There a few different ways a survey participant can cheat while giving their opinions for cash or prize incentives. There are also a few different reasons why, in the long run, this does not pay off and can actually be a big waste of time.

A VERY QUICK OVERVIEW ON SURVEY PROCEDURES
Usually if you opt-in to a paid survey site as someone who wishes to receive email invitations to get paid for your opinions by taking online surveys, your survey or survey site account that you originally sign up for registers you as part of the particular site’s survey-taking panel.

Almost all market research companies who maintain such a panel will ask you some brief questions upon registering regarding your demographics and personal interests. It is these answers, to what is known as a profile survey, that the market research company uses to determine whether or not you might be likely to qualify for each new survey they offer. If it looks like you are in fact eligible, they will send you an invitation to participate in your email inbox.

*It is definitely possible for one to lie about their information from the start, as in the very first time they register with the paid survey site’s participant panel.*

This is rather silly, though, because it is nearly impossible to anticipate what types of people each market research company is going to need opinions from in the future. (That is, unless of course you work for the survey company or their client, which gets into a whole new and much more unethical level of cheating.) If you lie at this point, you risk the potential of missing out on surveys that you would have gotten had you simply told the truth.

*Some people, though, might try to lie about their personal facts and opinions after they are a registered member of the survey panel and after they accept an invitation to take a paid online survey. How? Once again they lie about their profile answers - only this time they do so while in the midst of taking the paid survey.

As stated earlier, you are often invited to certain paid surveys according to your membership profile. Usually once you click the link to enter a paid survey which you’ve been invited to, the very first questions are strikingly similar to those profile questions you filled out at the onset of your membership - the ones that I stated were documented with your account.

If one really wanted to, he or she could also lie at this point about the answers to the qualifying demographic profile questions.

But this, like the first example, though, is not really worth the effort and chance one takes at being caught and expelled from the participant panel forever. Review the explanation and reasons for cheating method number one that I’ve written about above. For the first reason, cheating in the beginning of the paid surveys is stupid and often more harmful than beneficial.

A second reason to refrain from lying at this point has to do with human nature and the imperfection of the average person’s memory. Unless you are taking frantic notes while participating in the survey, it is probably unlikely that you will remember every single answer you’ve provided after the next 5-10 minutes, depending on your brain’s capacity.

If you tell the truth in the opening survey qualifying questions, this will not pose a problem. When they ask the questions at the end once again just to: a) verify their data and b) catch cheaters before they give you undeserved credit, an honest person won’t have to rack their brain for the answers, for he or she will just know; they’ll just answer truthfully as they did earlier.

However, he or she who lies at any point during the survey and especially during the beginning profile section may have a harder time keeping up their ruse once they’ve been answering long, complicated questions for 10 minutes or so. Suddenly when the profile questions are asked again for the above mentioned reasons, our cheating survey participant will very often forget what was originally stated as fact.

And guess what happens when the survey host figures this very-easy-to-catch discrepancy out? Survey participant loses credit and has now wasted a lot of time and effort? Survey participant gets terminated from the particular paid survey panel? Use your imagination and common sense for other consequences, but these two are pretty much inevitable.