CashCrate Review - Can You Really Make Money Online with CashCrate.Com, Or is it a Scam?

Editor: I wrote this review quite a few years ago and I no longer have an account with CashCrate. The following review may or may not reflect the current state of the site, I have no idea. Things may have changed since I wrote this. Take this review for whatever it's worth (it's probably not worth anything at this point).

If you're reading this, you've probably seen someone writing about how great CashCrate is somewhere on the internet, so you decided to do some independent investigating to find out if it really works. According to the people who want so desperately for you to sign up with the site, CashCrate is the very best way to make money online ever EVER, and have a-ton-and-a-half of super-fun while doing it! Yippee Hooray! Well, I've got a news-flash for you, Walter Cronkite... It isn't.

But why, WHY would some random person on the internet ever lie to you?! It doesn't make any sense! OK, let's go check out that CashCrate link that you saw on JimBob'sGetRichQuickOnlineBlog.scam before you decided to read this review. Sure, the link itself looks fairly innocent - it probably simply reads "CashCrate" like my link here does. Now hover your mouse over it - Is the address of the link "cashcrate.com" followed by a backslash and a bunch of numbers? Yes? Of course it is... That's a referral link. You see, the vast majority of people ranting and raving about how you can get totally rich with CashCrate are merely trying to hawk their referral link (just like I did here with my link) because THEY get paid if you sign up through it. So you join and do a bunch of work, clicking through seemingly endless pages of spam offers for a measly fifty cents, and they make an effortless profit. These people prey on beginners like you because you have no idea how to make money online, which is why you're reading about CashCrate in the first place. People who actually know how to make money online don't use programs like this - they might promote them, but they don't use them. That stuff's for suckers. And that's where you, the well-intentioned but totally clueless newbie, come in.

Oh, OK, I get it now - They just said all that stuff about how wonderful CashCrate is because it can benefit them! Exactly. You don't have to be as cynical as I am to realize that these people are willing to tell you anything to make a buck. If they truly wanted you to join CashCrate solely out of the goodness of their hearts, they wouldn't need to try to trick you into clicking on their referral link. The warm, fuzzy feeling they get from helping you earn money online would be rewarding enough...

I'm getting off track here (we'll get to how actually using the CashCrate website works soon, I promise), but this is valuable information. There are people trying to profit from your gullibility everywhere on the internet. Even a supposedly reputable site like Associated Content here seems to be more than happy to pay people to publish their crappy spam articles that are nothing more than plagiarisms of a site's official FAQs, promoting the author's personal referral links, or worse, their "How To Make Money Online" scam blogs. It's almost comical how terrible the large majority of articles on the topic of "making money online" are, but that's just the way the world woks. People want to make money by pretending to tell you how to make money. Not that I'm above it; I'll admit it - I like money, and I'd probably be willing to lie to someone on the internet to get it if I ever got desperate enough. Luckily for you though, I didn't decide to write this article to do that. I wrote it to tell you the awful truth about every aspect of CashCrate because no one else is willing to do it (and also because it'll be fun to piss off CashCrate's internet marketer flunkies by exposing their dirty little secrets to the very people that they're trying to scam). There's no referral money to be made from honesty as far as I can tell...

OK, so now that we've covered the fact that CashCrate referral-pushers have no souls or credibility, please come with me on the wonderful, magical journey of using Cashcrate! Let's take a look at the website, shall we? Ooh! There's a happy little cartoon box-guy standing on top of a literal mountain of money! KEWWWWWT!!! This looks promising... Isn't it so exciting?

As soon as you join, you get instant access to the incredibly exclusive "Member's Area." This is where you'll be spending (OK - wasting) most of your time, sifting through page after page of offers that sound too good to be true. A free $500 JC Penney Gift Card? Plus 30 cents? I'm sooooooo there!

But wait - To get that "free" gift card, you need to complete an offer which requires you to sign up for 8 different sub-offers! And that means spending money, or, at best, signing up for free trials that you'll end up being charged for if you forget to cancel them during the free trial period. That doesn't seem like a very good way to earn money... OK, forget that then, let's look for something that doesn't cost anything. Hey look, here's some! They want us to sign up for other websites. That's slightly less annoying and doesn't take too long. Plus we can get paid to subscribe to e-mail newletters that we have no interest in receiving. That's not so bad, either. Let's do it! Oh dear - look at all the spam we're getting in our e-mail now! We really shouldn't have used our primary e-mail address! But it's OK because we've just joined 8 websites and 5 newsletters and made about 10 dollars. Cool!

And this is where you hit "The Wall." You've just completed all of the decent offers and there's not much left for you to do. Outside of joining those websites, all of the other free offers are a total pain to complete, mainly consisting of pages full of ads trying to sell you stuff that you have to click through. You'll end up spending 10 minutes surfing through spam sites to earn that 50 cent reward. Of course, that's assuming you even get credited for it at all. I've had plenty of my earnings (nearly half of them, actually) perpetually held up in "pending" status until they just dropped off the grid completely. That's time I spent for nothing. Apparently clearing out my computer's cookies after each completed offer could have potentially prevented the problem, but I wasn't aware of that until it was too late.

Then there are the surveys. We all love surveys, right? Well CashCrate is willing to pay you a lousy 80 cents for completing them, with the allowed daily maximum you can take being two. I'd love to tell you how great these are, but I didn't manage to qualify for any of the ones that I attempted. Which is the norm with surveys, but at $0.80 a pop, they'd only be worth the hassle if they were less than 45 minutes long. Which they aren't. To be honest, I wasn't terribly motivated to try many of these. Regardless, as far as online surveys go, you can earn a lot more at dedicated survey sites.

OK, so that's all totally lame, but hey, that referral business sounds pretty awesome! Maybe I can make some money by signing up for CashCrate and posting my worthless referral link in a comment on this very article just like all those other silly people that are doing it! Oh yeah, like that's going to work... What makes your referral link special? Why is anyone ever going to randomly click on it? The answer: They won't. If someone reading this article was truly inspired to join CashCrate right this second, they would have just went back to the search engine they came from and found it themselves or clicked on MY link. These "PLEEZ be my referral!" people are going about it all wrong, which is exactly why they're so hard up for referrals that they've resorted to posting spam comments on every article and blog post about CashCrate that they can find. You can't fault them for not knowing any better, but you definitely don't want to follow their example. And doing it the right way involves a lot of work - most likely more than you're willing to take on.

For the successful referral hawkers (the ones that have their own smartly-constructed, search-engine-optimized websites that have no valuable content but all the right keywords), it might be an OK way to make some cash, but they probably aren't riding around in limousines sipping champagne with Playboy or Playgirl bunnies, either. To make even a negligible amount of money from referring someone, the referr-ee has to actually be somewhat successful with the site. Most people will sign-up, earn a buck or two for an hour of mindlessly clicking through ads and all of the other junk that CashCrate has to offer, and give up out of complete and utter frustration/boredom. The big profiteer in that situation is CashCrate - As far as business models go, CashCrate and all of the other "Get Paid To" offer sites like it are genius: Lure people in with the prospect of making some quick and easy cash, then have them click on a ton of stuff and earn you a few dollars from your affiliates until they realize that it's a gigantic waste of time and quit without being paid a dime. Good deal. For the average everyday Joe or Jane who might actually use their service hoping to make a little money, however, CashCrate is going to be a mind-numbing exercise in futility.

Assuming you aren't an expert in the field of internet marketing or an excessively patient individual with a high tolerance level for tedious activities and nothing better to do with your time, the best you're likely to do with CashCrate as a casual user is someday earn that $20 minimum required to request payment, wait 6 weeks to receive your check, cash it, and come to the crushing realization that you're a total sucker for spending hours upon hours online trying to make 20 freakin' dollars. The worst case scenario: You earn nothing, end up accidentally spending a bunch of money on crap you didn't want, and get harassed by Columbia House for the rest of your life. Get 5 DVDs for only 49 cents after buying 2 at regular price! Woohoo! Isn't CashCrate awesome?! The answer is no, not really. Can you make money with them? Yes. In fact, if you're willing to put A TON of time and effort into it, it might even be reasonably profitable for you. Reasonably profitable being a few hundred dollars a year - still chump change as far as the world of earning money online goes though. Is it worth the hassle? I guess that's up to you decide, but as for my opinion? No, it's not. There are much more lucrative, easier ways to make money online. CashCrate is mostly geared towards people who do a lot of online shopping and want to receive discounts on things that they were going to buy anyway.

So now you've read this whole long-winded article and yet maybe you're still kind of curious about trying to make money using CashCrate for some reason or another. OK - if you haven't already, go search for another review, but this time look for one that has a positive opinion of the site. Maybe try this CashCrate Review (EDITOR: Link is dead, removed), which is honest and balanced. Read it and process all of the information you've just been given. What do you think? Who's telling the truth and who's a dirty, rotten liar? Most importantly - Does it sound like a good deal to you? If so, it probably won't hurt too much for you to try it out for yourself and form your own opinion. Here's a non-referral CashCrate link (Go ahead and check it using the technique I showed you - it's clean) for you to click on if you want to go explore the site. Of course, you're more than welcome to use my referral link at the beginning of this article (EDITOR: Referral link removed. I no longer have a CashCrate account) if you want to (I personally don't care if you do or not - It's mostly just there for reference purposes and as a small experiment. But hey, if you're going to spend your time making someone else a profit anyway, it might as well be me!). If you do decide to join despite everything you've just read, at least you can't complain that no one ever gave you the full story...

- Last updated on May 23, 2013