JMH Techtronics &#187; ChaCha

II.

New ChaCha Front Page “Enhancements” Scam

III.

IV. Pay Me Now Fees Scam

V. Working for Free and Deactivations

VI.

When you get paid to work by the hour, and are punched in, the duties you are asked to do aren’t for free. At ChaCha you don’t get paid by the hour, but only when you are actually in a Live Search with an infoseeker. So if you are not in a search with an actual infoseeker you will not be getting paid.

Adding to the previous point from the article ChaCha New Front Page “Enhancements” Scam I want to give you an idea of what I am talking about here. The guide application is set up so that the results you display to infoseekers must be categorized so that they can be put into the search database. Whether or not this categorization is accurate or not is really of little importance to this discussion, and that can be argued by those that actually want to debate how good ChaCha is as a place to search for answers.

Now recently live guides have been asked to do a bit of overtime. It isn’t required, but certainly encouraged. When a session with an infoseeker ends, guides are asked to optimize the results that they have given to the infoseeker. This means that they can go in and re-categorize and make sure that they have the best results possible for the ChaCha database. Now the concept is great actually for ChaCha and ultimately the database. Of course guides don’t actually get paid to do this. This is just extra work they can do out of the kindness of their hearts. Since I mentioned int he last section that the consensus is that guides may be phased out eventually to a much smaller role this is something else that most would argue contributes to that. Not only are guides working for free, but they are also adding to a database that is trying to become its own stand alone search database that will work with out live guides.

Besides this request, how many of you guides have been in a search, and subsequently found the application locking up and then taking your pay away? This happened to me all the time. A few pennies here and a few pennies there adds up when you only make pennies doing this low-end money maker. ChaCha says they will pay you if you take the time to pull all th info related to the search, time, etc. and submit it to them. Seriously this is for about 20 cents in most cases so not many are going to do it. Then you would have to wait for weeks to even get a response on it if you did.

I never really checked this from search to search when I did it because I just assumed that their software worked reasonably well enough to keep track of it. Looking at your earnings page after every search shouldn’t be something you had to do. So one day I decided to look at my hours and do the math. What I came to find out is that almost 1/3 of my time was free. This wasn’t going over the time limit time either. At that time the time limit was 20 minutes so it never occurred, but maybe once in a blue moon. I contacted ChaCha with my question on why my pay was not being credited. They had the nerve to ask me to go through my entire earnings history and track down every single instance of when I may or may not have been paid when they would likely have access to much more detailed reports on my account. Can you believe this? At this point I would have had hundreds of pages to go through between trainings and real searches to find all these instances. I responded by telling them that I did not have time to go through such a scavenger hunt and that my stats clearly showed I did the work. All they had to do was look at it and see themselves. Suffice to say I never got a response after 3 more inquiries and never got paid either.

ChaCha Guide Deactivations

There are quite a few stories going around about ChaCha Guide Deactivations. Most are deserved and the guides will not argue the fact in these cases. What they do argue is that they were not compensated for any of the money left in their accounts after they were terminated even though they performed the work. This is why the ChaCha’s Pay Me Now Scam is such an issue. Guides are afraid to keep their earnings in their accounts for fear of a possible deactivation with out warning. They pull their earnings more often than they would want to, and therefore incurring a $2 fee that goes to ChaCha every time they do.

Just the story of guides not being paid when deactivated being out there forces many to use that Pay Me Now button more than they would like. They don’t trust ChaCha. Many fear they will be deactivated for silly reasons, and frankly there are those that have been. They may get locked out and have to go through a process of e-mailing, or even talking to the HQ to get the situation taken care of. This could take days and even weeks.

Then when guides are deactivated they are looking to get the money that was in their accounts. Most of the time the guide was deactivated for one instance. One search where they got flippy with an infoseeker, or just were having a bad day and got reported by a prankster. This may have been 20 cents they earned in that search, but ChaCha may be holding a couple hundred dollars they earned previously and only if you contact them and complain will you ever get that money back.

Take a look at this story from a guide who was deactivated and owed $441.80 that he had left in his account here.

Interesting read on his struggles with the deactivation as well as the timeline for him ever getting his money that he was owed.

ChaCha’s “Guide Agreement” is so vague that anyone who reads it should understand that it is so lopsided to favor the rights of ChaCha that you may think you are reading a work of fiction. They do nothing to make anyone think they will not be gouged out of their account money anywhere if they happen to be deactivated so they again have that nice little scam going for them to help add to that Pay Me Now Fees Scam. Everywhere you look with ChaCha they are looking to squeeze the guides out of some cash using fear tactics, and just plain lying.

What a great company. You RahRahs should be ashamed of yourselves for coming here and trying to justify how this company is run. Beta my ass. This is something that sounds better served for the Indiana Labor Board than talking about how “It’s still in Beta”.

Work at home opportunities better than ChaCha:

ChaCha Pay Lies and Scams: Pay Me Now Fees Scam

JMH — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 19:30:48 +0000

Table of Contents:

II.

New ChaCha Front Page “Enhancements” Scam

III.

IV. Pay Me Now Fees Scam

VI.

This is one of the biggest ChaCha scams there is. This little scam charges each live guide a $2 fee EVERY time they want to have their money transferred to their online bank account. Now I know what you are going to say. “Companies do this all the time.” Sure some do, but not many. Most times something that has no human interaction necessary to make a transaction is free. The only time someone PAYS to GET PAID in most circumstances is when they actually want a check sent to them directly.

To get your money transferred and paying $2 is enough to anger most people, but the bank that they have to transfer the money to? First Internet Bank of Indiana. Why is that important? Well for one thing the man who is responsible for bringing you the live guide, social search engine, known as ChaCha, Scott Jones is also on the board of the First Internet Bank of Indiana. Has anyone ever heard of conflict of interest? I hope so because this one is slapping you in the face right about now.

But wait. There’s more. This is simply the best part and one of the biggest lies of the whole thing. This makes the scam brilliant. Who gets that $2?

This is a quote from Justin Keller on the WAHM.com forums under the name of ChaCha Insider. Justin is basically a ChaCha public relations/guide care employee of ChaCha and before ChaCha actually made an internal forum he used to post regularly on the board at WAHM. Thank you to the good people at Bored Reader for preserving this quote for posterity before it was purged:

It only costs $2 to transfer the money from your
page on the ChaCha underground to the card.

That $2 isn’t for our profit, that’s just a
transaction fee, like using the ATM.

From the Live Guide Agreement:

ChaCha anticipates that the payment processing fee will be $2.00 (half of which shall be paid to the financial institution and the other half shall be paid to ChaCha), and this amount is subject to change at any time, in ChaCha’s sole discretion.

As you can see a bit of misinformation seems to make everything alright as usual by ChaCha and its employees. If you were to contact the First Bank of Indiana they would tell you flat out that they do NOT charge ChaCha to make this transaction. So the brilliant people at ChaCha have found just another way to purge their live guides out of some of their hard earned money.

Why it is so lethal to the live guide’s pay is that most of the people doing ChaCha really need this money. ChaCha was advertised to work at home mothers and college students for the most part. Mothers use this money to pay some bills and take the money out often because they need it. Maybe as much as every few days. It isn’t uncommon to see that many of these guides take their money out every $20 or so because of the fear that if they get fired they won’t get any of it back. You see when a guide gets deactivated it is standard that the money they have in that account before transferring it to the bank will never be paid to them. This is a completely different story altogether and I don’t have time for it here, but I promise I will write more about it in the coming weeks.

Is this illegal? Certainly not. Is it another slap in the face for guides? Yes it is. Just another in a long line of ChaCha scams that is designed to make the guides less money and add to the profits of Chacha. Do you believe that ChaCha wants to take care of those that are the face of the company? What are your thoughts on this fee?

Work at home opportunities better than ChaCha:

ChaCha Pay Lies and Scams: New Front Page

JMH — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:10:06 +0000

Table of Contents:

II.

III. New ChaCha Front Page “Enhancements” Scam

IV.

Pay Me Now Fees Scam

VI.

ChaCha is a live guide powered search database. Guides work for less than minimum wage online and find information for people too lazy to look for themselves, or entertain pranksters who have nothing else to do.

This is the page where searchers start out at. The ChaCha home page. It used to be that when an searcher (infoseeker as ChaCha calls them) came to that page they had the option of doing a regular search, or search with a Live Guide right away. Considering that ChaCha is promoted as a Live Guide search engine you would assume that it would be best to keep the home page just as it was. Apparently ChaCha saw some opportunity to give guides less money though by using the complaints about ChaCha Pranksters to make some changes.

Now if you are to go to the home search page they have taken the Live Guide button completely away. Now you must do a regular search even before you have the option of using a Live Guide. This isn’t something new. They tried this before. It’s one of their better pay scams.

Supposing you are an infoseeker and you come to ChaCha to find some information you have to do a normal search first. Since the database that ChaCha has put together for any particular search turns up the worst results on the internet for any search engine you would most likely find nothing of use. So why exactly would you even bother then? Google actually gives you relevant results. You just wasted your time with this whole thing if you decided that you were going to try ChaCha.

How does this effect live guides? This is a very simple answer. With that button gone on the first page they get less live searches, and in turn aren’t able to make as much money while they are sitting at their computers waiting for searches. Even the most supportive guides of Chacha can see that this is really taking their chance to make money away.

ChaCha though has tried to use the psychology of words to announce this to guides. Since so many complain about ChaCha Pranksters, ChaCha is telling the live guides that this front page “Enhancement” has been done simply to limit them from getting through. These live guides are supposed to believe that this is going to be a benefit to them. They will get less pranksters. I’m sure most of you reading this have enough common sense to understand that this will have completely the opposite effect. ChaCha Pranksters aren’t there to find information. They are there to cause trouble. Having to enter something that gets around whatever system they have in place to stop them from getting in is what they do. This doesn’t deter pranksters. This deters people that actually want to use a live guide for legitimate reasons and in turn lowers the number of searches that guides come upon in a given day.

It didn’t take most very long to figure out what ChaCha is doing here. It didn’t take them long to see the decrease in searches either. The consensus is that ChaCha is trying to phase them out. ChaCha had them build this “social search engine” and fill the database with results and eventually they will no longer need the guides. This is how it looks to guides, and how it would look to most other observers of the situation. It is called the “People Powered Search”. Apparently that means people are filling up the database for them now, and not actually helping infoseekers in chat sessions.

Guides have been filling the system with results for months. All these results were gathered from various other search engines. ChaCha is not a search engine by definition. They don’t scour the web and index information themselves like the others do. The guides actually put the results into the system by hand. Was this Chacha’s plan all along? Get the database filled by what essentially are Beta Testers to a point that it is partially accurate and up to date and then phase out a large group of the guide population?

Work at home opportunities better than ChaCha:

ChaCha Pay Lies and Scams: Press Releases and Articles

JMH — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 16:00:10 +0000

Table of Contents:

New Front Page “Enhancements” Scam

II. Press Releases and Articles

III.

IV.

Pay Me Now Fees Scam

VI.

The more I dug around about the pay lies in the press the more I seemed to find. So what you are going to read are articles posted around the web about ChaCha by reputable news sources. Before you begin reading this section it is important to point out some information about what guides actually do get paid.

ChaCha live guides are supposed to make anywhere from $5-10 PER SEARCH HOUR. What that means is they get paid while they are in a search by the hour, not per search. Guides are limited to 6 minutes of paid search time so the most they could get from one search is 50 cents unless they are on an Elite level which pays double. If you can find me a guide that actually gets paid on the Elite level all day I’d be interested to know.

Just keep all this in mind while you look at the quotes from the articles below and see if you notice any kind of trend.

This one here I let slide for a while as it was an obvious mistake on the part of an NBC affiliate. I expected to see some sort of retraction to the article and video (video will auto-play so be forewarned) on this story by now from NBC, or at the very least a press release by ChaCha that corrected the obvious flaws. I’d like to thank the author of Ex ChaCha Guide and Are these results sufficient??? for giving me these links.

This is the biggest lie, misinterpretation, fraudulent claim, whatever you call it that has gotten my attention:

You’re probably wondering what does Sharae get from your search. She gets paid. 10 bucks each time.

“42 searches last night alone.”

That’s more than 400 bucks. And it all goes to her Cha Cha debit card that she can use when she finally gets off of the computer.

If you were reading that you would probably be ready to quit your job and work 16 hour days doing Chacha if you had no clue about what they actually get paid. Sorry to burst your bubble, but that isn’t even close to being true. I already told you that live guides make $5-10 per search hour at the beginning of this post, but if you just happened to be reading that article elsewhere you would have no idea. That’s a far cry from $10 per search.

This article has been in syndication now for almost 2 weeks and it is still there. This isn’t some blog reporting this like me. This is an NBC affiliate. THE NBC. The National Broadcasting Company which has unlimited resources compared to what a lowly blogger like me has. Every ChaCha hater, and lover has read this piece or seen the video. Complaints must have been pouring in, but obviously something as completely fraudulent as these claims must not be such a high priority for one of the biggest news services in the world to correct.

After reading this article I asked some people at the BoredReader if they could help me with locating more ChaCha sponsored articles that make claims similar to this. I was immediately directed to the website of ChaCha founder, Scott A. Jones ego site here.

Upon landing at his page I was amazed at the amount of times the pay has been reported in a misleading way. Keep in mind that these article are all linked to and copied to the website of Scott Jones. ChaCha is his company and these articles are linked on his site with the misinformation. These aren’t just recent articles either. It seems as if Mr. Jones has been letting the lies about pay spread for some time.

Check out the quote in this one from back in December:

ChaCha’s service is free to users because it’s advertiser-supported. But the guides are paid $5 or $10 a search to ensure quality control. Many guides are parents who work from home. Others, including Jonathan Cline of Indianapolis, are on their way to, or already in, college.

That article is still on Jones site , but the original source has taken it down. It is available in the Chicago Tribune here still.

This quote is from February in an article from Technology Review here, but also linked on Jone’s website:

But the site’s real calling card is its collection of 29,000 human guides, who earn $5 to $10 per hour working with users in live chat sessions to locate the Web’s best answers to their queries.

This is technically true about the pay, but not entirely true. If is $5-10 PER SEARCH HOUR. Not per hour. Again they are letting it sound like guides get paid to just sit there even if they are not in a search.

Let’s talk about that number of guides. I can’t substantiate this with actual guide numbers, but one thing is certain. There are not that many active guides on ChaCha. I can’t give you numbers to say one way, or another, but if you take a look at that number of 29,000 and assume that there are that many guides working regularly you would be seriously mistaken.

You see ChaCha has always had a policy about how inactive guides would be deactivated after 30 days of inactivity. This is great information to give to potential advertisers and a great selling point when they make the claims of having 29,000 guides. As an advertiser you would assume that there really are that many active guides, and that they have been active in the last 30 days. This is completely false.

When I was a live guide there weren’t quite this many members, but I can tell you that the vast majority of those that were listed as active guides were in fact inactive. Like I said I cannot give hard numbers on this, but it has been observed by myself and many other guides so I can only speculate from experience and by looking through the guide community on a regular basis.

I asked to be deactivated by ChaCha from being a live guide 4 times. Yes 4 times by sending in an e-mail to Chacha. Not once did I ever receive a response. This was well over 2 months since I had done a live search. I was in the system as active even though I had not done a search for over 2 months. That’s 1 inactive guide being counted.

ChaCha allows the guides to invite new guides into the system and pays the sponsor 10% of what they make. To give you an idea of how inflated their guide numbers are I had 17 people in my network. Of those 17 people, only 6 of them ever did more than 10 searches as a guide. 8 of them never even did one search. To this day, only 1 of them actually still searches at all. Every one of those people are listed as active guides. Including myself, and my network, that is 16 people that have not done a search in over 30 days. All still counted as active by ChaCha.

In fact anyone can see who has an active status as a guide on Chacha. Simply go to the Underground. You can also see the last time that individual did a search as well. They have a place to look at every guide in the system, see who is in their network, as well as see what their last 5 searches were. It won’t take you long to discover that there are an amazing amount of guides that are listed as active, yet haven’t done a search in months, or never at all. I’m sure guides love the fact that this site is out there for all the pranksters to browse.

Still at it, but not as obviously fraudulent as they have been in the past:

ChaCha is trying to solve that problem by paying “guides” up to $10/hour to retrieve information,

That article can be found here.

These next 2 quotes are from a recent article posted on CNN.com Just 2 weeks ago:

They’re paid up to $10 an hour, depending on how users rank the quality of their efforts.

Now this is technically true, but it is worded in a way that makes a reader think they are simply paid by the hour, and not per search hour. It isn’t implied that they are paid per search hour here, just by the hour. Considering that this is a business article about the investment that is ChaCha it would make more sense to point out that fact.

From the same article you can see what Scott Jones thinks about the people that are ultimately the backbone of this social search engine:

Jones says callers will be on hold for 15 to 30 seconds waiting for their results, making that a great time to throw targeted voice ads at them. Toss in the ads that online searchers see, and Jones thinks he can make $12 million next year, while paying his guides no more than 20 percent of revenue.

This article can be read in full here.

This is how ChaCha is portrayed in the press. These releases are all over the place. They are on the website of ChaCha founder Scott Jones. Articles with lies and misinformation about Chacha pay are a recurring theme. So when I wondered how the NBC story could let that information slide for so long, I couldn’t even imagine that the founder of ChaCha would actually link these articles on his own website. He is promoting the lies that are out there. No disclaimer, nor any sort of correction to the claims made in the articles that are obviously false.

You could literally find these articles everywhere. One of my favorite claims however, is this one:

For example, say you’re a college student who has been spending all day at the library studying and have become very hungry. He/she could spend their last hour at the library as a Guide for ChaCha earning pizza money, and order a pizza on their way home using their earnings. It’s that quick. Instant cash anytime you want.

That ladies and gentlemen is on the Chacha Blog! Right here. Unless you can get frozen pizzas delivered to your house there isn’t much chance that you can earn enough money in an hour at ChaCha to pay for a pizza, much less a tip for the delivery person.

The truth isn’t pretty so apparently ChaCha decided to promote lies to get guides to join their network. It has been noted already that there are a very large amount of guides that get into the system and simply quit after a few searches. You have to wonder how many of these people read these articles and thought that they were going to be making some serious money with Chacha. The inactive guides scattered all over the Underground are still sitting there as active with little to no searches. Most haven’t done any in months which says a lot about the live guide experience. ChaCha isn’t what they say they are, and they promote lies on their very own sites to con guides into working for them just so that they can create inflated guide numbers.

Work at home opportunities better than ChaCha:

ChaCha Guide Pay Lies and Scams

JMH — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:58:02 +0000

The majority of people that have responded to my other article about ChaCha Pranksters as well as those that commented on the article at TechCrunch that linked to it, have looked at ChaCha from the technology standpoint more than anything. Most observe that they don’t think the service is all that viable, while ChaCha supporters tend to keep telling me that it is in Beta and it will get better.

I’m really not interested in any of that. The service itself is what it is. What I’m more interested in is how the policies are implemented, and the live guides that are the face of ChaCha. Although this is a tech blog I feel the need to point out that there is some sort of humanitarian cause that needs to be addressed here. There actually are people behind all of these things. Namely the live guides that run this so-called social search engine.

While writing this I came to the conclusion that there were so many things that needed to be addressed it couldn’t possibly be done in one post. So this post is going to be like a virtual Table of Contents. It will link to all the related stories here so that you can easily get to each and read one section at a time. Being as the attention span of most is rather limited it should be easier to read this way than by trying to limit everything to one post.

So let me get straight to the point and tell you about some of the lies and scams that myself, and many others have witnessed in the short time that ChaCha has been around. I expect plenty of RahRahs to come in and tell me that I made this stuff up and that it is not true. Nothing here is inaccurate. You can’t make this stuff up.

Table of Contents:

I. Introduction

II.

New Front Page “Enhancements” Scam

III.

IV.

Pay Me Now Fees Scam

VI.

I would like to thank the following people who have helped contribute to this series in some way:

Owners of BoredReader and World Wide Web Design for allowing me to speak with members of the ex-guide community with out getting watered down information. Also, for several related quotes that appear in the various articles.

ChaChaSucks.com for spreading truth.

Dailey|Arts, Ex ChaCha Guide, and Are these results sufficient??? for helping with research and links.

Work at home opportunities better than ChaCha: