Yes, remember, they're using official rates/prices for miles. That doesn't seem unusual to me either.

What are official rates for funny money (e-rewards currency)? Just because they are called "dollars" doesn't make them real money. Remember, Zimbabwe also had dollars, just not the US version :)

Varies a little, but average 3:1 ($25 gift card for 75 funny money)

Yes, just happened to me. Any info from the support team?

Essentially I was dumped as a member, but they reconsidered and re-activated my account...

Is anyone else getting the unexpected error message when trying to access surveys?

Whenever I log in I see "No surveys available. Complete your member profile to receive more studies."

Been like that for over 24 hours. Is that what you're seeing or something else?

I got an email requesting that I fill out a submit an IRS W-9 form.

The email wasn't specific, but listed a bunch of survey organizations, which I suspect in my case was e-rewards.

Has anyone received this?

Obviously one should comply with income tax laws. However, I question how they determined I exceeded the $500 threshold, and the "value" they assigned to hotel and air points.

Curious of the takes of others on this, the ramifications of not submitting a form, and so forth.

Had some experience with this taking surveys for cash with a different provider (though probably part of the same group). Of course, there it was easy to determine value, but I think you can bet that like other providers/partners they are valuing them at the full value (around 2.9 cents for airline miles as I recall) that the airlines and hotels value them at.

When I had this for the cash surveys, they sent me the W-9 request as I was approaching the $500 threshold. I did go through it, and I got a 1099-Misc.

But as far as the repercussions if you don't submit the form, you can be pretty sure they'll just stop giving you rewards. Then there's no tax issue, and no liability for them paying you without a form.

Since it is November, the easy way out if you don't want to incur tax liability is to just hold off until January 1, which will reset the clock.

FTF

I'm not an accountant, but as companies are not required to send you a 1099 until the end of January (with the same info reported to the IRS) I'm not so sure this is going to work. Companies do the calculations in January, so once Dynata receives the W-9 after January 1 they would do the math and send the 1099. The tax liability doesn't just disappear simply because it's a new year. And as you pointed out, if you don't submit the W-9 form at all they can stop giving you rewards or just freeze/close your account.

I've been doing e-rewards for years, and this is the first time I've received this request. My guess is that it has something to do with Dynata taking over e-rewards. Here's the text of the email I received:

When the Perk program was a thing and you could do well spinning ads on a bank of cheap smartphones if you had no data cap on your home internet service, there were a lot of people who got hit with this. So not unprecedented.

Hi "Bob" and the folks he was replying to (not sure how to quote back to that - yes, if they have not calculated tax liability yet and found in January that they'd paid over the limit, then he'd have liability. I was going by my experience with a similar outfit that they keep a running track and just won't pay you any more once you get close if you don't give them a W-9. That's how it worked there, anyway. So if you got close and got the demand for a W-9, it was up to you whether to continue asking for redemptions or not.

This W9 is a Yank thing only, I guess, isn't it?

Yes, it is. You provide your relevant information, in particular your social security number or Tax ID if you're a business. They use that info to send you a tax notice at the end of the year of how much you earned, and that is also reported to the Internal Revenue Service, to whom you ultimately file and pay your federal taxes.