Mturk - legit or scam???

If you get scammed, it is the fault of the person providing the work. You should be able to report them. Amazon is an extremely well known company. It's very doubtful that they want to ruin their reputation like that. All I can recommend is that you look through what is being offered. Most of the higher paying jobs seem to involve writing.

It really depends on the tasks you do. I earned really well there after my daughter was born in 2010. They had a lot of easy photo moderation tasks that paid very well, and I could easily make more sitting there at home than my husband was making in a day working a full-time job. I stopped working on it as much when that task provider stopped putting up as many tasks, but I still do things occasionally. I've rarely had problems with not being paid for the work I did and that's a problem with the requester not Amazon. I always do just a couple of tasks from a requester to start with, and if they reject my work (and I'm sure I followed the directions) I add them to my blacklist and don't do any more tasks from them. That way I don't mess up my percentages with people who just want the work done for free. Thankfully it doesn't happen very often but I like to be safe rather than sorry!