Thoughts on pawns.app or any other "share your internet/bandwith" sites?

[JelloJerk]

I'm looking for easy ways to make beer money this holiday season, and I've been looking around at online survey sites to find the ones that will scam me out of my private info and time the the least. A site that popped into my radar is "pawns.app". It does surveys, but it also lets you "share your unused internet" for money. It's not much, about 20 cents every 1GB, but I figure that's 20 cents for idling on the internet vs the 0 cents I'm currently getting for doing the same thing.

From what I understand, you're sharing your bandwith/IP address to companies for "market research". Before you say "you dumb nigger" yes, I know. That's why I'm posting. From looking around various places, there's concern that it's going to be botnets, hackers, and people looking to do illegal things using your connection, and that your IP could get blacklisted from survey sites and other places from lending it. There was another site called honeygain that seemed to do the same thing and it got into some controversy like that apparently.

But most of the reviews of the site are positive, and the company claims that they do thorough background search on the people they lend to. So, would it be worth it to do this? Would me using a VPN lessen the risk of anything bad happening? Have any of you done anything similar with this or similar sites?

P.S. I think this is my first time posting in an off-topic board, so sorry if this isn't the right place to ask this question.

 

[Caesar]

20c per GB is an insane payout rate for any legit applications I can think of.

 

[Blue Screen of Death]

DId a little bit of looking on their website.
On their about us page (archive), it lists them as "IPRoyal Services FZE LLC"



One search leads me to this site IPRoyal.com (archive) which is pretty clearly advertising a proxy service. Appears you'd be whoring out your connection for god knows what people pay them to do.

 

[Pee Cola]

Hmmm... you might want to check your ISP's acceptable use terms first before you whore your Internet connection out for beer money. If you end up chewing through terabytes of data every month because you're selling it to a third party, your provider may kick you off for abusing the service.

 

[ChristSeVeN]

Would me using a VPN lessen the risk of anything bad happening?

That would probably defeat the purpose of this proxy service and therefore would risk you getting kicked off of it. The proxies that this service wants to sell are are residential ones rather than data centers or ones with IPs linked to VPN services. Just try doing serious web scraping over a VPN and you'll see what I mean, a big pain in the ass imo unless you're connected to some rarely used golden VPN server that isn't flagged by any services.

That being said, yes using a VPN would essentially remove the risk of being held accountable for what people do through your network. However that assumes that the service allows VPN usage over it in the first place which I would doubt because it would make the entire proxy service pointless.

As an experiment, it would be funny to get a Raspberry Pi or some other simple little device and place it in a public WiFi network somewhere where no one will bother touching it, and use that instead of your own connection.

 

[xmpp]

Most people using your IP will be botting in video games, scalping tickets/clothes/electronics, abusing promotions, scraping sites, account generation etc.

You wont end up in prison, but your IP will eventually become so shit that loading a majority of sites will present you with an annoying captcha or just a straight up CloudFlare access denied page.

 

[ChristSeVeN]

Something to add to this, there are similar services such as the Mysterium Network, however they recently had issues with people using nodes to host CP.

Kind of funny that it feels like there's more risk in being an operator on one of these services than there is in running a Tor exit node. I actually like the idea of this service, though - at least lets you make a bit of money as an operator rather than risking prison time at no benefit for a free and open internet through the Tor network.

 

[JelloJerk]

One search leads me to this site IPRoyal.com (archive) which is pretty clearly advertising a proxy service. Appears you'd be whoring out your connection for god knows what people pay them to do.

I saw something about that. A Reddit thread talks about how they advertised in BlackHat World but I'm not quite sure if this site really is what the name implies. I still find it worth noting.

As an experiment, it would be funny to get a Raspberry Pi or some other simple little device and place it in a public WiFi network somewhere where no one will bother touching it, and use that instead of your own connection.

Well, I have nothing but free time right now. Though I would feel kind of bad about pozzing up the local McDonalds.

 

[Blue Miaplacidus]

Just sell your bandwidth to pajeet bots for a premium and cut out the middleman.

 

[COME ON OUT YOU RAPIST]

This is basically how Mysterium VPN already works. It's going about as well as expected, with the people offering their data plans as residential proxies being contacted by authorities because random users (who can't be traced; they use Mysterium to pay for the service) have been using it for CP.

 

[Not Really Here]

You wont end up in prison

You will end up in prison if somebody pisses off the government with your IP address.
Enjoy prosecution by the Southern District of New York stalker child.

 

[HyperboreanRightsActivist]

1. Spoof Patrick S. Tomlinson's IP
2. Use the service until that fat fuck shows up in the news for distribution of CP/narcotics/hitman services/etc.

 

[Spergerella Junior]

Is this anything like Grass.io? I’ve done okay with that.

 

[JelloJerk]

Is this anything like Grass.io? I’ve done okay with that.

Had a quick look through their website, and it does sound similar. I will say that grass.io seems less shady. Or maybe it's because they word everything nicer. Since you've used something like this, can I ask if there were any downsides? Like did your IP start getting blacklisted or anything like that?

 

[Spergerella Junior]

Had a quick look through their website, and it does sound similar. I will say that grass.io seems less shady. Or maybe it's because they word everything nicer. Since you've used something like this, can I ask if there were any downsides? Like did your IP start getting blacklisted or anything like that?

No, nothing bad at all has happened. I earned grass tokens which now are hovering around $3USD. Now I’m in the second phase of it, and will earn a new batch by the end. But to get your airdrop you have to use a VPN during the claim part because it’s not technically allowed in the US.

 

[dirty dishes]

That would probably defeat the purpose of this proxy service and therefore would risk you getting kicked off of it. The proxies that this service wants to sell are are residential ones rather than data centers or ones with IPs linked to VPN services. Just try doing serious web scraping over a VPN and you'll see what I mean, a big pain in the ass imo unless you're connected to some rarely used golden VPN server that isn't flagged by any services.

That being said, yes using a VPN would essentially remove the risk of being held accountable for what people do through your network. However that assumes that the service allows VPN usage over it in the first place which I would doubt because it would make the entire proxy service pointless.

This Reddit post claims you can use Honeygain with a VPN that provides residential IP addresses. Don't know if that still works 4 years later though.