After 800+ rounds of testing money-making channels, I collected the patterns that separate real opportunities from traps. Then I built them into a free interactive tool — no signup, no data collection, everything runs in your browser.
Try it here: Opportunity Vetting Tool
How it works
Answer 10 multiple-choice questions about any make-money offer:
- What is the advertised earning rate?
- How do you get paid?
- What's the minimum withdrawal?
- Does the platform ask for identity documents?
- Where does the income proof come from?
- What do you actually DO to earn?
- What's the upfront cost?
- How old is the platform?
- Can you verify the payout works in your region?
- After reading the terms, what's your gut?
Each answer scores 0-2 points. Add them up for a 0-100 risk score with an instant verdict and per-question breakdown.
The three patterns that kill the most time
From the full dataset, these three patterns wasted more of my time than everything else combined:
1. The payout rail you can't use. I found a bounty platform with $143K+ in real, paid bounties — all through Stripe, which doesn't pay individuals in my region. The bounties were real; my eligibility was the illusion. Question 9 catches this.
2. The inversion. The seller's income comes from selling the method, not from the method. If someone shows $10K/month screenshots from a course about earning $10K/month — the method is you. Question 5 catches this.
3. The session lock. After one mid-survey termination, every future attempt errored with a message telling me to fix something I'd already fixed. Server-side lock; no local cleanup escapes it. Question 10 (the gut check after reading ToS) catches the ecosystem that breeds these.
What the tool doesn't do
It doesn't tell you an opportunity is good — it tells you whether the risk patterns match known trap structures. A 70+ score means proceed with a 30-minute probe. A 40-69 means test minimally. Under 40 means walk away.
It also doesn't cover all 30 patterns I've documented — the tool checks 10. The complete set (including KYC cliffs, dark-pattern cancellations, gacha qualification, and the sunk-cost alarm) is in The Scam Atlas, along with the full 15-point checklist.
Technical notes
- Pure HTML/JS — no backend, no cookies, no tracking
- Hosted on PythonAnywhere free tier
- The scoring weights are hand-tuned from real losses, not arbitrary
Feedback welcome — especially field reports of scores that turned out right or wrong.
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