06.02.08

Hacking CashCrate.com, the unofficial guide to making the most with CashCrate

Posted in Uncategorized at 10:56 pm by BartonG

Note: By reading further, you acknowledge that I take no responsibility for your actions or use of this information. You have my full permission to distribute this information in any manner you like as long as it is unmodified. It is against the rules of almost all GPT sites to discuss what I’m telling you inside their forums and websites. Violating their terms and agreements can result in permanent bans and denial of funds due to you. I’ve held nothing back and given out all of my personal hacks, tips, and tricks. I’m also not going to lie to you about making a fortune. I make a decent bit of money on the side - but it is far different than finding a stream of income to replace your job. If you’re looking for a legit full-time job income, look elsewhere.

Intro: What are GTP sites?

A while back I was introduced to “Get Paid To” websites - ones where you get paid to do stuff like read emails, register for websites, fill out surveys, commit to a free trial or sign up for newsletters. Basically, GPT websites are middlemen between advertisers and the potential consumers, paying you a cut of their lead-generation revenue. For example, some big ad company might pay $1.00 for a working email address with a full name, and a GPT site like www.CashCrate.com might cut you in for $0.75 when sign up for the ad company’s spam list.

Chances are, you probably have already heard of GPT sites and wondered about their legitimacy as a way to make money online. Yes, many are legit- I deposited a check from one earlier today!- and sooner or later, you’ll probably give in and try them. Unlike many other online money-making ventures, you don’t need to have any skills or initial capital. All you need is time and the internet.

The sad part is that most people who try will never get past the beginner’s part of the learning curve, and will end up wasting their time. Most people will buy into the advertising hype and think that using GPT sites will open some mythical money flood gates of epic proportions into their bank account, then discover such a claim to be untrue and quit. It takes time to get the stream of income flowing, and it’s not going make you rich.

Unless you know how to do it, you won’t make minimum wage for your time. But if you do know how to do it, you can spend a couple of hours a month and make $20-$50 bucks. That’s why I’ve written Hacking CashCrate: the unofficial guide. This guide could be used with any GPT site, but CashCrate is one of the oldest and well established ones.

Tools of the Trade

Before we jump too far in, make sure you have the following free resources.

• Mozilla Firefox
• Pop-up blocker, a Firefox add-on
• 2-4 junk email addresses. You can sign up for free ones at MSN, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.
• A mouse with mouse wheel.
• Roboform, an automatic form filler.
• An account at CashCrate, sign up here

If you get into GPT enough, I’d suggest buying a pro version of Roboform. The real bonus to going pro is that you can add custom fields and tab in identities, which will bother make filling in forms faster and easier. Anyway, they still have a free handy USB data-stick version that you put on your jump drive and use just by plugging it in. For those of you who plan on working GTP at somewhere besides your personal computer, (job, school, etc) it’s a must.

Also, signing up for CashCrate is easy, free and totally safe. Make sure to enter in correct information when creating your CashCrate account, as they’ll send checks with the exact name to the address you provide.

Completing 100% Free Offers

From their website, they suggest the following, which is a pretty solid overview.

Completing Cash Offers

Cash offers are the heart of CashCrate. Follow the steps below to start making money.

1. Click on “Complete Offers” in the Member’s navigation bar.
2. Click on the “Cash Offers” tab in the offers box.
3. Decide which offers you want to show and how you want to sort them. To start off with, we recommend you show the ‘100% Free’ offers and sort by ‘Rating’. These offers are completely free to complete and the easiest offers come up on the top of the stack. Now click ‘Go!’.
4. Choose an offer from the table that appears. Note the description (which tells you how to complete the offer), then click on the offer name.
5. The offer will open in a new window. Complete the offer using truthful information. After you’re finished, close the window.
6. You’re done! The only thing left to do is submit the offer to us so we can credit you. Go back to the offer table and click the ‘Submit’ button to the right of the offer you just completed. The offer will be added to your Pending list and removed from the offers table.
7. Once we confirm the offer (usually within a couple hours), the money will be moved to your monthly earnings and the offer will be put in your Completed offers table.
8. Rinse and Repeat!

That’s pretty nice, but this is HACKING CASHCRATE, isn’t it? There are a lot of little details that make a big difference when fulfilling an offer. We’ll go over these as we go along.

Log on and go to the “Cash Offers” section, but instead of “Highest Rated”, select “100% Free” and sort by “Newest”. We will discuss the trail offers a little later, but for now you should see something like this:

And the list goes on for several pages. There are dozens, if not hundred of available offers. New offers are added almost daily, and many old/defunct ones are removed. I’ll go through a couple to help you get the feel.

Click on an offer with your mouse-wheel to open it up in a new tab. You’d see something like this:

Now you could fill out the form manually, but that would be way too much effort - use the RoboForm form filler button. One click and it will insert all the fields it recognizes with info from your setup RoboForm profile. If there are any left, just input those by hand and submit. It brings me to a page that says something like, “We’ve just sent you a confirmation email. To finish signing up, click on the confirm link in our email.”

Luckily, I already have my junk email address open and look at the inbox. I open their email which says, ” To You recently registered for GlamList using this email address. To complete your registration, please follow the link below …” I click the link and BAM, I’m registered.

Now, I go back to the CashCrate cash offers list click “submit”. I’m done with the offer, and I see that I’ve got $0.50 of pending earnings. Ten minutes later, they confirmed my offer and I’m $0.50 richer. It only took me a 90 seconds of work.

BUT!!! That one was easy. Some are longer, and do a good job at sucking you into their advertising web. They dangle “Get a free ipod” in front of your face and try to get you to complete a ton of “mini-offers” within their main offer. However, you get paid by only completing the offer listed by CashCrate. And no, you will never “win” that ipod.

You see, these companies pay money to CashCrate, and ultimately to you, and they want their advertising bucks to go as far as possible. They make it as difficult as possible to know when you’ve completed the CashCrate portion of their offer. They’ll say all sorts of ridiculous things, but remember they’re advertisers. They lie. For example, in the next offer I’ll walk through, they say “We’ll give you up to $100 dollars to take surveys for us! We’re desperate to find people in your area!” Bull. My job is to wade through their advertising crap as fast as I can to get my payout.

It took me 90 seconds to fill that the first one out, which makes out to be $20/hr, but if it took five minutes to fill out I’d be making $6.00. If I got sucked in and spent 10 minutes I’d be making $3.00/hr. At any point during completion of the offer you notice that you’ve spent 3 minutes, consider bailing out. I know you’ll say to yourself, “But I’m so close …”. Advertisers are good at what they do - be warned.

It takes a little trial and error in finding out how much of the offer you have to complete to get credit but once you get an eye for it, you’ll be able to identify which ones are easy and how far to finish to get credit for completing the offer.

Later, we’ll talk about Sizing up an offer, but let’s complete another offer.

I checked the cash offers list and found one that said, “Paid Surveys Unlimited … Register for free … $0.75″. I clicked to send the offer to a new tab and it looked like this:

I filled it out with RoboForm and submit. Then it brings me to another page …

I manually click “NO” to all the buttons and submit, and I’m brought up to another page …
NOTE: There will be several times when you’ll be required fill out a list like the one above. The fastest way to do this is to use the TAB key to jump from field to field, and then use the space bar to mark the bubble you want. If the list is formatted just right, you can get into a quick rhythm and be done in seconds.

Notice a subtle change in what your seeing. They’ve stopped gathering info for their service and have started to pimp out their advertising partner’s stuff. At this point, you’re probably “qualified for the panel” and, more importantly, probably get the offer confirmed if you went to CashCrate and submitted it. How far to continue is a subject of debate, and if you drop in on the GPT forums you’ll get to hear it.

There were two things I just wanted to point out .

1. You should always look for the “no thanks” or “skip this offer”. For this particular offer, went through a three or four pages saying, “no thanks “, and still got confirmed by CashCrate. Sometimes they try to hide the skip button at the bottom or in the corners.
2. They queue your information up and make it look like you’re supposed to fill it out. Don’t. If an offer says that you need to fill out 2 gold, 3 silver, and 1 platinum offers to qualify for their “free gift” (1 in 63 million chance prize drawing), I think you should abandon ship. You’ll probably have to jump through an infinite number of hoops to “qualify for the panel”. Even though you don’t go all the way through, often you will still get the offer confirmed at CashCrate. Remember, time is money.

Sizing up a 100% free offer

When looking over the cash offers list, you need to evaluate the offers on their difficulty as it relates to their payout. $0.25 extra cents isn’t worth another 15 minutes of your time. Also, not every offer will confirm. If you’ve done the same offer or even a similar offer from the same ad company, they often won’t confirm because they already have your market information. After a couple of sessions, you’ll have seen it all.

Any offer that says, ” Register and confirm your email”, “Create a free account” or “Join and confirm your email” are usually pretty easy, much like the first example I did above.

Offers that say stuff like, “Participate in the survey”, “Enter information with intent to participate”, “Complete the form with accurate information” are usually a step above in difficulty. Also, they are more prone to not confirming because of duplicate entries into the same company’s marketing list.

Do the easiest, highest paying, and most unique offers first.

Sizing up a “Trial Offer” or Credit Card offer

These offers are a little bit of a different beast and if you’re savvy, can be the best money maker in a GPT site because the high work to payout ratios.

Basically, you hack the offers like this - you sign up for a free or low cost trial offer using a prepaid credit card, uphold to the letter every word of the “terms and conditions”, get the CashCrate offer confirmed, and cancel the offer before the regular charges start to apply.

If you try out a service and like it a lot, for example Netflix, go ahead a keep it. That’s why advertisers offer free trials - they know that a favorable percentage of people will either enjoy their service and just keep paying for it or forget to cancel.

Credit Card offers are a little more advanced, so you can always try them later after you get comfortable with the whole thing. I’d suggest you at least take advantage of the easiest and most well known ones like the Blockbuster, Netflix or Napster trial offers. I’ve never had an issue being scammed or hassled, but I still like to buffer my risk by never doing any offers that ask for my social security number and by using prepaid credit/debit cards.

You can get prepaid credit cards different online, at credit union’s and banks, and even at some places like Walmart or Target. Of course you could use your own personal credit/debit cards, but I feel a lot safer with one that can’t cause me to go into debt.

To make sure you follow every term and condition, use Google Calender or Outlook express. You don’t want to make a really good score on a CC offer and then cancel too late.

Remember, on the members forums, discussing cancellation of offers can get you banned - and gripes about problems from individual vendors are removed pretty quickly.

Cash Rewards or Cash Shopping

I think a lot of people look over this area of their GPT sites, but they can be pretty useful. If your going to buy a product anyway, might as well check to see if you can get a kickback by purchasing through a GPT site. CashCrate has a modest list, but some of the best rebates on the net. The have 5% cash back at Wal-Mart, which IMO, is the best. Wal-Mart doesn’t have everything, but I was surprised by them when shopping for video and computer games.

Before you get too excited, make sure you understand all the factors involved. In most cases, you’ll have to pay for shipping which will probably offset the cost savings. If you’re shopping online there’s a good chance you can find whatever you’re buying cheaper some else or better yet - much less if you can stand to go used. If it’s possible, you can try to get a in-store delivery or in-store pick up type of thing, saving the shipping costs. Also, don’t just assume that because you’re buying it online it means you’re getting the best price.

To give you an idea of the retailers you’d get a rebate from, I’ve put CashCrate’s list below. (Treasure Trooper has a more exhaustive list, but a slightly weaker return)

Store Name	Description	Cash Back
Apple iTunes	Purchase and download songs from every artist possible.	5%
Babies R Us	All your baby accessories you need.	7%
Blinds.com	America’s #1 blind store.	5%
CCS.com	Clothing from all the brandname skate comapnies.	5%
Cingular Wireless	Purchase a cellphone or sign-up for a plan.	2%
Disney Shopping	Purchase anything and everything Disney.	5%
Enterprise Rent-A-Car	Reserve your car rental online.	1%
eToys.com	Toys, electronics, games and more!	3%
Flower.com	Order flower bundles.	20%
ICE.com	Save on a wide selection of diamonds, pearls, gemstones and more.	6%
LavaLife.com	Where singles click.	100%
LEGO Store	Find all the rare, classic and new LEGOs possible.	1%
Magazines.com	Over 1,500 magazines to subscribe to.	35%
Match.com	Find singles in your area.	75%
McAfee	Virus and anti-spyware protection.	15%
NFL Shop	Apparel for your favorite NFL team.	10%
Office Depot	All your office supplies and accessories.	1%
OfficeFurniture.com	Premier source for corporate office, small business or home office furniture.	2%
Reebok Store	Sporting goods and team fanfare.	5%
Wal-Mart	Shop Wal-Mart for all your everyday needs.	5%

Referrals

Another little perk is that if you refer people to CashCrate, you get 20% of their earnings. You even get 10% of second tier referral earnings, if you’re lucky or motivated enough to get those. I’ve seen and used a variety of methods to get referrals, but none has been as effective as the direct, personal referral.

Learn the ropes a bit and do a couple of the higher paying credit card offers. Then go to your friend and show them the credit card offers and how they can make $20 bucks in a few minutes. No need to over hype things just tell them the truth. You sign up for these three free trials, the website pays you and then cancel the trial offers.

You can also try to garner new recruits by praising CashCrate on your blog, putting a referral link in your forum signatures or by putting up fliers in your dorms. However, CashCrate bans people who use spam or try to get recruits on their myspace page. There are lots of legit ways to garner new recruits, just be creative.

The Master Flow

Here is my basic routine. I work my CashCrate account two, maybe three times a month for about an hour a session. The sessions go like this:

I go to CashCrate’s cash offers page and sort them by “trial offers” and “newest”.

I look at the Trial Offers to see if any of them are worthwhile, then do those.

I go on, sorting cash offers by “100% free” and “newest”.

I browse them, looking for ones that look unique and aren’t reposts of old offers, then I center mouse-wheel click half of a dozen of the best valued offers into new tabs. Before I start completing them, I click the complete button in the CashCrate members window to make sure I don’t forget.

I go to each tab in my browser and do as much work on the offer as I’m willing to do, then close it and move on. If an offer looks like one I’ve done before, I just click through the first page and stop so I don’t waste time.

After I finish up the first batch, I close any pop-ups that may have appeared and check to see if any offers have already completed.

I do a couple more pages of offers, picking the ones that I know confirm the easiest and most consistently.

After an 40 minutes or so, I stop doing offers.

I look at the my pending offers list, and if any is over a week or two old and not confirmed, I remove it and reset my Roboform email address to be one of my other junk-email addresses.

Assorted Advice

• Generally avoid the Daily surveys - taking a 25 min survey for $0.80 is a rip off to you. You need to do it in less than ten.
• Try to get away with as little as possible - but It’s important that you get paid for the work you’ve done. Make sure you get to the point where you’ll get verified and paid.
• I do offers in waves, some at the begining, middle and end of the month. It seems to be true that if you do too many offers too quickly, they won’t confirm - possibly because it looks like a computer spammer.
• As I’ve said before, If you’ve got the right kind of job you can have your cake and eat it too. Their RoboForm Pro is worth it - it can cut down on filling in form MAJORLY. They have one version that you run from a flash drive, which is super cool. School, work, random coffeehouse, whatever. No place is immune from you making a little extra green.
• I never give out my SSN, nor do offers that allow others to look at my credit score.
• Be selective in the offers you complete - you’ll find that your dollar per hour wage is much better when you cherry pick the easiest or guaranteed confirmation offers.
• If you’re anal, you can keep track of everything - your account passwords etc - in an excell spreadsheet.
• Remember to set up digital reminders so you can cancel your trial offers.
• Use the forums occasionally, looking to see the best confirming offers and useful tips.
• Resist the urge to spend more than 10-15 minutes surfing the forums - time is money!
• Teach your referrals to succeed. Tell them every dirty trick you know and ask them how they work the system. You get a cut of what they make so do everything possible to help them- at least make sure to get them through to their first cash out.
• Send out periodic messages to your referrals to motivate and help them. Tell them which offers have confirmed for you.
• When wading through offers use key board shortcuts to speed things up: Use the mouse wheel to scroll down (or the Page Up/Page Down buttons), click the middle mouse wheel to bring up websites in Firefox tabs, use the tab key to skip to the next field, on lists that require you to check “Yes or No” hitting spacebar will fill in the circle.
• Make to use accurate information when filling out offers- they often data checkers (to see if the address you listed exists and to see if a phone number you may have listed matches your geographical area code, etc.)
• If you notice that a lot of offers aren’t confirming, start using one of your other junk email addresses.
• If you already belong to some other GPT site, the same principles apply just as well to www.cashcrate .com as they do to www.TreasureTrooper.com or www.cashontap.net.
• Also, if you do go sign up with Treasure Trooper - I always pick the same bonus box to get the most pearls possible ~ 1 for every 3 offers.
• If you have any questions, I’d be happy to try to answer them.
• Enjoy!

- Bart

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