any type of freebie, job, referral or moneymaking forum then chances are you've heard of Swagbucks. I decided it was time to check it out since it's everywhere and here's my experience so far (the good and the bad). I would recommend it over all but I'd also be careful what you use it for.

Swagbucks is a search engine site that randomly awards their currency (swagbucks) to users who run searches with them. You can also earn in other ways, like sending in old cell phones to be recycled (which is neat), referring friends, shopping through their links or following them on Twitter and Facebook to get special codes for swagbucks.

I signed up with them on October 16th to tinker with them some (mostly because I was really impressed by iRazoo's earning potential) but I didn't start using them until the 17th. Right now, after 8 days, I'm up to 21 Swagbucks, and I'm averaging about 2 a day from searching. Once in a while I get a code from somewhere to put in as well.

They have prizes of all types but my focus (as usual) will be on the gift cards.

They DO offer PayPal gift cards, however I do NOT recommend them. They run 70 pts (190 when not on sale, although I doubt this sale is uncommon) for a $5 PayPal card, or you can get an Amazon card for 45 pts (100 when not on sale). That makes the choice for me easy as pie. Since Amazon cards are nearly 1/2 the price of PayPal I'm obviously going to go for the Amazon cards. They're versatile and can buy toys, electronics, clothes, or even food so why bother with the overpriced PayPal cards. At the sale prices though you can get 1-2 easily a month with out any actual effort.

You can easily earn more than that if you refer people to join as well. You actually have two options if you decide to work on referrals. You can either join their affiliate program which pays a straight $1 per referral (not sure if there are any catches) or you can just use the regular referral link and earn SwagBucks whenever your referral earns them - up to 100 total. Even at non sale prices, that's still equal to a $5 Amazon card, if your referral doesn't lose interest before then. I personally would opt for the latter because it has a higher earning potential, but it is a slower turn around.

I did have my first bad experience with this kind of thing with Swagbucks though. On October 19th my account was banned (!!!) and I was pretty annoyed because I hadn't done anything wrong. (I was using it for my IMShopping research as a matter of fact.) I contacted customer service immediately and received a message the next day. Here's a general run down of how it went through the course of that day (all paraphrased of course):

Me: I'd like to know why my account was disabled, I wasn't cheating, my searches were legit. I never even received a warning pop up as your TOS says should happen if people are doing things that would trigger suspicion.
Swag: (Pre Written BS answer.) You were disabled for violating the TOS. We will reactivate your account but you need to reset your IP to use it.
(I had no intention of using the company because I had no intention of resetting my IP for them.)
Me: That response does not adequately answer my question. I need to know EXACTLY what I did so I will be sure not to do it again. I still believe I did nothing to violate TOS since I got no warning, and all I was doing was searching for items related to my Shopping Assistant position (no I'm not actually a shopping assistant with IMShopping but that was the best way to put it) that requires pricing and item comparison. In the event that no decent results showed, I would search for stores that I felt might be of help.
Swag: Our compliance dept. determined that you were Over-Clicking please search as you would normally.
Me: That response was just a shortened version of the unsatisfactory answer that you already sent me. Please tell me exactly what I did. Since I don't feel I was "over clicking", I need precise information so I'll know what to avoid doing in the future.
Swag: (this is a quote) "Unfortunately, the clear cut answer here is to not over search. If you are naturally searching and not over clicking on links you will be fine. If you are over clicking, clicking on every link possible you will be flagged for it." We do rarely make mistakes, it is possible you weren't doing this, I will note your account and if this happens again please contact us and we'll correct it.

At this point I still wasn't satisfied, but I figured I'd see if my account really had been enabled - it had AND it had been fixed so I didn't need to change my IP address. Since I was capable to log in and use the program without any further effort on my part, I decided I'd continue using Swagbucks so that at the very least I could write an informed blog post on it, with more than 2 days of use as background.

Needless to say I am no longer using this for IMShopping purposes because clearly their standards are a bit skewed. I may try working it back into my IMShopping work later, but I'm not sure. Right now I'm just using it in the evenings or whenever I need to do a random search in place of Google.