Earlier in January, I posted about Honeygain and Earnapp and how they offer the ability to use your free bandwidth to pay you money. I was unsure of the security safety of these and did not link any referral links until I had tested if they would even pay what they claimed to pay.

I am fortunate to have some commercial tools that I get to play with on my home network. So I was able to notice a lot of inappropriate communications from the server I was running these programs on; pornographic searches, as well as known bad domains like the phishing one pictured above. According to the Earnapp website, it ran on my machine for 12 days, and 18 hours.

$4.26 for using my bandwidth and $2 for signing up. Unfortunately they don’t allow payouts until you have $10, but I wasn’t going to continue to host risky traffic for another 12 days just to payout $10, but I had to be sure it was only Earnapp and not Honeygain. I’ve continued to run Honeygain, who says that their uses are legitimate businesses that test ad visibility in different geographical regions.

Since turning off Earnapp the only alerts it’s generated relate to DNS queries against media_stream_manager.cc which is also the name of a Chromium core file. So, I don’t think Honeygain was the source of any of those other alerts, and I don’t particularly have time to dig deeper into the windows logs.

Well since Honeygain still seems to be a mostly legitimate program, how’s that working out? Well I had to turn off the 10% Jumptask bonus because their payout linking refused to connect for some reason. Jan 16th through Feb 9th has gathered 3,650.73 credits, or roughly $3.65 after using 43.38 GB of my bandwidth. That’s a pretty awful payout rate. Using their initial $3 bonus for signing up and the daily pot bonuses, I’ve hit a grand total of $7.80 and I can’t payout until $20.

At current rate I’m probably looking at 56 more days to reach a payout, putting me at a total of 80 days to reach $20. I highly doubt this is going to be worth it even for the passive money from doing nothing. I was going to wait until a month had passed to post this, but with the security failures from Earnapp, I didn’t want to wait. I’ll probably do a few update posts on this as time goes on at least until I get a successful payout.

Current synopsis: Earnapp: Bad. BAD. BAD. Avoid and do not use. Honeygain: Maybe worth it on a machine you’re running 24/7 anyway, otherwise doesn’t seem to be worth the electricity unless you can get a whole bunch of referrals.

~~Miniwing~~
Stoic, Investor, Parent, Wordsmith