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Brian Benenhaley, chief operating officer at SubscriberBase, of Columbia, S.C., which owns Consumer Research, said when the company receives a complaint, it is typically because a person has not familiarized themselves with the requirements before signing up.
"It's not for everybody," he said, adding that consumers do have to spend money to participate. "The question the user has to answer is: do they think the service they're paying for is worth it?"
Citing competitive reasons, Mr. Benenhaley declined to discuss how many members SubscriberBase had and what rewards it had given out. Although he said he would ask satisfied participants to discuss the program, no contacts were provided.
Some consumers found through Internet sources did not have kind words for Consumer Research.
Stephen Paquin of Charlton, Mass., said he had been attracted to ProductTestPanel.com, a Consumer Research site offering him a camera valued at $1,299 if he volunteered to be a product tester. Mr. Paquin said he signed up for several offerings on the site, but was unable to complete the process because the site stopped working. Although he went back to the site, he was unable to pick up where he had left off in the ordering process.
Susan Grant, director of the National Fraud Information Center, a project of the National Consumers League, said "free" offers on the Internet should be examined closely for underlying costs. Typically, a business will need to cover the amount of the prize and such offers will be followed by an onslaught of solicitations. "I don't think a lot of people would really stop to think about the implications," she said.
John Morgan, 51, owner of a truck brokerage service in Columbia, S.C., said the onslaught of e-mail messages that he had received after filling out forms related to a Consumer Research offering overwhelmed the computer he used to run his business.
RANDOM spam filled the in-box he relies on for orders, and legitimate e-mail messages got lost, he said. The situation worsened when he tried to use the "unsubscribe" option on a spam note. He said his computer locked up, and after it was restarted, files began opening 50 to 60 times in row and the computer ran at a crawl.
Although ultimately the company assisted him in efforts to eradicate the spam, he said, it has remained a problem. "Once it gets put into all these systems, there's nothing on God's green earth that will stop it," he said.