This is a bit of a different review although still kind of fits under games, though in this case it leans towards mobile games. It’s a strange topic for me because I’m not generally much for mobile games, but it’s something I’ve turned to heavily over the past few weeks.
Long story short, I’ve been dealing with some heavy grief over saying goodbye to my dog and I’ve not had the interest or focus in doing much of anything. Cue mindless mobile games that I could turn my brain off and pass the time which helped scrub the last image of my boy after saying goodbye which was haunting me at every moment.
I’ll be honest and say I genuinely don’t even remember how I got into them, but I became aware of these apps/sites that pay for playing mobile games and doing surveys (I’m assuming I saw an ad but the haze that is my memory recently means I can’t say this with complete confidence). So I started trying out various of these apps/sites to see if I could make a little extra money potentially in my sudden hyper fixation. Who couldn’t use a little extra money in this current economy? If nothing else, I thought it would be the perfect way to make some money to help pay for the little mementos you can get for your animals through vets on their passing. I’ve tried quite a lot. Most of the ones I’ve tried have even been genuine, paying out money even if tiny little scraps that take a lot of time and effort to get to.
I thought I had found my favourite one yet, a site called Freecash which had a number of games I was actually enjoying and seemed to have the best potential payouts to boot. To clarify, I only stuck with games I genuinely ended up enjoying because I do not have the attention to play something I hate. This is also the reason I ended up giving up on some of them because of lack of variety and the largest monetary boosting goals coming from playing specific games for specific amounts of play through (ie. Levels). Freecash works with a systems where you have certain goals to strive for and generally a time period in which to do it before it either goes away or the payout drops significantly. They heavily emphasize paying to play which probably should have been my first sign.
Cue to weeks into using this site and building up a pretty decent balance. With all of my pending payouts (they hold the money for anything over a few cents for I believe a week before you can actually withdraw it) I had built my account up to around $200. I was feeling pretty good about this, though still trying to be cautious about considering it as mine because I haven’t dealt with these kinds of sites before and I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And just when I thought I could throw caution to the winds and was counting down the time to taking my first payout, it did.
Another clarification, I was waiting for a bigger balance to even withdraw for the first time because the fees they take from your payouts are kind of insane. Another sign I should have taken for what it is. The bigger the payouts you take, the smaller percentage of fees they take from you, so in the interest of getting as much as the money in my pocket as possible, I was waiting. In retrospect the is probably a big red flag because what do you mean you need to take fees off of gift cards and PayPal payouts? I’m aware PayPal does take fees in some cases but having both bought and sold through PayPal I know it’s a very small sum, I’ve never had it be more than a few bucks on even hundred plus dollar amounts. These guys are taking much more than that in their so called fees.
Anyway to get back on track, the shoe dropped when I made my first significant earnings from a game and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Instead of mere cents as is generally the case for meeting goals, I made a double digits goal and all of a sudden this site completely turned on me. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is when they suddenly froze my account and claimed that I was using third party hacking type devices to cheat the game. I’m sorry what? I have no idea what it is they were claiming I was using, so I can’t provide any details to elaborate on this, but suffice it to say I was not using anything to cheat any games, nor do I even know how to. I’m also not sure if this is something you can actually do on your phone or if you need a computer for it, but I can say I don’t even have a computer. I possibly shouldn’t admit this but ya girl isn’t technology smart enough to know about these things or how to use them so I’m not sure what it is. I’m more of a “uses it to Google and/or search things on the internet” than a hacker pro. What I was doing? Investing an actually embarrassing amount of time into these games. Why? Because it’s the only thing I could get my brain to do and I sure as heck haven’t been able to sleep with the stress and sadness of both the impending loss of my little boy, and actually losing him. What I have been is inconsolable and trying to cope with that loss. So apparently that was a hyper fixation on mobile games that my brain chose for coping. The game in question that I believe they were accusing me of fixing the results on or whatever, was a game that is extremely generous in giving freebies to players. (I can and will hype up Dice Dreams because I have been addicted to it and enjoyed it immensely while my brain has checked out). Not only is it easy to get lots of freebies generally playing the game, between milestones that give extras, hourly regeneration of dice, multipliers that give you back tons of items when you roll something good, but it also has this daily ability to watch ads that give various free items. And you can go through this little tree chain of videos multiple times a day with each reward getting better and better. It’s a generous as heck game and I was plenty motivated to keep playing because I enjoyed the game and also wanted to keep my brain busy, so watching these videos did not bother me in the slightest.
Now, I am making assumptions in assuming this is the game in question they were accusing me of hacking. Why don’t I know for sure? Because their customer service is an absolute joke. They have a live service and email. I reached out to both multiple times to demand answers on why they were freezing my account permanently to never be able to withdraw and literally got the same copy and paste word for word AI-like response every time. Supposedly these are real people but the jury is still out as far as I’m concerned because they never gave unique responses and literally would respond once and I would never hear back a second time despite asking for answers and evidence. I felt pretty confident they couldn’t provide evidence because I wasn’t doing what they were accusing me of, and lo and behold, they refused to provide any evidence showing my supposed wrongdoing. You know why? Because it doesn’t exist, they’re just a scam company coming up with excuses not to pay people who make actual significant milestone amounts.
I do think it’s a pretty good assumption because they froze my account right after asking me to provide receipts showing payments made in said game and when I responded that I hadn’t bought anything, they immediately said I was cut off for life essentially. I think this is significant in retrospect because, as I said before, they seem to heavily emphasize paying to play what with actually having this stated with the “quests” or milestones to hit to receive payout. My guess in hindsight is that they get much bigger payouts from the companies themselves if they influence their players to spend money in the game successfully, and when they realized I was just playing normally, for free, they didn’t want to have to pay out these two bigger sums of money because they didn’t benefit as much from someone else go wasn’t spending money in the game. Jokes on them because I just have no life and wasn’t sleeping so I was just investing disgusting amounts of time into this. (Yikes). But again, this game is so generous to the players so I just had various methods of getting freebies that allowed me to keep playing and advance through levels at a decent pace.
Despite being leery of trusting these sites as legit (point proven through this scammy company) I was fuming that they just choose to make up their own narrative when actually paying people more than a few cents comes into play, so I was trying to fight this and get any response so I could prove my innocence, demanding someone who would actually respond and help (didn’t happen, as I said they were one and done responses with zero help provided) and so I’m writing this review of my experience so others don’t fall scam to Freecash like I did and waste valuable amounts of time thinking they’ll make a bit of extra money. They’ll just find a way to accuse you of doing something illegal and unfortunately there are no consequences to them because they can just make up their own narrative and ignore you without providing any evidence to back their claims. This seems to be the risk with these kinds of companies because they can’t be enforced, because it’s their word against yours and no one monitoring that they are doing right by their players. This isn’t the case for all of these types of apps/sites though. I’ve genuinely had a few that have actually paid money out so it isn’t all bad. And I’m sure this one lays out as long as you’re only making a few cents or paying to play so they make even more profit off of you. I just fell outside of both of these. Their accusation was especially a joke because of the multiple other games I was playing where I wasn’t making milestones frequently or even at all. For example, I was also playing Paimon and beyond the daily playing goal which is 8 cents, I literally missed every other payout goal because they are impossible to hit without paying to play. Which is how they get you I’m sure. Would you not think someone would be hitting every one of those goals if they were cheating one game that paid far less? Freecash is a joke and a scam at that.
Suffice it to say, this whole experience feels like it has been my villain origin story. As much as I tried to be cautious, it’s hard not to get excited about making extra money doing things you were enjoying, and in the midst of a grief so deep this is what you turned to just to stay above water. I thought I was doing something with my time while processing my grief, and even helping earn something to keep a part of my baby with me for life in mementos from the vet, but instead I was scammed and have nothing to show for my time. So consider this a cautionary tale for anyone else considering trying out Freecash, because I feel like it seems like a great deal, and a beneficial site to right up until they dislike how much money you’re making off of them. I might as well use my frustrating experience to help others and prevent anyone else from spending time on something that won’t lead anywhere in the end. Now to find the sites that aren’t scammers like Freecash was.
