Stimulus.com Arvostelua 2

This company touts being being a money giveaway company, which already seems a little sus. However, I looked into it more and even joined because I was curious and I found out it came from a sticker vendor , Stickermule. I was curious enough to get on board, I liked the idea of an alternate social media more than the whole gimmicky money giveaway part.

Alright so in order to be eligible for giveaways one must enter some very personal info, which i almost regret letting it get that far. SSN with a picture of photo id, which yeah Im well aware I should of known better. As that risk alone seems barely worth it.

Anyways the 'social media' side is extremely sparse per se. Just a bunch of random posts that all go into a central timeline. Somewhat cool, altho scalability of having more than a thousand or so people with active engagement and that format would be a flying blur.
They eventually added a "follow" and "like" , and similar features. However I just never really felt any of the social features stick, and there are a lot of scams posted in the general thread. I would say some accounts are legitimate, and seem to sponsor their own giveaways (never more than a $100 btw , and is more often a "t-shirt", eg. Come click on my company link and a random winner will receive a free shirt or 10 stickers or 50$ , etc)

The main money giveaways are from the company itself, and I seen them go up to $500. Recently tho its become mostly stickers and t-shirts (which no surprise are all promo from their other company ; Stickermule) .
I saw one that was just a bottle of hpt sauce. So they lured people in with the promise of monetary giveaways. Then started to tone it back and go winning products and usually something like 10 or so and not a design of your choice. Then I noticed something when i started looking into the winner pool, there have been multiple time cash winners.
So I thought - if nothing else - when I joined I might win just a little cash, and entered almost every giveaway for nearly a year (they have multiple weekly). It feels like being strung along with some hollow promise, which is supposed to be the main feature of the site.
Now getting back to the people who "won".
Well interestingly enough before those people won you can look at their earlier posts (before their multiple wins) and see they were all some how related to the company itself. They always were posting as if from some generic template and clearly engaging heavily before winning anything, leading one to wonder why would they invest so much time, energy, attention into something which was a lucky pick of the draw? Short answer it isnt. After this small pool of people won they would post a picture of an envelope with a bunch of 20 dollar bills being sent in the mail (?) Amounting to the denomination that they won (50$ - 500$).
Which putting the pieces together here, not to mention the general weirdness of sending cash thru the mail, I fully believe these people are either employees or inside family members baiting people.

So basically I got involved since the beginning, because I trusted stickermule, a company i purchased awesome stickers from, I thought this might be a cool thing to get involved in and turns out its basically a scam.

I've been scammed here and not because of the company, but because the people they allow to join without regulating. If you are running a social media platform, security measures should be in place to keep users safe before you even launch the site. That should be priority number one. Nope! Not here.Stimulus was pretty cool in the beginning and we would never have to have this conversation if they had stayed at that pace. But low and behold, some genius from the company decided to grow by adding "Influencers and having paid-referral-periods every Monday." So the influencers they chose were bad enough, but what those individuals did to bring people in created pure carnage. Stimulus will pay you $10 for every person you bring to their site and verify. Verify meaning they sign up using a goverment ID. So these 2 or 3 influencer women brought a train load of their followers from Facebook to stimulus under the pretense that stimulus will give you money if you join. To be clear, There are 2 ways to make a few dollars (Not a living unless you are one of these influencers) on Stimulus. The first way is to win one of their giveaways. It is nearly impossible and much like winning the lottery.. But for some reason their winning algorithm favored new people who just joined more than those who had been their since 2022 when they started. The other way to get a few dollars here or there is to refer other people at $10 per verified person. That's tricky because, paid referral periods go quickly. They have a budget of $10,000 to give away per week and the refers take it all very quickly. So it is not in any means a money making site UNLESS you are and influencer who already has hundreds of thousands of followers to refer. Get it? So a few select people make a killing on this site and what hurts the most is they are not clear with their followers on how Stimulus really works, they lie to them to get them to join just so that THEY can pocket the cash. So what follows is a bunch of new people every week asking "Where is my referral link?" "Stimulus is a scam, I didn't win anything." "Where is my money?" OR you will find a group posting outside links to get rich schemes and scams. That is really all he site has turned into. So how did I get scammed on this site? One of the new recruits from this "Famous Influencer" dragged in was posting on Stimulus how she was so down on her luck and just needed $5 gas to get to work if someone can just cashapp her. Well I usually don't help people but $5 to go to work is reasonable, at least she is working I thought. Wrong! After I sent her $5. she continued to send request everyday, from $5-$25. Then other strange request were coming in with crazy amounts all the way up to $730. Of course I didn't reply to any of them, but if you open Stimulus website right now and just scroll through, you will find everything I just discussed and then some. Don't believe me, just do it. See for yourself, because it is still going on. The owners are so casual and non-nonchalant about the situation. They don't enforce their rules or implement added protection, it's just and open mine field. It is HORRIBLE! I joined stimulus in 2022 when it began. It was fun, cool, calm, interesting, it showcased a lot of artist and small businesses. And even though they had giveaways, in all my time there, I never won anything. I didn't care. I enjoyed having a happy place to meet new creatives. It really was a "Happy Social Media" site. I myself, as a creative, had my own giveaways on Stimulus too which I regret, because I should have done it in 2022 or 2023, not in 2024 when this new group emerged that are ONLY concerned about "money and winning." So yes, I was scammed on STIMULUS.COM because they allow users to post cashapp links, they allow people to post outside links, There is no block feature to block people from seeing or contacting you, there is no real report system for people posting inappropriate things, there is no real follow-up to illegal happenings on this site for instance "A user was selling her food stamps on Stimulus." THERE IS NO BACKBONE to this site. It's just, whatever happens happens. I wish it were like it was in 2022, but the powers that be don't respect their users enough to take action. So I cannot recommend this to anyone. Unless you like misery. Stimulus should take all that referral money and donate it to the organization they have there already such as: Fishing from the Heart. Give it to someone who will make good of it and get rid of those "Influencers."