Is 20 Cogs A Scam? [10 Little Details You Shouldn’t Miss]

Is 20 Cogs a Scam? The website and the credibility that we found showed that 20 Cogs seems to be a promising website. But let me just tell you, don’t rush into signing up for it if you don’t know these 10 details, these would be the most important information you may need as you are deciding if 20 Cogs is truly a profitable website.

20 Cogs Review Summary

Product Name: 20 Cogs

Company: Submission Technology Unlimited

Price: Free Signup, Variable prices on offers.

What they Offer: A website where you can participate in competitions, offers, games and surveys and earn after you have unlocked the 20 Cogs (or 20 tasks)

Best For: Those who are willing to keep track of their trial subscriptions and pay for some of the tasks

Recommended: Not Recommended

What Is 20 Cogs About: 20 Cogs is like an affiliate website that offers rewards to its users (or most likely their referrals) from the commission that they get

Overall Rating: 30/100

Summary:
 20 Cogs is a website offering rewards to its users after the completion of 20 tasks. While it is under a legitimate company, it still poses a risk on one’s personal details especially as it requires signing up on and purchasing from other websites.

What is 20 Cogs About?

20 Cogs sounds promising at first because you may think you only need to complete the 20 tasks and you have a chance to earn £200 which is approximately $260+. Here’s their introductory video about it:

For this 20 Cogs review, I’ll let you in on some of the smallest details that you need to know before you dive straight in into this program.

Company Behind 20 Cogs

Looking into their footer and as confirmed in their Terms & Conditions page, we can verify that 20 Cogs is under Submissions Technology Limited. And here’s what I found about the company:

Is 20 Cogs a scam submissions technology LTD company registration


It’s great to know that the company is registered in the UK and they are impressively a few months away from being a decade-old company! Interestingly, they own a lot of websites and 20 Cogs is just one of them. You can check out the other websites under them by typing this phrase I got from (20 Cogs’ Terms & Conditions) into the search bar and searching through the Verbatim option:

Here are some of the websites that may come up with the exact phrase:

https://producttestingusa.com
https://usproducttesting.com
https://usmysteryshopper.com
https://freeclubusa.com
https://thepipbox.co.uk/
https://www.10giftshop.com/
https://paidsurveys.uk.com/
https://www.ukjobshub.co.uk/
https://ohmydosh.co.uk/
https://mortgagequotescompared.com
https://moov.co.uk
https://20cogs.co.uk/

While it’s quite reassuring that these websites are under a registered company, unlike the other reviews we’ve had on Analysts Class and also on UpWealth FInances (which had different website names and addresses despite being under the same company), I’ll let you know later a disadvantage that I believe is an important matter to consider.

What do you think about this initial information, is 20 Cogs a scam?

The Concept of 20 Cogs

20 Cogs positions itself as a website that offers a rewards program for its users by offering trial and minimum purchases to their partner websites. So basically we can think of 20 Cogs like an affiliate of their partner websites and they get commissions from referrals, and/or leads that they can gather from the users. Here is a good illustration of how affiliate marketing works.

How Affiliate Marketing Works - Earn From Your Laptop
How affiliate marketing works

Affiliate marketing is a legitimate marketing tactic and business opportunity and model. 20 Cogs then operates just like the CoinPayu website that we have written a month ago. As 20 Cogs accumulates referrals to their partner businesses and websites, they get a handsome commission for it, and they relay a part of that commission back to you as your “reward”.

But is 20 Cogs profitable enough to spend our time in?

A deeper look beyond 20 Cogs

For this part of our 20 Cogs review, let’s look at the domain age and backlinks of the website so we can gauge a bit of its credibility.

Domain Age

It turns out that 20 Cogs has been around since 2015!

I found the first archived crawl of the website last 2015 and their website looks like this:

Now this shows that the first version of the website is consistent with the current version of 20 Cogs. Consistency is a good measure of credibility… But is it enough evidence for me to recommend it?

Let me give you my verdict later in this article.

Backlinks

Now, why do are backlinks important. Backlinks are a good measure of a website’s credibility and how much effort they have given to help their website gain authority. It seems like even if the website is in its 6th year, it still has an average but substantial amount of backlinks and referring domains.

It’s not bad, but it’s not quite impressive for a long-standing website.

To conclude this part of this 20 Cogs review, I can say that it is a credible website as it is running under a registered company, its website is consistent with its content and business model, and it has substantial website authority.

What does 20 Cogs Offer?

This 20 Cogs review will let you in on the little details that you need to know so you can decide if it’s for you.

20 Tasks

20 Cogs are equal to 20 tasks that you need to do before withdrawing your accumulated money. But you need to know that you can only withdraw your money after you have referred a friend. Now what are the sample tasks on 20 Cogs, according to users:

  • Signing up for free trial on websites
  • Signing up for memberships
  • Buying offers
  • Product testing

Whoa, you might not have expected that right? Here is a video of some of the offers and a quick overview of what it’s actually like:

We can see from this video that there are different terms for each offer, some require you to sign up on the service for a month, some requires you to complete a month’s trial period, some even requires you to purchase something!

Imagine signing up on the services that they are partnered with and forgetting it after the trial… now what comes then is this. When you decide to actually purchase something from their offers, you will now then be pressured to complete the 20 Cogs to get your money back!

With this business set-up, do you think 20 Cogs is a scam?

Affiliate Opportunity or Refer A Friend Program

Even as 20 Cogs work like an affiliate website itself, they also have an affiliative opportunity for bloggers and other content creators

Now, what are the perks of referring people to 20 Cogs as an affiliate? Well here are the tempting offers:

  • You’ll get 5% of what your referrals make, forever.
  • You’ll will also receive a £20 bonus when they complete 20 Cogs. 
  • By referring 5 friends and once they complete their own 20 Cogs you will make an extra £100, plus 5% of their earnings along the way. 

Now those are generous offers for an affiliate! Not bad.

Here are the actual terms of the website:

How does 20 Cogs Work?

According to the website, this is how they work:

From here they have kind of admitted that they really are like an affiliate website. It seems like the instructions that they give you are the requirements to qualify for the commission! In my opinion that’s quite fair, they get an amount after you have finished the tasks… but it’s also quite risky because you need to satisfy certain conditions (like minimum purchase, days of subscription, etc.,) so your task would be counted.

How to become a member of 20 Cogs

I tried signing up for 20 Cogs but it seems like its registration is only for a few targeted countries because it showed that 20 Cogs is not supported in my country. Well that makes sense because there’s no point in subscribing to services that are not supported in my area right?

So here is how you can become a member of 20 Cogs:

Previous users and affiliates recommend creating a new email for 20 Cogs, then you have to connect your Paypal account to it for your payout.

You have to know that most 20 Cogs review that you may read online fail to mention that you can’t and it’s truly impossible to complete the 20 Cogs tasks in just one sitting. Let’s say that maybe you could actually do the 20 tasks in a day, but there’s no guarantee that you can take your payout quickly because they still need a month to verify all those registration and subscriptions that you signed up for.

Basically, they need to first get the commission from their partner websites before they process and look into the validity of your task and if it will be counted. Some users mentioned that some of their tasks are not counted outright in a month and you may need to send a support ticket to fix it.

Do know that if you don’t finish the 20 tasks, you won’t get any payout, but the website still profits from you as their referral.

Can it work for mobile?

Yes you can access the 20 Cogs website both through your desktop and mobile.

How do you make money with 20 Cogs?

The best way to weigh if an earning opportunity is truly worth it is to look at their earnings disclaimer. They have quite a straight to the point answer on how much you earn from the website…

It’s a very realistic claim. No overpromises.

 
Earnings Disclaimer

Here is a brief earnings disclaimer from 20 Cogs:

I do like how honest their statement is, that’s a good sign of credibility!

BASC or Paypal withdrawal

According to their Terms and Conditions, the only bank that they don’t support in Monzo. While the referral program may sound easy, the person you refer need to meet certain eligibility requirements so you can get the reward:

Make sure to only refer someone who has a permanent address in the UK!

20 Cogs Reviews and Testimonials

There is no BBB profile for Submission Technology Limited or 20 Cogs since it’s registered in the UK. But we did found their Trustpilot profile. Although they boast of a 4.2 Trustpilot rating, there was truly more to the score here’s what we found:

It seems like 20 Cogs has been flagging a lot of bad comments! Plus most of their positive reviews are not organic but rather comes from the reviews from invited people:

Now that’s not quite a credible way to gauge your user reviews right?

Pros

  • Website has been up since 2015
  • Running under a credible company
  • Can be used on mobile
  • Signing up is free
  • Has a legitimate affiliate opportunity

Cons

  • You may need to pay to finish some of the tasks (to unlock cogs)
  • You can tend to forget the subscriptions you signed up on
  • Risk on your personal details when you sign up on the other websites
  • Even if you don’t finish the 20 tasks, they still profit from you
  • Flagged bad reviews, most positive reviews are from their review invitations

Is 20 Cogs A scam?

Since 20 Cogs is running under a credible company and with the website still standing until now, it can be safe to say that 20 Cogs is not a scam. But you have to be very careful on the affiliated websites that you sign-up on because it can pose a risk on your personal and bank details. After

Just to be fully transparent with you, I am not a user of 20 Cogs and I do not endorse it in any way.

I have researched the website, testimonials, and information on the Internet to get to the bottom of what 20 Cogs genuinely does. This is because I have been burnt from programs just like this in the past and I want to prevent others from making the same mistakes. If you’d like to learn Ways to Avoid Online Scams then click the highlighted text. 

What I like about 20 Cogs

  1. You can easily sign up on the website
  2. Service can be used on mobile
  3. Under a registered UK company
  4. Website has long been around

What I don’t like about 20 Cogs

  1. Only the details you put on the 20 Cogs website is secure. So whenever you sign-up for the subscription websites that they put on as a task for you, 20 Cogs doesn’t cover their liability to theat extent
  2. Your referral needs to finish the 20 Cog tasks and you need to have a 5 GBP balance on your account before they could count your referral.

10 Details You Shouldn’t Miss

  1. You are recommended to create a specific email for 20 Cogs so you can also keep track of the subscriptions you signed up for, or else it may continue to be charged
  2. Only those who have a permanent address in the UK is eligible for the referral reward
  3. Some tasks to unlock the cogs requires purchases or a charged subscription
  4. You can’t finish all 20 in just one sitting because verification requires a month
  5. 20 Cogs is an affiliate website and they profit from you even when you don’t finish all 20 tasks
  6. 20 Cogs is only giving you a fraction of their commissions from the brands.
  7. You need to have finished 20 Cogs tasks and have a balance of 5 GBP for your referrals to be counted
  8. Your referral needs to complete 20 Cogs too before it can be counted under you.
  9. Risk on your personal details. There is no assurance that the personal details that you put in on the websites that they partner with is secure
  10. Their reviews doesn’t look genuine as they have been flagging and deleting most bad comments and most of their Trustpilot reviews are only from the invited reviewers

Is 20 Cogs A Scam? [2021 Final Verdict]

No. I don’t think 20 Cogs is a scam. It is a legitimate affiliate website that offers rewards to users from the commission that they receive from their referrals. While the website and the company it is running under is legitimate, there is still a risk on your personal details as you sign up to complete the tasks on 20 Cogs. In case you won’t be able to finish the 20 tasks, remember that it only works for them because they still profit from you as a referral.

Plus when you think of it you only get a fraction of their commissions. Wouldn’t it be better if you were the actual affiliate so you can get the full commission?

How I Make a Passive Income Online [A Better Alternative]

The problem with affiliate websites that positions itself as a website that offers rewards is that, it only gives out limited rewards and may take you months to reach the minimum amount or may even risk your personal details just to get their commission.

Why spend time signing-up on websites that may continuously charge you if you happen to forget about them. Would you rather risk a few dollars on tasks with no guaranteed returns, when you can create more valuable things that you can help you gain a more sustainable passive income. You won’t need to risk your personal details or worry you’re investing in something that not worth your time and resources. And what is it- it’s affiliate marketing.

Yes you can be an affiliate marketer yourself! You can parther with brands of your own choice and get commissions in full.

I find this the best venture for starters and a good way to sustain passive income over time. Plus I also know a community that can help you learn and train about the actual skills and knowledge needed for this online business. It’s even FREE to start.

If you’re thinking about doing this full-time, going premium is just $49/month and John Stanley will also personally help you. In the end, you’ll learn valuable skills and earn more than the time you’d spend on reward and survey sites!


Louee Gonzales Author

Louee Gonzales has been a content specialist for 4+ years now. She has been enjoying writing investigative articles for EFYL. If she’s not writing, she’s either painting or traveling somewhere fun.

She has a degree in Psychology, and quick fact: she can’t read your mind. She has authored articles on the School of Positive Transformation.

20 Cogs

Free Signup, Variable prices on offers.
3

Credibility

5.0/10

Income Opportunity

2.0/10

Reliability

1.0/10

Price

2.0/10

Business Model

5.0/10

Pros

  • Website has been up since 2015
  • Running under a credible company
  • Can be used on mobile
  • Has a legitimate affiliate opportunity

Cons

  • eed to pay to finish some of the tasks (to unlock cogs)
  • You can tend to forget the subscriptions you signed up on
  • Risk on your personal details when you sign up on the other websites
  • Even if you don't finish the 20 tasks, they still profit from you
  • Flagged bad reviews, most positive reviews are from their review invitations

2 thoughts on “Is 20 Cogs A Scam? [10 Little Details You Shouldn’t Miss]”

  1. Hi. Thanks for your thorough and honest 20 Cogs review. I see that you’ve given it low scores in the areas of reliability, income opportunity and price. Even the business model is not so good. Something that requires signing up on and purchasing from other websites frightens me. That means lots of other companies have my log in and payment info. I think the cons outweigh the pros. Thanks for the review.

    Reply
    • Thanks for your comments Shalisha and for reading my honest 20 Cogs review,
      I agree with you 100% about the concerns with other parties having your log in and payment imfo. Also when you think about it, the potential earnings of just a few dollars per hour is very very low in terms of the western world and this is quite typical in the paid surveys/Get Paid To (GPT) options out there. They are only for pocket change.
      For those serious and committed to build a longer term and larger income stream. I also prefer affiliate marketing and am happy to personally help you or anyone interested.

      Reply

Leave a Comment