I'm a software developer, but I took a brief career break in 2011 to try B2B sales for an ISP. I was the only sales rep with experience as a developer, so I was always looking for ways to use my software skills to get an edge as a sales rep.

The most valuable prospects were businesses in buildings where we had a direct fiber connection. There were sites online that purported to list the buildings and leads that the company bought from somewhere, but the sources were all really noisy. Like 98% of the time, the phone number was disconnected or didn't match the address the source said, so basically nobody used these sources.

I thought MTurk would be my secret weapon. If I could pay someone like $0.10/call to call business and confirm the business name and address, then I'd turn these garbage data sources into something where 100% of the prospects were valid, and none of the sales reps competing with me would have time to burn through these low-probability phone numbers.

The first day, I was so excited to call all the numbers that the MTurk workers had confirmed, and...

The work was all fake. They hadn't called anyone at all. And they were doing the jobs at like 4 AM local time when certainly nobody was answering phones at these businesses.

I tried a few times to increase the qualifications and increase pay, but everyone who took the job just blatantly lied about making the calls and gave me useless data.

Still, I thought MTurk was a neat idea and wish I'd found a better application for it.