MJB on Ralf’s Latest Scam

Like I said in my post before this, I emailed Michael J. Bruzzese, the guy whom I was fuming over because he closed down MMHIP.

What can I say?  Lawyers are a double-edged sword.

I told him about the latest scam Ralf-finance.com was into.  he will now include the e-gold account that steals investor’s money thru phishing in his freeze order request for the courts.

 Below is his reply:

Michael J. Bruzzese” <mjblaw@verizon.net> wrote:

We do have a case against Ralf Finance pending already.  In fact, I was working on it when your email came in.  We are aware of Ralf’s latest scam.  Thank you for the e-gold account reference.  We will take appropriate legal measures.

Thanks again!

Regards,

MJB
At 07:19 AM 8/21/2006 -0700, you wrote:

hi
 
do you have a case on ralf-finance.com already? if so, please add e-gold account number 3507179 to your list of accounts to freeze.
 
This account is used to steal money from ralf-finance.com investors.  They make investors think that their previous investments can be withdrawn, then ask members to make a test $0.01 spend to verify their account.  Once they try to make a spend, they are directed to a fake e-gold site, and if you type in your password, they will clear out your account balance! 
here is egold’s email to me when I complained to them:
 

EG DDU <7eLO2428_ddu@e-gold.com> wrote:

We have investigated and blocked account number 3507179. Unfortunately we

will not be able to refund your money because all e-gold spends are final

and not reversible as stated in the e-gold account user agreement. e-gold

is also contractually prohibited from freezing e-gold accounts or releasing

e-gold account information in the absence of a court order or subpoena. You

might want to consider obtaining some combination of help from a legal

professional or law enforcement to obtain a court order, if the size of your

loss warrants expenditure of your resources (time and money) to resolve.

Thank You,

Due Diligence Unit

Ralf-Finance is at it again

Not being content with running off with their investor’s money, Ralf now sends out emails to these same investors telling them that all is OK.

Investors will then be asked to log in and deposit $0.01 to verify their e-gold account.   The deposit page for the $0.01, however, is a fake e-gold site, designed to steal the investor’s password and immediately empty their e-gold account.

A lot of people fell for it, including someone I know.  I get the details from him, and have contacted e-gold about this. It’s funny how there are a lot of victims but very few report these incidences.

Anyway, I got a reply from e-gold, and the account that stole the money has now been blocked.  The problem with blocked accounts is that they cannot receive funds, but they can still do whatever they want with the money. (that’s my understanding based on the email below)

Hmm.. maybe I’ll email that lawyer guy who’s been an a$$ to other HYIPs.

 Here’s e-gold’s email:

EG DDU <7eLO2428_ddu@e-gold.com> wrote:

We have investigated and blocked account number 3507179. Unfortunately we
will not be able to refund your money because all e-gold spends are final
and not reversible as stated in the e-gold account user agreement. e-gold
is also contractually prohibited from freezing e-gold accounts or releasing
e-gold account information in the absence of a court order or subpoena. You
might want to consider obtaining some combination of help from a legal
professional or law enforcement to obtain a court order, if the size of your
loss warrants expenditure of your resources (time and money) to resolve.

Thank You,
Due Diligence Unit

How to Set up an HYIP Scam Site

Disclaimer:  These are just my assumptions on how it should be done, since my day job is making websites, and my night job is investing in HYIP. 

1. Get a domain name.  Make sure it is anonymous.  Getting an anonymous domain name ensures that you will not be traced in case of any problems. (5 mins)

2. Get Web Hosting.  Preferrably, one that accepts egold.  Some companies offer anonymous hosting as well. It seems katz global is the number one choice. (5 mins to 24 hours)

3. Get an HYIP Manager script. Goldcoders seems to be the top choice, but there are other scripts as well. (5 mins)

4. Get an e-gold account. Use a new one, actually, get at least 2. One for accepting deposts and paying off investors, and another one to keep most of the money.  Just in case the primary e-gold account gets blocked.  (5 mins)

5. Fund your e-gold account.  You’ll need initial capital to pay off the early investors and build good will.  So you will lost some money at the start. (24 – 48 hours by creditcard)

6. Make sure you can install all these different components together. (allow 24-48 hours for the domain name servers to propagate)

7. Make sure you have a nice professional website design/writeup. (3 days)

8. Create advertising banners. (3 hours)

9. Advertise in different HYIP Monitors. (4 hours)

10. Advertise in different HYIP forums. (4 hours)

11. Be sure to be active in the forums and pay on time.  (daily)

Another E-gold phishing attempt

These people are definitely going to hell!

 Anyway, I got another of those emails.  It looks very real, but still a fake.  The link ( http://www.e-gold.com.secrd.com/acct/login.html ) tries very hard to look like it’s from e-gold, but you will know that it is not, because the mother domain is secrd.com.  I checked it in whois, and the domain was just registered today.  The mail server used is from makng.com, which was registerd a day earlier. (you can find that our by checking your email headers.

 To check email headers in yahoo mail, just click on the FULL HEADERS link at the lower right of the email.  In outlook express, it is found in File->Properties->Details->Message Source

Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 09:09:15 -0400
To: xxx@yahoo.com
Subject: Notification of e-gold account update
From: AccountRobot_donotreply@e-gold.com  Add to Address Book  Add Mobile Alert 
   
Dear e-gold user,

Due to the number of incorrect login attempts, your e-gold account
has been temporarily limited for your security. This has been done
to secure your account and to protect your private information in
case the login attemps were not done by you.

Account access will remain limited until this issue will be solved.
Please click on the link bellow and log in to your account:

Restore e-gold account access

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and appreciate
assistance in helping us maintain the integrity of the entire
e-gold system. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Please do not reply to this automatically generated email message.

Byebye MMHYIP

Last week, I had $100 to spend. I was thinking of plaing it into anHYIP program that pays 1-3% a day.  There were a bunch to choose from – stellent, packard, yellowstone.  These were ok programs, but are fairly young.  So I chose a veteran in this field – MoneyMakerHYIP.com.  They have been online for more that a year, so I thought I’d be safe here – WRONG!

 A day after investing, the site goes down. DDoS, says the admin.  Today, more bad news.  Another lawyer enters the HYIP picture and so, there goes my money.  Here’s the admin’s message from their forum:

 Dear Members,

It’s been more than one year since we started with this ambitious project to let people deposit their funds through our team of investors getting as much profit as possible. Unhopelessly the world is not even near perfection and is plenty of evil people who only try to success in their business without thinking in the others.

It’s of public knowledge that we have been under a big DDoS attack the beginning of the last week. “Mysteriously” after the DDoS attack a “well know lawyer” whose main activity is to destroy the Hyip industry presented an order to E-gold to Freeze all the Moneymaker Accounts as well as my personal ones. He is “supposed” to be working as an Attorney of one of our investors and demands that Moneymaker hasn’t paid his obligation although you all know we are surely the only hyip who paid each and every day of its life. If you want to verify this, contact him or just show us your support here is the information of the lawyer who started the legal demand:

Scott Michael Hare
Bartony & Hare, LLP
Law & Finance Building
429 Fourth Avenue Suite 1801
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
Tel: 412/338-8632
Fax: 412/338-6611
Email: smhare@bartlaw.com

Currently we are starting all the legal process which will take a long time to solve. Probably this people will contact you to offer their services and take your money for nothing.

You must be sure that as soon this problem gets to an end we will try to return all the deposits you made.

You can contact us via e-mail or phone to get more information

Regards,

Javier Bogan
MoneyMakerHyip Team

Lawyers are worse that Scammers

If you have ever lost money to an HYIP program, I’m sure you feel bad about it, but at least you know there are risks involved that the program is a ponzi scheme.

But what if you lost money because an a$$hole lawyer produced a court order to freeze the e-gold account of your HYIP program? Take note: This HYIP program has been paying you diligently EVERY DAY WITHOUT FAIL.

How would you feel?  Would you want to curse and scream and beat the living $HIT out of this lawyer?  A lawyer who expects to take a 30% cut out of the total HYIP program funds in order to go away?

Well… let me give you a test case…. www.real-fund.com is the victim and the lawyer is Michael Bruzzese.

IF you ask e-gold why the accounts were frozen this is their reply:

Abuse <55m60E6X_abuse@e-gold.com> wrote:

xxx,

Real-fund.com e-gold accounts have been frozen pursuant to a court
order
issued by the attorney listed below. Please contact this individual
if you
have any questions or claims to the frozen assets.

Michael Bruzzese
The Bank Tower, Suite 1008
307 Forth Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
Tel: 412-281-8676
Fax: 412-281-8046
mjblaw@verizon.net

Regards,
e-gold Abuse

Did I mention that Real Fund pays it’s members every day without fail?  Check out this bullShit the lawyer wrote in response one of RF’s members:

“Michael J. Bruzzese” <mjblaw@verizon.net> wrote:

Thank you for your message regarding Real-Fund. This is a quick response
to confirm that we have initiated litigation against this illegal operation
because it has defrauded its investors. We are engaging in an effort to
effectuate a recovery for victims of this fraudulent operation.

We will be sending additional information within the next several
days. Meanwhile, you should gather any information you have regarding your
investment with Real-Fund, including the dates and amounts of all
investments, the form of your investment (e.g., e-gold, bank wire, etc.),
the total amount of any interest payments you received, and your total net
loss.

In the meantime, we have placed you on our contact list and you will
receive additional information and updates as they become available.

We look forward to communicating with you in the near future.

Regards,

MJB

You can check out the discussion on real-fund’s official forum. 

Mosaic Finance – SCAM

I did not invest here, but I did some basic DD so I might as well post it. 

 Basically, ecommerce-journal.com already said they were a scam in their post.  But since I don’t really trust them that much, I also checked out their source, the person was  Ms. Louise Mitchell , Executive Director of  International Financial Services Authority in  St.Vincent.  I went to the official St. Vincent website at www.stvincentoffshore.com.  I filled up the contact us form last Saturday, and Ms. Louise Mitchell herself replied:

 Dear xxx,
Thank you for your enquiry sent to info@stvincentoffshore.com on August
5,
2006.
Yes I can confirm that I did write the email that is posted on
ecommerce’s
website. I did not authorise them to publish it, however the contents
of it
were written by me and are true. See our website later today for a
similar
warning on Mosaic Finance.
And yes I do work for IFSA, I am the head of the organisation.
Kind regards
Louise Mitchell

Ms. Louise Mitchell
Executive Director
International Financial Services Authority
P.O. Box 356
Grenville Street
Kingstown
St.Vincent.
Tel:784 456 2577
Fax: 784 457 2568
email: louise@vincysurf.com

 Note: I asked permission to post her email since she indicated in her email that she did not authorize ecommerce-journal to do so.

My First successful DD on a scammer.

On Aug 5, I got a PM in my talkgold account regarding an HYIP, LawFirmInvest Ltd.  http://www.lfi.by.ru/ . The PM even included screenshots of payments received. 

Good day tlorenzo!

This project is very famous as I know. Admin prefers to advertise his project by the forex market (no forums at all). I`ve decided to earn some money from using referral system.

I have no problems at all with this one and have been earning
hundreds of dollars since February.

So please, if you want to invest use this link -
http://www.lfi.by.ru/?777 The LFI COMPANY.

A little bit below you can see proofs of the payments that I had got.

http://tinyurl.co.uk/flle

http://tinyurl.co.uk/njn0

http://tinyurl.co.uk/as58
Sincerely,
Andrew K.

When I went to the site, I saw the admin even had business registrations provided.  I therefore made some simple google checks – first, I googled the name of the person in the business registration – Simon Aronsohn.  The results were encouraging.  I found some of his names listed and the company he was in was Law Firm Ltd. in UK.  So I went to the site of the UK office and inquired from their contact form.

Today, I received a reply from the said UK office:

Dear XXX,

Thank you for your enquiry.

Please note that we DO NOT HAVE any branch office or subsidiary any where in the world.

We are just operating from one office and that is in London only. We have noticed that “law firm Invest Ltd.” has got our address as their head quarters which is completely wrong and misleading.

Please note that we are going to take very strong action against that fake company as they are using our name and office address without our prior knowledge or consent.

And it goes without saying that any one who conducts business with that fake company would be responsible for his own losses.

Thank you,

Yours Sincerely,

Intisar Ali Chauhan
Company Solicitor

Queens House,

180 Tottenham Court Road,

London

W1T 7PD

Ph: 02079071460

Fax: 02079071463

www.lawfirmltd.com

intisar@lawfirmltd.com

 OISC: F200 500 002

More Scams

I’m getting tried of posting these scam programs, so I’ll just point you to my scam page.

The list is getting longer and more expensive. The lastest one, T-investment.com, was very promising, and was once number 1 in hyipinvestments.com. I don’t know what happened, but they just stopped paying, altho their site is still up. Their rates aren’t even high, it’s variable, usually 1-2% only so it’s not very scammy.

E-gold Phishing Warning Again

 I got this email from forexers.biz regarding a spam email by scammers.  Thought I’d share it with others:

 #######################################

From: “FB Support” <support@forexers.biz>  Add to Address Book  Add Mobile Alert 
   
Dear member!

Look out! If you have recently got e-mails from “e-gold” about
“E-gold’s Private Key Generator™” DON’T INSTALL THIS AT YOUR COMPUTERS, THIS
MAILS *ARE NOT FROM E-GOLD* (but from 24.84.218.126). THIS IS PACK OF
SWINDLERS!
–
© Forexers.Biz
http://forexers.biz/contact/
Emergency mail: forexers_biz@yahoo.com
+ 31 847 598115 (fax only)