Four Dollar Click is a Paid To Click website which promises to let its users make money online. Is Four Dollar Click a scam? I certainly think so. I review the site and explain why I believe that it is.
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What Is Four Dollar Click?
Paid to Click (PTC) is a type of website which pays its users to click on advertisements.
PTC sites let their users click on ads to view them. After displaying the ad to the user for a specific length of time, the site credits the user with a small amount of money, and allows the user to click on the next ad to view.
There are many PTC sites on the Internet, some of which are legitimate, so there is nothing unusual about Four Dollar Click in that regard.
How Does Four Dollar Click Work?
Once you have created an account and have logged into the website, you can view the ads listing and start clicking on ads. Most ads have a minimum view time of 25 seconds, and some as much as 90 seconds.
Click on an ad and wait for the required waiting time to elapse. Then click a number at the top of the screen. You will then be credited with $4.
Once you reach a minimum balance of $4000 you can request to withdraw your funds.
You cannot withdraw your funds as a free member, though. You must first buy a membership. The cheapest membership option is the Bronze Monthly, which costs $59.99 a month.
Then, according to their FAQ, you must still wait another 75 business days before you will receive payment.
How Can It Afford To Pay So Much?
The $4 that Four Dollar Click claims to pay per ad click is way more than any of its legitimate PTC peers pay. One of the obvious signs of a scam is that the scam claims to pay much more than the standard in the industry.
In the case of Four Dollar Click, the amount it claims to pay is as much as 40000 times more per click than almost all the other legitimate PTC sites do. On average, a PTC site would pay around $0.001 per click, depending on the type of ad. That’s one tenth of one cent.
Can you see the problem?
The higher than normal reward would be OK if there was a plausible explanation to explain it.
There is no info on Four Dollar Click’s website that explains how they can outdo their competitors by this much. This is a question that all sensible users should be asking. A legitimate PTC business should act pro-actively to allay such concerns, and provide a ready explanation somewhere on their site, but there is none. Scam signal #2.
Where Does The Money Come From?
How do PTC sites make the money they need to pay the users who click their ads? Well, they make it from advertisers who pay to have their ads shown on the PTC website.
So, if Four Dollar Click pays 40000 times more per click than other PTC sites do, it stands to reason that it should be charging its advertisers many times more to display their ads too.
Fortunately, it’s very easy to check this because Four Dollar Click quotes the advertising rates on their website. It seems that they do not charge their advertisers much more than their competitor’s do.
Certainly not 40000 times more. Not even close to that.
As listed on the website, the most expensive ads that an advertiser can buy cost $10 per 1000 ads. That works out to $0.01 per ad. Not too different from what other PTC websites charge for their adverts.
That means that, for every ad that they sell for $0.01, they somehow have to find another $3.99 to pay the $4.00 to the user that clicks on it. But it does not end there.
The Greatest Referral Program
If you buy an upgraded membership, Four Dollar Click also promises that you will earn up to 100% of whatever your referral earns.
This means that Four Dollar Click must pay $4 to your referral, and another $4 to you, for every ad that your referral clicks on. They must pay out a total of $8 for every ad that they only earned $0.01 for.
Is that possible? I think not. Scam signal #3.
Maybe Four Dollar Click offers advertisers other, much more expensive ads, that they don’t list openly on their website for some reason.
Maybe, but why would advertisers pay such a premium to have their ads seen? It’s not as if their ads will be exposed to a larger audience. Each ad is clicked by one person, and one person only. So, if an advertiser buys 1000 ads, they will still only be seen by 1000 people – no more.
And speaking of an audience; for a site that has supposedly been in operation for a number of years, why does it only have 46000 members, as claimed? I imagine that a legitimate PTC site that pays so incredibly well would have many, many more eager members, and hundreds of thousands more people lining up to join.
Those members would also refer as many friends as possible, so that they can benefit from the very generous 25% to 100% referral incentives offered.
To put Four Dollar Click’s membership figure in perspective, compare it to Neobux, which gets that many new members in just 4 or 5 days.
This is the largest and most trusted PTC site, yet it rarely pays much more than $0.01 for a viewed ad. Scam signal #4.
Is it A Ponzi Scheme?
If the revenue from selling advertising cannot cover what it has to pay to its members, then the only other income stream that Four Dollar Click appears to have is the revenue that it earns from paid memberships.
Paying users from the income that it makes from other users, in this way, would make Four Dollar Click a Ponzi scheme, a kind of scam which is illegal in most countries. Scam signal #5.
Even if this was the case, it would need to continuously recruit new users at an incredible rate, in order to maintain payments to its other users. If their claimed membership figure is correct, then this is not happening either.
Excessively Harsh Terms Of Service
In my book, extremely one-sided or harsh Terms of Service (ToS) are a dead give-away when it comes to assessing the legitimacy of a business, especially when there is no apparently rational reason for such harshness.
Let’s take a closer look at Four Dollar Click’s ToS and FAQ.
Four Dollar Click Scam Signal after Scam Signal
First of all, you need to have a balance of at least $4000 before you can request a payout. Why so much when most other PTC sites let you cash out on balances between $2 and $10?
Secondly, you have to buy a membership before you can withdraw your earnings. In other words, you have to pay in order to receive the money that you have already earned. That’s like having to pay your employer before you can receive your wages. Scam signal #6.
Thirdly, you cannot use your own earnings to pay for the membership fee that they impose on you. You have to deposit money. Scam signal #7.
Next, you have to wait up to 75 business days before you can receive your funds. That is around 100 calendar days, or more than 3 months. Most other sites will pay you out within a week, or less.
The reason that Four Dollar Click gives for this rule is that it has to “manually” process each withdrawal request to make sure that you have not breached their terms of service.
To “manually” process anything on a website, where pretty much everything else is fully automated? That must be one of the lamest excuses that we have heard. Scam signal #8.
Scammy – Scammier – Scammiest
But wait – there’s more, as they say in the infomercials. If your account is inactive for just 6 days, you forfeit your earnings. If you don’t login at least once in 5 days, you lose all of your earnings.
That’s it! They provide no reason or justification for this. Is there an easier way to screw over some user who just didn’t take the trouble to read your ToS? What better way to worm yourself out of your obligations than to insert a clause like that into your ToS? Scam signal #9.
Let’s not forget that if you have come this far, have paid for upgraded membership, and are waiting for that wonderful day when your $4000 will finally find its way into you’re eager hands, you had better make sure that your membership stays upgraded.
If it lapses back to free membership at any time during the 3 month-long cash-out process, you forfeit all funds associated with that cash-out, again without any reason. Scam signal #10.
You have to wonder why any PTC business would wish to deal so harshly with its users. After all, without users, the PTC site would have no advertisers, and no business.
A Few Loose Ends …
Four Dollar Click attempts to demonstrate that it is legit by providing what it says are payment proofs. This is supposedly a list of users who they have previously paid. Unfortunately, it is just a list of names. It cannot pass as proof of payment by any stretch of the imagination. Scam signal # – Oh damn, I’ve lost count.
A Google search revealed several complaints about Four Dollar Click. A number of users claim that they never received payment. We also saw comments from people saying that they were satisfied members, and who claimed that they were being paid. They blamed the complainants for not adhering to the sites ToS.
Sadly, there is no way to tell if these are genuine. In our view, it’s likely they came from persons affiliated with Four Dollar Click, to counter all the criticism against the site
Bogus Websites
We found 2 highly suspicious-looking websites which appear to exist for a very specific purpose. They sing the praises of Four Dollar Click, and call out the scam allegations as hoaxes. Both of them are free, WordPress-hosted sites. They contain nothing else except for a small number of pro-Four Dollar Click posts. The articles were posted either anonymously, or under pseudonyms.
Instead of serving to allay our concerns, the existence of these sites merely arouses even greater suspicion. Why would anyone go to all the trouble of setting up whole websites, then posting several posts praising Four Dollar Click?
There are no posts on other topics on either of these websites. If they were setup by genuine Four Dollar Click users, surely they would have had several referral links pointing to the site? After all, the up to 100% referral commissions are very lucrative, so why not try to profit by bringing a few new users to your favorite website? There are none.
In my view, these sites are very poor attempts at creating bogus social proof. Social proof is a kind of reassurance that a site is legit, that potential new users seek from the existing or previous users of a service.
The 2 websites are Four Dollar Click Review and Four Dollar Click Scam. Click on their names if you want to check them out.
Other Similar Websites
There are a number of other sites very similar to Four Dollar Click. They are called Two Dollar Click, Three Dollar Click and Seven Dollar Click. Their ToS, although not identical, are very similar to each other. In some paragraphs, the wording is identical to the Four Dollar Click ToS.
There are other signs that indicate that these sites almost certainly have the same person or persons behind them. None of these other sites appear any less suspicious, and I recommend that you stay away from them too.
Our Verdict
We cannot prove that Four Dollar Click is a scam without becoming working members ourselves. We would have to accumulating earnings then pay around $240 to upgrade and maintain membership for up to 4 months until the payout comes through – or, more likely, does not.
I fail to see how it is remotely possible for the site to generate enough revenue to pay all of its active members at the mentioned rate. There is no information that we could find on the site that allayed our concerns in any way.
In my view, Four Dollar Click has “scam” written all over it. For that reason, I recommend that you stay away from it, as well as all of the other similarly-named sites that I mentioned.
If you want to make a little money by clicking ads, you could try Neobux. It has been around for several years and pays out reliably. Like all PTC sites though, you will be spending a lot of time just to earn pennies.
If you would rather use your valuable time for making real money, even enough to earn a living from, then you should do one of these.
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Thank you for reading this review. If you have had any experience with Four Dollar Click or other similar sites? Why don’t you leave a comment to tell me about it?