Yeah, it definitely had me go to an external website, which seemed fishy to me in the first place, and then explore to give them a review. I should have backed out when I started smelling tuna.
Yeah, that sounds like a TOS problem. For reference, this list from MTurk has some examples:
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=policies
In particular, the review HIT you're talking about sounds like it could be a few of these:
What are some specific examples of HITs that violate Amazon Mechanical Turk policies?
- HITs that directly or indirectly promote a site, service, or opinion
- HITs that violate the terms and conditions of an activity or website (for instance asking Workers to vote for something)
- HITs that generate "referred" site visits or click-through traffic
- HITs that ask Workers to take action to manipulate a website's behavior or results