If it's just like on the HIT preview page then it's not survey content.
But yea referral HITs like these have always been around.
Get banned come back with different accounts.
I was told by a moderator that anything that would not be visible without an MTurk account, or access to the HIT/preview page itself even, is under the umbrella of survey content. Better to be safe than sorry?
I will say in the years since I joined Mturk they have almost completely cleaned up the marketplace as far as spam/scam shit goes.
Used to be a whole lot worse.
And yeah, when I looked into MTurk before initially signing up, it had mixed reviews. Between the community here, and the scripts / add ons, things must be better than they were previously!