Palm Research is a marketing research company that pays respondants about a dollar per survey to take online surveys, with a cashout at 10 dollars. I am not writing this to resolve my own customer service issues (they owe me 7 dollars for done surveys, but this is niether here nor there) but more to report what looks like fraudulant activity that I came accross, so that people (both potential surveyors and clients) can be warned away. This is kind of my good deed for the day.
Since the only real e-mail line I had as a surveyor was to the "admin", who didn't answer e-mails, I also today sent a letter to the owner/president at the physical address in the event owner did not know what was occurring. Basicly, what it looks like this company is doing is sending EXTREMELY lenghty surveys (it will say "15 minutes" but generally end up often taking 45-60 minutes). When the surveyor gets close to the end of the survey, Palm research puts up a fake screen either making it seem like there is some computor glitch, or by saying "your not qualified for the survey" (even though you had done and passed the prequalifying questions 40 minutes earlier) making it impossible to complete the survey and get credit for it.
What occurred that revealed these were apparently intentional faked screens and not just computer glitches is when 45 minutes into a survey I had already prequalified for a screen came up saying "sorry you're notqualified for the survey". On e-mailing the admin, he sent back (the first and only time he answered an-mail about one of these glitches) an e-mail saying how sometimes the prescreeners WERE really long. However, sometime much later the EXACT same survey came up on from line or company, I redid it using THE EXACT SAME ANSWERS and this time finished it to completion. When I got to the part where I had previously been told I was unqualified, it turned out the end of the survey was only a few minutes away.
The "unqualified" screen had been a fake. Over the next month or so 3 other instances occurred whereby I got close to the end of a very long survey, when a "computer glitch" came up preventing doing the remainder of the survey. Any and all e-mails I sent on this to the admin went unanswered and ignored. Since I had earlier done 7 other surveys that I did complete for Palm, and as the surveys with the fake screens were all OTX surveys, I decided to just skip the OTX ones and only do 3 of the others so I could reach the 10 dollar cash out point and then unsubscribe.
One day I accidently hit the unsubscribe link instead of the survey link, so then sent numerous e-mails to the admin to get this undone, all of which went ignored. It appears Palm is putting up the fake screens to avoid paying incentives, and then since they already have about 95 percent of your answers on these OTX surveys, to be able to foward the survey to their clients I can only assume they type in the remaining answers themselves, pretending it's being done by the surveyor, then sending it to their clients as complete.
Since the survey police files showed HUGE volumes of similar complaints about OTX ("survey"exchange") I at first thought maybe this was just an OTX situation, but Palms ignoring of e-mails on these issues indicates they are complicit and/or WELL aware of the situation. One or more people at Palm must know these rip offs are going on.
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