Amazon Mechanical Turk Reviews 76

I have been a customer of Amazon and an approved member of their Associates program for several years now which means that I have been carefully vetted by their team.

I recently applied for a New Worker Account with Amazon Mechanical Turk and after several days received a notice of rejection. The notice I received was this:

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Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,
We have completed our review of your Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker Account. We regret to inform you that you will not be permitted to work on Mechanical Turk.

Our account review criteria are proprietary and we cannot disclose the reason why an invitation to complete registration has been denied. If our criteria for invitation changes, you may be invited to complete registration in the future.

Thank you for your interest in Mechanical Turk.
Sincerely,
Amazon Mechanical Turk

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As you can imagine I was very disappointed by their response and reached out to them to try and understand what the problem may be. I was told that accounts are accepted based on marketplace needs and then they fell back on their policies which are stated above.

There is no direct email to contact them and no phone number in which to call them. Even after calling Amazons home office, they are unable to connect you to Amazon Mechanical Turk. There is no direct line to connect to. This blew my mind. Could this possible be the same company. Amazon which epitomizes customer service in the marketplace and values relationships above everything else treating their customers like they are worth less than nothing. Not even willing to speak with us. The only avenue of communication is a 1000 character form on their web site. Even the Amazon team from Amazon Associates who were kind enough to write a letter on my behalf were forced to use this form to contact them. Truly unbelievable and disappointing.

I decided to let things go and accept that they simply did not need any new accounts which I suppose is possible. I then realized that there are dozens of new videos on Youtube popping up every day from people who were just accepted from MTurk and already posting about it. The evidence seems to prove that I have been lied to.

I am typically understanding about most things but this experience has permanently scarred my relationship with Amazon as a whole. I have already contacted the corporate offices in order to verify the procedure to file written formal complaints. If some resolution does not come from this, I may take further steps as well.

Needless to say. Please learn from my experience. This is clearly not a fair and honest organization. I am shocked that they can put the name Amazon in front of their name and I have decided that I will do everything in my power to make others aware of their business practices. More than anything, I want their corporate office to realize the impact to their customer base when Mturk responds to them in this manner.

I hope that this review will at least help some of you to make more informed decisions whatever they may be. I wish you the very best.

FYI:
I am born and raised in the United States.
(I know international applications have had challenges as well so I wanted to clarify that. It is not just you!)

Mturk can be a fantastic way to earn extra money. It can also be a frustrating, demeaning experience. My best advice would be to seek out other workers on forums, facebook, IRC, anywhere you can find them. Get advice. Lots of it. Use add-ons and scripts and protect yourself from the scammers.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is great if you shop on Amazon lots and want to earn money towards your purchases. You really need to be careful though because there are requesters that will reject your work so they get work done for free. There are also lots of scams on there too.

My suggestion: Install Turkopticon and make sure you read reviews before doing work on Mturk.