When someone offers you $10 For Nothing, it is understandable for you to consider that there might be a 'catch' involved. In the case of Authorship.com's recent 'funding' process that yielded them $4 million of investment - the catch appears to be that they can just completely reverse their offer and give you nothing and then not speak to you!
I recently shared a link to an offer from a new startup that is attempting to revolutionise the Publishing industry. They offered $10 for everyone who registered with them and an additional $10 for each referral that users brought to them. I brought about 7 new users to them via my posting of their links on social media, so according to their offer they owe may about $80USD. They stated that this would be paid on the 14th September.
I was already seeing the red flags when they stated that on the 13th they had received major DDOS attacks against their servers and that (paraphrasing) they would "Not extend the funding period to make up for the lack of connectivity because it would make them look bad". The red flag for me came up because their logic is the total opposite of what I would have thought, since they were placing their perceived 'image' ahead of the desires of the potential investors who sought to benefit from the offer that they had put forward.
A lack of intelligence and integrity?
I checked the Ethereum wallet that I had registered with them and it was empty. I checked their website and it said that the payments were in process. Then I received an email informing me that they had encountered numerous technical problems in using the ETH network to make the payments and had given up - so most of the referral commissions would simply not be paid! They literally just decided to tell 1000s of people that they were giving them the finger because of their own technical ineptitude! Is that really the way to launch a successful business that is attempting to promote itself as having the moral high ground as compared to traditional publishing companies?
They did, though, offer a $100 voucher for books from their service once it launches - which might sound like an acceptable alternative, except that there is no guarantee that the service will ever actually launch or have any books that I or anyone else actually wants or needs.
Next up, they sent out another email saying that - yes, they WILL pay out all of the tokens for referrals after all... They had found that there were (predictably) numerous scammers attempting to get large amounts of tokens from them by using fake referral accounts and so they were employing some strict rules to limit how many tokens were paid out. They claimed that a high percentage of applicants had given incorrect wallet addresses and/or registered from IPs that were also used to register numerous other applications. They stated that only applicants from an IP address that had had 3 or less applications from it would be paid.
After all of this, I still felt I should be paid from them, since I am the only applicant from my IP address, I didn't scam them and have done nothing wrong... But, I got nothing at all!
Worse than getting nothing at all, they state that they will not respond to any enquiries about an absence of payment!
This reminds me of the BBC TV series 'Watchdog' which would keep track of dodgy offers and con artists - exposing their twists and turns as they made offers and then used every trick in the book to not come through on them.
Apologies if you used my link
Just know that I also received nothing from them and am very unlikely to be putting any of my own publications through them as I was thinking I might one day do.
Did anyone here actually get paid from them?
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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