Invitations to participate in external psych activities.

I have received multiple PMs asking me to join in questionnaires, studies, webinars, and talk radio shows about things that I have previously posted about.
These people have to sign up as members in order to send me a PM, but even if they identify themselves as a student at a university or some doctor at a hospital, how do I know this for sure? None of them have posted here, they registered here solely to send a PM.
Now I am generally a trusting person and take people at face value, but I also have concerns of personal privacy and anonymity on the internet.
I kindly decline the invitation to participate because of this.
However I still want to be helpful in educating and in answering the questions that professionals may have about my experiences. I also want to reach out to others wanting to learn more or who are suffering from the same things that I may have experienced, but just don't know how to proceed. It also helps one to know that they are not alone with the problem.
Is it OK for me to direct these inquiries to the Surveys & Studies section of Psychforums so that I would then feel more comfortable in participating?:
surveys-studies/topic44450.html
If others participate in the Surveys & Studies, it would also give more helpful insights than mine alone.
How would you answer others who ask you to share of yourself, what you went through and what it is like now?
Thank you.

No one here is a professional. And any studies and surveys must be approved before it is placed in the public forum. Please report anyone to a moderator so this type of thing can be taken care of. These types of PM's are not allowed and can result in a member being banned permanently from the forum. Please do not answer any questions of theirs. It is to protect you.

If anyone receives such a PM as that, please report it by clicking on the Exclamation mark (!) on the top right corner of the PM sent to you. And report it.

Definitely as Quietgirl says.... it's clearly in the forum rules that canvassing or recruiting via PM is a serious infraction and can result in instant ban. We have a sticky on the Surveys/Studies detailing how to contact site admin to show proper proofs and submit a survey.

When a new poster tries to submit a post to the Survey thread, they get a PM from us pointing them in the directions they should have read, but it's no big deal.

When they bypass us and PM members directly, it don't go well for them. That looks too much like purposely bypassing the rules. Because surveys can (and sometimes do) break user privacy, that makes it a serious deal to us.