In a TikTok video with more than 4 million views, Jillian Randall laid out a simple way for anyone to start a $5,000 to $10,000 per month side hustle “as a complete beginner.” All you need to do, she explained, is become an affiliate marketer for Amazon. For every product that you promote and convince people to buy, the company will pay you a commission (Amazon’s Associates Program pays out 3% for furniture, according to its website).

What she doesn’t disclose in the video is that it didn’t work for her. The video was one of the first she posted on her account in August 2023, but she quit hawking Amazon products on Pinterest after about a month when she wasn’t able to bring in a meaningful income.

Instead, the stay-at-home mom in her 40s has found that it’s a lot more lucrative to teach her approximately 58,000 followers how to become digital marketers. She claims the secrets to her success can be found in an online class from the Digital Wealth Academy, which offers to teach people how to build a business online and sell products “while you sleep.” She sells the class for $497 a pop, making her at least $17,000 monthly, she told Forbes in an interview last year.

Randall is part of a growing ecosystem of creators on platforms like TikTok and Instagram who promote digital marketing courses to people looking to boost their income through easy side hustles. As the rising cost of living has forced many Americans to bring in more money, the hashtag #SideHustle has some 6.9 million posts on Instagram and 4.1 million on TikTok. And while being a successful affiliate for Amazon or other brands is possible, many creators have found it’s a lot easier to claim the secrets to success than to practice what they preach.

Some influencers promote their own educational materials, but many sell popular courses like Digital Wealth Academy, The Roadmap Exclusive and Legendary Marketer. All three promise to teach the foundations of digital marketing and building an online business, such as finding a niche, driving engagement and creating sales funnels. “Passive income is the cheat code,” reads a banner on Digital Wealth Academy’s website. The course pledges to help you “build your business around your ideal schedule.” The founder of Digital Wealth Academy did not respond to a request for comment.

But there are perverse incentives at work here. Some of these companies give influencers as much as 85% of sales revenue every time they’re able to sell a course, and others offer what are known as “master resell rights,” so creators can keep 100% of the profits on any sale they make of the course. As a result, Forbes found many creators end up overpromising how easy it is to earn money from online side hustles in the hopes of drawing viewers to their page. Posts with the #SideHustle hashtag are filled with promises of “stupid easy” or “lazy” side hustles that can allegedly earn users thousands a month from the comfort of their couch.

Creator Crystal Witter claims in a TikTok with over 6 million views that you can spend 30 minutes creating a “digital product” on Canva and rake in $8,100 per month in sales, while another creator Audrey Marie promotes working for transcription services to earn an extra $3,000 a month in a video with 2.6 million views. Through links in their profiles, Witter sells The Roadmap course and Marie sells Digital Wealth Academy (neither responded to a request for comment).

In interviews with Forbes, the companies behind two of the courses, The Roadmap Exclusive and Legendary Marketer, blamed some creators for making misleading claims about how much income can be earned from their courses and stood by their business practices.

Husband-and-wife duo Zach and Hannah Pippins, creators of The Roadmap, revamped their business model in August, ditching the master resell rights model for an affiliate program, allowing them to distance their business from what Hannah described as “scammy” content.

“When you give people an inch, they’ll take a mile, but only if you as the business owner allow it,” she says. “And unfortunately, we allowed it for longer than we should have.”

Randall said she was mimicking other creators in her early posts, and has since changed her approach because she “didn’t feel right about it.” The course she sells is “designed for you to be able to basically create a business around something you’re passionate about,” she says.

But as is usually the case, get-rich-quick schemes are hardly ever what they seem. “The No. 1 problem with side hustle culture on TikTok is the fact that it is often easier to teach someone how to side hustle than it is to actually do the side hustle,” says Nate Hoskin, CFP, founder and lead advisor for Colorado-based Hoskin Capital and an influencer on TikTok with more than 230,000 followers.

The stakes are high. The Federal Trade Commission has in some cases sued companies and individuals for misleading consumers about the income they can make through various online opportunities, from e-commerce to affiliate marketing. For instance, the agency sent more than $2.4 million in refunds to customers of Lurn, an online business coaching company, which settled with the FTC after the agency alleged the company made “unfounded claims,” including that consumers could become a “Stay-At-Home Millionaire.”

Anyone boasting about the income that can be earned from an opportunity has to be able to substantiate not only that they made that amount, but that the typical person could, too, according to Kati Daffan, assistant director in the Federal Trade Commission’s Division of Marketing Practices. And disclaimers at the bottom of the checkout page are not enough—it must be “clear and conspicuous,” Daffan said.

“Social media has changed the landscape significantly because it is so possible for people to reach a very wide audience with many kinds of claims, which can lead to an ease in recruiting new people to an opportunity and cause things to spread very quickly,” she said.

Such videos are “hope traps,” says Ryan, a creator who makes videos reviewing viral money money-making schemes. He asked to go by only his first name for job security concerns. Ryan first turned to videos about supposedly easy ways to make money after his home was damaged in a winter storm, but none helped him meaningfully chip away at his debt. Now, he runs his “side hustle review” account on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

“People have figured out, these get attention and get people to watch,” he says. “Easy money is just appealing.”