Pledge Drive Update: PS3 is going to better anwyway
Remember the Pledge Drive I held back in November, where I asked readers to support this site and ensure that I never finish my book by helping me get a free Xbox 360? I needed eight people to come through for me and nearly 25 went ahead and registered through my referral links. Unfortunately only one of those people followed through and completed an offer. I was flustered enough that I actually began working on an article about this — is it a scam after all? The president of FreePay Inc assured me that it is not. Whew! But he did acknowledge that I have an unusually high "yellow to green" ratio. Inquiries led me to believe that at least a few people actually did complete an offer but never got credit. Scam? Depends on how you look at it. Most likely scenario: those people either never bothered to complain to FreePay about their situation, or did complain, only to have the standard request for more information e-mail get spam filtered. Mr. FreePay did tell me that it's fairly common for folks to tell their friends that they completed an offer and then not do so, which is funny, but not really apropos here.
Upshot: Having persuaded two actual friends to complete offers, I am now five people away from owning one of these babies. And you, if you want one, are eight people plus yourself away. It obviously ain't as easy as it looks, but since I just got an alert that I need to wrap everything up by the end of May, I thought I'd post one final reminder that if you want to be my friend — but not the kind of friend who lies about whether they completed an offer — it's not too late to sign up.
We now return to Fresh Air.
Comments
Is it that you can't afford to buy your own XBox? Or is it the thrill of the spammy, scammy, jump-through-hoopsy chase?
I wish I could help you out, Daniel. But I am busy trying to find a way to get a free iPod shuffle.
Lauren
Posted by: YogaChickie | March 23, 2006 12:15 PM
Sure, I could afford to. The twins don't really need all that medicine, right?
Posted by: radosh | March 23, 2006 12:34 PM
Credit card's sitting in my wallet and pays for my World of Warcraft subscription. Still don't know why you didn't get credit.
Posted by: Matt | March 23, 2006 2:31 PM
Eh, medicine schmedicine. Aren't they old enough to buy their drugs on the street yet?
Posted by: Lauren Cahn | March 23, 2006 11:27 PM
Free pay has become a big scam. I got an ipod a year ago from them, everything was fine. Then someone else I knew tried, got enough signups, and they denied her application.
Then, recently, they changed the rules. If you don't get the required number of signups in one month it doesn't count.
So what started out as something legit has turned into a scam. Probably because they realized they couldn't make money giving things away, but they should still honor the original agreement.
Posted by: Howard Nix | March 24, 2006 10:36 AM
it IS a scam. I know it didn't used to be, and maybe they have some system in place to only 'mistakenly' not count a certain percentage of completed offers that come through, but i had a ton of people sign up and complete offers, and only 2 have actually showed up for the last month or so. Another friend of mine actually HAD all the completed referals showing up, and in the members area it showed that he had completed everything- then one of his referals magically disappeared and he went back to not being complete. No explaination, nothing.
Also- there used to be only one way to contact them directly- and it was burried in a bunch of links in the faq (you had to have the specific problem that you completed an offer more than 15 days ago, but didn't recieve credit). It was a form on the page to send email. Then they changed it to information on how to fax them... so no more emailing freepay. Why are they trying so hard not to let people contact them? I heard they are going through a lawsuit now as well... i definitely see more of those coming in the future- and perhaps I will be one of them. I held up my end of the bargain, and they are not holding up theirs. They are breaching their own contracts left and right- DON'T TRUST THEM!
Posted by: me | April 10, 2006 12:36 AM
Since this post, I also had one completed offer revert to uncompleted. The lawsuit is over selling e-mail addresses, which is a different issue, but in my experience when a company does one shady thing, it does lots of shady things.
Posted by: radosh | April 10, 2006 9:17 AM
AVOID Freepay, it once was a great company, but no longer. They have scammed me, I signed up to Screenselect 60 days ago and still no credit, 12 of the 22 referrals also signed up, none of them have credits (its been over 30 days) and 2 of my referrals have been placed on hold. I have created a website to stop Freepay - www.ekpc.co.uk. We must stop these scammers before they con everyone - FREEPAY NO WAY. AVOID AVOID AVOID
Posted by: David | April 27, 2006 3:57 PM