RewardZone and UpLevel Rewards A Scam?

Aug 17

Recently I received an interesting screenshot of a Tik Tok posted by @Reddit.Journals which I assume is an account that curates posts from Reddit and puts them on Tik Tok. It’s a pretty lazy way to make content but, I guess, it also helps bring interesting things from Reddit to people using TikTok who might not otherwise see it.

Here’s the screenshot:

This Reddit user Jdubs101111 posted a LPT (Life Pro-Tip) on how to easily make money online by doing surveys. They make sure to point out that people often underestimate websites that pay for surveys and casually names one, “surveysenpai.com”. They then make an unbelievable claim that you can make hundreds a month for 30 minutes a day.

Immediately I’m calling bullshit and scam because that post screams like a hidden ad. So I looked up SurveySenpai.com’s domain information and found out it was created July 27th, 2022 but the post was supposedly made 145 days ago.

So either u/Jdubs101111 is a time traveler who used their extreme wealth from surveys to travel back in time or there’s something really fishy going on here. After looking into the Reddit account it turns out Jdubs is not a time traveler. But it also turns out that Jdubs101111 never even made that post.

Someone photoshopped an actual post from u/Jdubs101111 in order to advertise it, was it the person that runs @Reddit.Journals? Who knows but I can’t definitively say yes… although I’m thinking it. (Spoilers for the last section of this article: @Reddit.Journals is totally photoshopping Reddit posts)

Here’s Jdubs101111 actual post that was photoshopped into the fake SurveySenpai ad:

How time travel works would have been the better LifeProTip

So that’s a red flag. But maybe SurveySenpai is legit and they’re just using shady advertising practices? So let’s take a look at the website.

Is that fucking comic sans?!

Here’s the thing, there are legitimate websites that will pay you for doing surveys except the payment is almost always less than a dollar per survey. When the payment is for a larger amount ($1-$10) you usually have to fit certain criteria, so they’re pretty rare. This is why the $750 Cashapp Gift Card (you can get a Cashapp gift card?), the amazon, Shein, and literally all of them sound like bullshit to me.

So I clicked the link.

Nah I’m looking to frame the gift card and not spend it

You might have noticed it says I need to complete 25 deals to claim a $1000 reward, lower deals completed equals fewer rewards. This is already starting to feel a bit more labor intensive than the fake Jdubbs101111 and Tiktoker Reddit.Journals led me to believe.

Before answering any questions I scrolled all the way down to where websites like this usually have their fine print. There was a fair bit to read but if you read my Wicked Bible article you know I’m willing to read a 300-page boring book called A Short History of English Printing to get some information. So this was a cake walk and I found some pretty interesting stuff.

The Rabbit Hole of RewardZone

The first thing I noticed is the name of the company, ‘RewardZone USA LLC’. This company owns RewardZone, UpLevel Rewards, Reward Wizard, is a part of RewardsFlow LLC which also owns Rewards Giant, RewardFlow, RwdFlow, Rwd Flow, RwdsFlow, RewardGiant, RwdGiant, Flash Rewards, FlashRwds, Flash Rwd, and a whole bunch of others plus, believe it or not, they own some companies that don’t have the word ‘reward’ in it. The main thing about these websites is that they each offer you deals to complete in order to get a reward.

Surprisingly UpLevel Rewards is not a scam… I promise you that felt weird to type. Here’s the thing though, it’s not as simple as “30 minutes a day to get a couple of hundred a month”, it’s not even possible. Here’s the chart of the number of deals you need to complete:

So if you want the $750 you need to complete a total of 20 deals. Here’s a breakdown of just some of the things you need to do in 60 days:

Download and play mobile games
- Most games you’ll have to play to a certain level in a certain amount of time which might require you to buy something in the app or take up a huge amount of time
Sign up for a service that requires you to add more personal information like linking a bank account
Make a purchase from an online store, for example, Alpha Brain, Unbloat, Green Roads CBD, etc

Sign up for a subscription service example: Disney+, Hulu, SiriusXM, or make a monthly donation, etc
- Some of the services that offer a free trial won’t count until you make an actual payment so you can’t cancel them
- Some services don’t have a free trial and you’ll have to pay right off the bat
- You are responsible for canceling all of these services and some are not as simple as clicking a button, you gotta talk to people!

Those are just some examples, according to their representative chart, as of 8/15/2022, there are around 385 different offers you can fill out but you wouldn’t know that from looking at the deals page.

You can reload the page and you might see some different deals but I reloaded about 20 times and didn’t see a lot of variation. Also if you fill out an offer as a Level 1 and you see the same offer on a different level, those don’t count, you can’t double dip. They also don’t tell you this, so you might not find out for a few days.

You also have to use the same information for all of the deals you complete, so if you’re thinking ‘I’ll just sign up with a fake email address, name, and physical address’ well then it won’t count. If you’re thinking ‘fine, I’ll use the same fake email, name, and physical address for all the deals’, well, when you try to claim your reward you’ll be rejected since you have to send a picture of your ID, proof of address, and a selfie.

Downsides

But let’s say you don’t mind and you want to go for the $750, in the end, you’re going to end up spending some money. The price of the offers range from 0 to a bit over $100 and since you have to complete 20, there’s no way around it.

Let’s say you still want to go ahead and do all of this, cool but be ready for tons of spam emails, physical mail, and text messages and not just from the offers you signed up for.

RewardZone’s privacy policy says they can sell your information and since you have to give legit information plus a picture of your ID, proof of address, and a selfie, I can guarantee companies are willing to pay for it. They’ve already been involved in a class action lawsuit for that very reason in 2018, Hilton v Fluent, LLC. And hey, remember when I said they’re working with 385 different companies to make their offers?

“Okay give us info and… do you know their social security number? Oh you do? We’ll take that too.”

None of this is exactly illegal, it’s just another source of income for these companies. They get money for you filling out their deals and money for selling your information. But, if you think they are doing something illegal, well, by using their service you agree to not sue them, which incidentally makes it very difficult to sue them.

But alright, you don’t mind, you still want to complete 20 offers to get that Amazon gift card. You don’t mind paying for some offers, dealing with the hassle of canceling them, dealing with the spam emails and mail, and you’re willing to get a Doordash gift card instead of Amazon… oh, did I forget to mention?

According to their policy, they can decide to change the reward you selected to any other of equal value at their discretion. You might start an Amazon wishlist just to delete it because RewardZone decided you’re ordering DoorDash for every meal for the next two weeks.

But maybe you love DoorDash, you still want to go through all of it because that fake post from the Tik Tok said “a few hundred a month”. You’ll take whatever reward you get and then just do it all again next month for the reward you really want.

Except you can’t.

According to their pesky policy, if you earn a reward for over $100, you or anyone else in your household can’t get another reward for 12 months. That’s one whole year last time I checked. If you decide to get the $100 reward or less, you have to wait another 60 days to do it again.

So while these websites aren’t illegal, they sure as shit don’t tell you everything upfront when they advertise their stuff. Speaking of which, why are they resorting to photoshopping Reddit posts to put on Tik Tok to advertise their business?

Turns out they might not be.

TikToker @Reddit.Journals the Real Scammer?

On the premise that photoshopping a Reddit Post to post on Tik Tok might be a bit risky for a company that has been sued several times (I found more lawsuits but I’m already on hour 10 of researching and writing what I thought was going to be a 3-hour article before I fell into a rabbit hole, so I won’t go into them).

I went back to our friend at surveysenpai.com and checked out their links. I don’t mean I clicked them, I mean I looked at the actual links, and guess what, they’re affiliate links.

Some go to other survey websites not part of RewardZone and some go to other apps promising money. Based on this it’s pretty safe to say whoever runs Surveysenpai isn’t an employee at RewardZone but they are getting paid by them.

See, in order to advertise their sites, RewardZone (or one of their many companies) have been reaching out to Tik Tok creators and paying them to promote them. The creators post a video directing you to their link and BAM you’re at a RewardZone website and the creator gets paid by RewardZone.

The problem is I can’t definitively say that the people of RewardZone told @Reddit.Journal to create the fake photoshopped post in their video. It’s most likely up to the discretion of the creator to set up however they want and then it’s possibly approved by RewardZone. User Reddit.Journals also appears to not be willing to discuss it since that video has the comments turned off.

So I took a look at some of their other videos and guess what? I found 2 more videos with photoshopped Reddit posts both pointing to Surveysenpai.com one with 61k+ views and the other with 126k+ views. The first was posted on July 31st, 2022, just 4 days after SurveySenpai.com was created.

Comments were also turned off for both of these videos and after searching both users, I confirmed they didn’t type anything about a website that didn’t exist at the time.

Remember when I said these videos were a pretty lazy way to create content? Well, I take that back a tiny bit since @Reddit.Journals had to photoshop those posts, hide them between some actual real posts in their videos, and create a website to make them seem legit. They did get pretty lazy with the posts though, the first one had an actual backstory but the latest two say the exact same thing.

In the end, no one comes out of this story looking great. RewardZone and their subsidiaries aren’t entirely a scam but they are misleading on how you get rewarded and they might be breaking some laws with your information. TikToker Reddit.Journals is definitely lying to their audience, photoshopping other Redditor’s posts, and outright lying on how the surveys work. In essence, they’re running a dishonest scheme, which, interestingly enough, fits the definition of a scammer.