[Please Help!] Blatant TOS Violation by Requester

Hi Everyone,

I am relatively new to mturk and have been lurking on this thread learning as much as I can. So, thank you all for helping me learning the ropes but now I desperately need some advice.

Yesterday, I completed a qualification hit for requester. The qual hit gave the option of providing my email address for the purposes of being added to the requester's mailing list. I regretfully provided my email on the hit.

This morning I received an email from the requester asking me to complete work for them outside the mturk system and stated this would be paid via paypal. I may be a newbie but even I know this is a blatant, unabashed violation of mturk's TOS. Frankly I'm furious that a requester would potentially jeopardize worker accounts in their quest to circumvent the mturk payment system. I don't have a huge number of hits completed, but I've worked hard to get over 1000 hits with a 99.9% approval rating. I would not jeopardize my account for any amount of payment from a requester.

Should I report this to mturk? The answer may seem obvious but I am paranoid about mturk somehow holding me responsible for this or potentially suspending my account for providing my email to the requester. Regardless, I know the takeaway from this is that I will never give an email address when completing hits.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

Yeah you're in a situation where you're 100% correct, but IMO you're better off just accepting the $ and doing the work or ignoring it altogether. If the platform was the one starting with a T it's legit. The owner sucks, yes he's an ash hole for going about worker recruitment the way he does, but he also actually pays for work & generally the work there is usually decently paid.

Totally up to you with what you do, I personally wouldn't report it because other people do rely on it for income but it is what it is. We don't chat about the platform here because the owner has removed people for doing so in the past.

My philosophy on it:

Not my not my

 

Thanks for the quick response! It was a different requester but I will follow your advice nonetheless.

 

Did you also post about it on Reddit? Because if so, I also do work for them and does actually pay.