McAfee SiteAdvisor Blog

10 "free gas" sites that are high-volume e-mailers

With gasoline breaking the $3 per gallon mark all over the U.S. and prices throughout the world on the rise, consumers are understandably looking for anything that will help blunt the cost of "fill'er up, please."

Many people turn to the Web for help and find plenty of sites offering "free gas cards" for $500, $1000, even $1,500. But it's a search that could leave you with computer indigestion. In fact, search Google for "free gas" and your screen will be inundated with unsafe results. Six out of twenty first page results link to red sites for this recent search for "free gas." And five of the top eight sponsored links go to red rated sites.

What's the Catch?

What's wrong with a chance to get a free gas card? What's the catch? Like the free iPod sites that have come under increasing media and legal scrutiny sites that offer free gas cards often make their money in two ways that should trouble users in search of a freebie.

First, many free product sites use the allure of the "free offer" to encourage unsuspecting consumers to divulge their e-mail addresses. Once submitted, the address is provided to advertisers who inundate users' inboxes with solicitations. We know because we've signed up at each of these sites with unique, one-time-use e-mail addresses, then tracked the results.

Some consumers might accept an inbox full of spammy e-mail in exchange for $500 or $1000 in gas coupons. But the unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of consumers will never successfully complete the requirements to collect the gas card.

Why not? Consider the second way free product these sites make money. Many free product sites present users with unrelated product pitches – offers like trial subscriptions and credit card applications. Consumers must complete some of these offers to earn the gas card.

Again, some consumers might wonder what's wrong with accepting a new credit card or a 3-month trial membership in exchange for hundreds of dollars of gas. But free product sites intentionally structure their offers so that most users will fail to qualify. Industry insiders say that "breakage rates" (the percentage of users who fail to qualify for the free product) are often in the high 90s.

One tactic used to "break" the process is to swamp a user with literally dozens of screens of unrelated promotional offers. Another is to require the user to enlist five friends who in turn sign up and complete offers.

However a free merchandise site accomplishes breakage, breakage is the key to their business. Consider: If only 5% of consumers jump through all the hoops to get the free offer (free gas, or what have you), then the free merchandise site pockets all its revenues from the other 95% of users. For each credit card, product trial, or other sponsored offer a user accepts, the free product site gets paid $10, $20 or more from the sponsor. With sufficiently high breakage rates, fees from the sponsors greatly exceed free merchandise sites' payouts to users. Users come up short, of course – since most users are lost in the breakage complexity, and get nothing. But for the free merchandise sites, it's a great business – entice users with a tempting offer, confuse them with tough or complicated fine print, and make money when consumers give up and leave empty-handed.

10 Misleading Gas Card Promotions

For readers who want to know in detail how these sites break the freebie seeker, we provide an illustrated example later in this blog. But first, we present a list of 10 sites, sign-ups at which all resulted in high volumes of e-mail flowing to our inboxes. We found these sites while searching Google for the keywords ‘free gas card' ‘free gas' and variations of them. Note that visiting these domains directly may not show a free gas offer.

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shopherefree.net (64 e-mails per week)
Signing up at Shopherefree resulted in the lowest volume of e-mail into our inbox, but as we show later in this piece, the site has a black belt in "breakage."

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internetopiniongroup.com (67 e-mails per week)
This site offers an answer to "How does this work?"

Our sponsors cover the cost of your free gift!
1. Simply choose which free gift you would like
2. Enter your email address.
3. Then complete our sponsored offer(s)!

They don't tell you how many e-mails their sponsors might send. We received sixty-seven e-mails when we signed up here.

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consumerincentivepromotions.com (78 e-mails per week)
Read through the fine print and you learn that users are required to successfully complete six offers from advertisers to qualify for a $250 gas card.

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onlinerewardcenter.com (81 e-mails per week)
Onlinerewardcenter and consumerincentivepromotions are located in the same Del Ray, Florida building and have the same six offer requirement. And lest readers think these are unpopular sites, consider this: onlinerewardcenter's Alexa rank is 3,695.

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superbrewards.com (84 e-mails per week)
We went through thirty-five screens each featuring a single promotional offer, one screen with thirty-plus offers (some offers automatically checked ‘yes'), and one screen with another ten offers. That was simply the preamble to the "last step" that featured another glut of promotional offers and a "congratulatory statement" that was anything but encouraging.

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allfreegifts.net (92 e-mails per week)
Here are some examples of the ninety-two e-mails per week we received when we signed up here.

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freegascard4u.com (105 e-mails per week) Landing pages typically offer little or no detail about program requirements.

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emarketpanel.com (117 e-mails per week)
Before a user submits his e-mail address to emarketpanel, he should consider the one-hundred and seventeen e-mails per week we received when submitted our e-mail address here.

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consumerrewardzone.com (188 e-mails per week)
SiteAdvisor received one hundred and eighty eight e-mails per week when we signed up here making consumerrewardzone the second worst site of this list in terms of e-mail volume.

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brandsurveypanel.com (361 e-mails per week)
Brandsurveypanel has the dubious distinction of generating the highest average e-mail volume of the 10 sites listed here. When we signed up, we received 361 e-mails per week.

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Breakdown Lane

For shopherefree, the first Web site on our list, we decided to take readers through the entire process to show how these sites "break" a user, even one who is reasonably sophisticated about technology and Web marketing.

freegascard.shopherefree.net, the 'free gas' search landing page, acknowledges users' skepticism. The site asks and answers the question top most on a user's mind: "Too good to be true? …Definitely not!" This landing page goes on to explain "how we do it..."

Each month companies rely on us to help them conduct marketing surveys and introduce new products and services to consumers. In exchange for your feedback and as a reward for trying their products and services, (some of which are being offered free through this website) you will be given a $500 Gas Card absolutely free.

It sounds so simple. In reality, the process is anything but. Step 1 asks for personal information including date of birth:

Step 2 presents nine offers, at least one of which must be "reviewed."

We selected the first offer to review. Here's how the default options looked:

When we clicked "No Thanks!" and clicked continue, we received the following dialogue:

We tried a different tactic, selecting "I am NOT interested in this offer" from a pull-down menu.

When we clicked "continue"...

We were prompted to "select the best time to call." Remember: this step is supposed to be optional. We tried another tactic, filling out the form, but unchecked the agreement to be contacted by a mortgage specialist. Not possible:

We agreed to be contacted by the specialist but kept the "Do NOT contact me about it" option. That combination wasn't going to work either:

We checked "I understand that this offer is optional and does not affect my free gift" and were able to proceed. Our new understanding is that the required "review" of an offer actually requires us to agree to be contacted by one of the Web site's advertisers, though the advertised services themselves are optional.

Step 3 looked similar to Step 2, except for the presence of a ‘skip' button:

Skipping brought up a new page, this one with 28 additional offers:

We went back a page with our browser and tried to continue without selecting an offer:

Back to the 28 offer page. We tried to continue:

Once again, remember that these steps are supposed to involved optional offers. We checked the "no" box 28 times and were allowed to continue. But the next screen we saw was truly surprising:

When we looked at our browser's address bar, we saw the following domain with a lengthy affiliate tracking code:

http://www.everyfreegift.com/landings/template_05.jsp?
product_id=4887&pid=1844165924&cid=CD849&lid=1006&ptid
=CD849.8fcee8c2bfee1ee8b8520e34e7e341b1.&etid=181

Shopherefree.net had just re-directed us to everyfreegift.com, a totally different Web site running a completely different promotion. We think most users would not understand this and would interpret the huge "Congratulations!" as indication that the process was complete. A user who unwittingly submits his e-mail address to everyfreegift.com in an effort to "finish" his shopherefree promotion could be signing up for an additional 93 e-mails per week.

Throwing in the Towel

We returned to Step 3 and accepted the first offer, in this case, a free Samsung cell phone.

The free phone required us to sign a two year cellular contract. After providing our social security number, which was required, and agreeing to the two year contract, we clicked ‘No' another 28 times on the next screen. We clicked continue and appeared to be near the end:

But when we clicked on "Click Here (to) complete the sponsor's requirement" we were taken back to Everyfreegift.

At this point, we could not figure out how to actually complete the offer and get our free gas card. Our clicking ingenuity was exhausted. The site "broke" us.

In the process of being broken, our journey included viewing 86 offers and two visits to everyfreegift.com. We agreed to a two year cell phone contract and asked to be contacted by a mortgage broker about refinancing our home. We gave over our e-mail address, our street address, our phone number, our social security number, our age, and our time. In exchange, we got 64 e-mails per week.

Running On Empty

Consider someone who signs up at each of these 10 sites in hopes of getting some gas tank relief. That user's e-mail inbox could be deluged with an astonishing 1,237 e-mails per week.

We are not surprised to see misleading offers littering the sponsored results of search engines. Our recently published study on the safety of search engines found that sponsored results were two to four times more likely than organic results to lead to red or yellow rated sites. Nor are we surprised to see these offers showing up for ‘free gas' searches. Bad actors follow consumers, and consumers are concerned about gas prices.

We at SiteAdvisor strive to offer safe alternatives to common searches. Unfortunately, we cannot recommend any safe sites that offer free gas cards. We do enjoy GasBuddy.com, a site that allows consumers to search for the cheapest gas station in their zip code. Your local American Automobile Association club Web site often has good advice as well.