Actually no, or at least I don't think so.
I recently received an email from a representative of a company called 'Edutech' offering to pay me $800 a month to host adverts for them on my web site.
I thought this sounded too good to be true, so I did a bit of digging and discovered they're a company which connect students with 'professional tutors' who help them write their assignments on a fee per assignment basis.
The chat bot, which I installed on my secondary blog to test it, takes students to their site... all it is is this (bottom right hand corner, it opens up when you click on it, but otherwise it's quite unobtrusive).
(Rather satisfyingly I had to head to Chrome to get this screen capture, Brave blocked it!)
A couple of further email inquiries convinced me the company were genuine - i.e. it is actually a company with a registered name, legal team, contracts, rather than a scammer, so I went ahead and installed the chat bot on my main site.
20 minutes later they'd sent me $800 via PayPal, from 'Edutech', Malta. No contract necessary.
Needless to say this all feels a bit wrong, but I can't for the life of me see what I've got to lose - if my traffic takes a hit, or if people complain about said chat bot, I can just delete the widget early and send them back a portion of the cash - this whole relationship seems based on trust.
They could of course dispute the payment (I've had a couple of people do that on PayPal, clearly scammers 'cos there's nothing I can do about it as a seller of digital products) but it's a genuine company, and it strikes me as a lot of money to risk for one advert.
I guess morally it's not the right thing to do - but then again my site is mainly for A-level sociology which is 100% assessed by exam, so for my primary target audience tuition aimed at assignments makes little sense, and for anyone else getting a little extra help with their assignments so what, money already largely determines what grades people get anyway!
If anyone knows of anything I should be worried about with this deal, please do let me know. I'm still sitting here thinking this is too good to be true, I keep checking my emails for bad news, and I'm going to just let this $800 sit for a few months, I can't quite believe it's real!
If it is real, this is the easiest money I ever earned, even if it only lasts a month!