Two Months, Zero Earnings, and a Banned IP: My Journey With EarnApp

As someone who has little free time but always enjoys getting an extra buck in his pocket, I have been long interested in various passive income apps. Swagbucks, Ibotta, Honeygain, you name it, I might have tried it at some point. Let me tell you one of them left me as flabbergasted as my almost-two-month experience I had with EarnApp… But let’s start from the beginning.

How I came upon EarnApp

EarnApp is an internet-sharing app launched by Bright Data Ltd. an Israeli-based proxy provider that previously operated Hola VPN. I heard about their plans to launch a passive income app from other passive income fans on Discord, which is also where they started their first user community. I of course joined so I could learn more as they go. This was at the beginning of October — so less than two months ago.

I was a bit busy with my studies at first, so I only downloaded the app itself on my laptop on October 14. I was a bit upset about there not being a version for mobile as I use my Android way more often than my computer on a daily basis (in fact I read somewhere on Reddit that they did actually have an Android app before, but it got removed from Google Play), but for a rate of $5/GB I thought I could certainly leave it running for longer. This was the best rate I ever saw on any internet sharing app — most pay under a buck per GB!

Naturally, the high rates were a marketing ploy, since EarnApp was only available in a few countries then (technically you could use it anywhere, but they only paid if you lived in one of like 10 or 12 countries on the initial list), and experienced a ton of bugs and lags — which of course is often the case with freshly released software. They did improve at a steady pace though! Dashboard got refreshed, the list of countries that can earn grew, there were updates going out and some talk about upcoming features.

The rollercoaster of EarnApp’s rates

As I stayed on the Discord community I did see people coming up with issues fairly often, some said their money wasn’t counted fairly, some said traffic is not adding up as it should be, and they always replied something along the lines of ‘Sorry, the traffic is impossible to recover, we’re sorry for your inconvenience, stuff happens’.

On November 1, I guess EarnApp decided they had gathered a quite sizable community, as they dropped the rate to $1/GB. Going 5x lower was quite a blow, not gonna lie — but as I said it was still more than most of the other internet sharing apps offered. In a few days, they also opened up the opportunity to earn money to the entire world, so I thought sure, they’re not about to start splashing millions around… and then they revealed all the newly added countries will earn $0.1/GB. I was still on the $1/GB list so I didn’t care much, but it did get my attention. Less than a month in the industry and so many changes already? Red flags.

Fast forward a few days, another change! On November 9, they increased the rate for some countries (like the US — $2/GB, or Canada at $1.5/GB), and others remained at 10 cents per GB. I got $1.25/GB. Lucky me, right? For now.

There was another thing that made EarnApp different: unlike literally all of their competitors, EarnApp was always pretty open about the fact that they allowed using VPNs with residential IPs and changing one in a different country. In fact, one of their official Discord moderators encouraged users to do this in order to boost their earnings and even advised on exact VPN products they should be using. It was expressed as protecting user interest — who wouldn’t want to earn more without putting in much effort, after all.

Black Friday 2021

By the time Black Friday approached, I had $4.77 in my EarnApp balance. I would have earned more as I was lucky enough to live in a better-paid country, but as I said before, I would have needed a mobile app for that. Well no worries. The minimum payout sum is only $5 on EarnApp so I was looking forward to reaching it for the first time and trying to request a payout to see whether they pay as promised.

On Thursday before Black Friday, EarnApp even started a special campaign. They launched a referral program and they said they’ll pay $2 for every person a user brings into the network. What a rate, huh? I didn’t get to use it though, because……. I was banned from the app. Just like that.

First, the EarnApp dashboard started showing my computer wasn’t earning anything due to a ‘low quality IP’. I must add that while Vita did encourage using VPNs, I wasn’t doing it (I figured better quality VPNs cost, and I didn’t want to spend money on such things). And yet the dashboard clearly stated my IP was detected as a VPN.

Curious, I checked by IP on the website called IPQualityScore. What I saw shocked me: the website said my IP has a risk score of 74/100 — which is virtually impossible for a simple home computer. It’s basically a sort of score automated spam machines get. And then it suddenly became clear why I had to solve so many freaking captchas for the last few weeks, why I had issues logging into Netflix and some other sites. My IP was viewed as risky.

And that’s not all! On Black Friday, I actually got banned from EarnApp. The reason? You guessed it. Risky IP. Possible VPN usage. Low quality.

I asked around on Discord, looked around the web and saw I was far from the only one. Sadly, quite a lot of people have experienced the same thing — both the boost in their IP risk score and banning from the app.

Naturally, I went on Discord to look for an explanation, and oh my god what an experience that was. The moderators were far from polite or formal, and if I ever had a thought of using EarnApp again… I don’t anymore. The quotes speak for themselves. I have added text from first screenshot below.

EarnApp belongs to BrightData. BrightData has many large, serious customers. Banks, insurance companies, airlines, ecommerce sites etc.
all these companies use your IP to collect information from the web. Like prices, reviews, research papers, etc. that’s the deal. You give your IP, they have the right to use it to download information from the web. Just normal web information that is available to anyone, without username/password. For example, the price of a flight from New York to London.
Now, as you can imagine these are serious companies. Many of them public companies, on nasdaq or other stock exchange. They are very serious about privacy, GDPR, security, etc.
OK. So they use your IP’s. And guess what? many of you are CHEATING. I am not saying all of you. I am saying some of you. Your probably know who you are. Cheating, by using VPS servers, all sorts of baguettes, crap like that.
add to this the fact that most of you have been using less-than-reputable apps for a long time and you can see how some of your IP’s don’t have the best reputation.
Now, we love you and we want you to be happy and make a lot of money but try to think like business men and not like hungry passive-income seekers for a minute.
EarnApp is supposed to be on your MAIN pc. Or on other people’s MAIN pc and you make referral money from that. you probably saw we released referral a few days ago. I think that most of you — if you are smart — will make more money from referrals than from your own PC.
so what happened was: as EarnApp grew — and you all know because you made a lot of money — you got more traffic. and more customers sent traffic through your device. and guess what? some of that traffic was USELESS to us because it was blocked (for example, when trying to get the price of the New York-London flight ticket) because of bad reputation. So we actually paid you for a few weeks for traffic that we DID NOT GET PAID FOR.
i’ll give you all some time to process this.
I am not going to answer any 1:1 issues here, stop posting them you are annoying.
get off the chat then, dummy
OK. so moving forward. what can happen.
we use a few external services that we pay a LOT of money for to verify if the IP is ok or not. you don’t have access to all of them. that ipqos site you all use only gives partial information. In addition we run our own statistics to see if the IP is good or if it is blocked. Of course you don’t have access to that either.
I want to be very clear: we want as many IPs from you as possible. BUT THEY NEED TO BE VALID.
I don’t need earnapp to make money but if I did I would focus my efforts on the following thigs:
1. referrals. Get many people to join, they most likely won’t be “PROs” like you. No VPNs, no VPS, no VMs, didn’t screw up their IP reputation etc. Sit back and enjoy their revenue. another advantage for you: it’s stable. 100 people earning is stable. if 5 bet banned you won’t feel it. if YOU get banned with 100 fake machines you feel it.
2. IP reputation. It is POSSIBLE some of you got screwed. I mean: you followed all the rules, you never used another bandwidth app, no VPNs etc. THIS SHIT CAN HAPPEN. If you think this is the case, there will be an FAQ in a few days of how you can appeal. We will KNOW if you were OK or not. Someone making $10/day on 10 machines in on the same ISP NOT OK. It should not happen. So i suggest you only appeal if you know you were 100% OK. In any case our decision is final for your IP. You can of course change IP and/or invest in referrals
again will let you time to read and process.
3. TrustPilot reviews. It was nice to see how you all gave 5 stars when we fixed all payment issues, and in a way also nice to see how you took this so hard and are now giving 1 star reviews. Trustpilot is nice but to be honest we don’t give it too much importance — we invest in making the product good. I am sure you saw VERY quick changes in last few weeks. This will continue. So feel free to leave reviews, good or bad.
4. Changing IP: you are all resourceful and I am sure you can find ways of changing your IP. Restart your router, change MAC address, change ISP — whatever you want. In any case there are no guarantees. Guys, this is not a life-changing app. Don’t take it so hard. you can always use some of the others (although they don’t pay as well:) ).
So to summarize:
1. We love you and we want your IP’s and we want to pay you
2. We can’t use just any IP. We have real customers who won’t accept garbage IPs.
3. We will continue making EarnApp better
4. With referrals you can make more (stable) income.
5. If you still think you were impacted by these changes and it’s totally not your fault you will be able to appeal in a few days. But remember, we know a lot.i think that’s it. Thanks for your patience, this is more words that you read in a week for some of you

I don’t think I need to tell any of you this is an absolutely unacceptable way to talk to your consumer. As I said, I went to Discord to find some constructive explanation or instructions on how I should approach the issue, but instead I found EarnApp’s general manager calling his own app’s users dummies and hungry passive income seekers. Quite honestly, this felt like a slap on the face, and I’m certainly not alone in this.

So yeah, to sum it up, I got my IP flagged as risky just in time for the Black Friday sales, I earned nothing sharing my bandwidth, EarnApp’s team showed massive and public disrespect to their users instead of talking to them like normal people should, aaaaaaand well at least I’ve got a story to tell now. Not the happiest one, but definitely unlike anything I have experienced before. Stay safe online everyone, and be a bit more cautious with just-launched apps… I know I will be from now on.