I’ve been getting phone calls from a company named K&B National Research, and apparently so have lots of other people. They’re offering me $200 for a day’s participation. It appears that they’re after my Social Security number. Is that it, or do they have more sinister motivations? And also, is that “Caller complaints” site yet another scam?
Getting hold of your SSN isn’t sinister enough? They can do all kinds of malicious things if they had that.
Do you need to go somewhere for that day, to participate? Maybe they just want to sell you condo shares.
You can get all the SSNs you want for a buck apiece. Stand in the street and give away dollar bills, but tell people that you have to have the SSNs of everyone you pay the money to, to keep in your financial transaction records, same as the banks do, just another bullshit federal law… Which these days, is probably true.
Here is their webpage:
http://www.kbnationalresearch.com/
They claim they conduct focus groups, which admittedly might be worth $200/day to them, depending upon the demographic.
Not much at the Better Business Bureau, which is both good and bad news:
http://www.bbb.org/dallas/business-reviews/market-research-and-analysis/k-and-b-national-research-in-richardson-tx-90464462/complaints
Supposedly I’d have to go somewhere and participate in some kind of marketing survey for the day. I’m tempted to call them back, just out of curiosity. Of course I’ll end it if they want more information than they have a right to.
Please be aware that if they pay you more than $600 they have to file a Form 1099 with the IRS and they need your Social Security number for that.
Its all legitimate.
They have to stop people coming back for repeat days and making a career out of it…
It makes for poor research results. So they need some form of ID, and anyway they may have tax ,etc, responsibilities with regard the $200 payment.
I’m not sure about this organization, but my wife and I participated in a focus group one time. We were paid (a nominal amount I don’t recall) and given lunch. We watched a bunch of commercials for a small group of products and voted on which ones we liked and didn’t like, and took little tests to find out what we recalled from each commercial.
All sorts of companies, ad agencies and research groups conduct research and focus groups. That’s not to say this particular group is either legitimate or not, but this kind of research is certainly being conducted, and it makes sense to pay people to participate if it takes more than a few minutes.
I don’t know about the legitimacy of this particular company, but there are many market research firms out there doing this kind of thing. I’ve participated in many with fees in that range for a couple hours of time. They varied from watching TV pilots to giving feedback on the shape/design of “fill nozzles” for electric vehicles.
My wife just got invited to a focus group at a place where we’ve been before that pays $125 for an hour and a half. SSNs when they pay you is legit, I’m not sure why they would need them before.