I just read an old article fom Wired magazine’s online edition. This article was written back in 2002, but is still interesting. It talks about e-gold, it’s history, and some other financial stuff.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.01/egold.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=
August is coming to a close, and I’m going to take a break from investing in new programs. They’re probably scams, anyway. I actually invested another $100 in kaonline last week, and I’ll see where I’ll put my next one. Probably in the private program again.
Next month, I am thinking of writing a script to help HYIP investors manage their different programs. This script will run in a website, and will primarity work for e-gold HYIPs. If you are interested to beta test it, please just leave a comment with your email.
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 They make investors think that their previous investments can be withdrawn, then ask members to make a test $0.01 spend to verify their account.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
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
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)
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: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.
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.comCurrently 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
I also downloaded HYIP Lister, an HYIP Monitor script developed by goldcoders.com. The script is free if you promise to give some of your traffic to goldcoder’s website.
This script is a lot better than the first HYIP Monitor I tested. What’s good about this one is it allows the admin to upload the egold transaction history to allow easier HYIP Monitoring. The admin will still need to verify manually, though, if the program is paying or not and setting the status to PAYING or NOT PAYING.
The purpose of the import feature seems only to display it for the visitors to see.
A sample monitor that uses HYIP List of goldcoders is http://www.hyipranking.com/
HYIP Monitors are notoriously unreliable. Their site says a program is paying when you are sure it isn’t. You know this because you are an investor of this program.
I was wondering why monitors are can’t give us real-time data on paying programs, so I bought one just to see how they work.
I bought a commercial HYIP Monitor script at a very cheap price, $3.95. It is the same script that http://www.365money.com/ is using. I made it run on my windows desktop, but some features can only run on linux.
Anyway, I just want to see the administration pages.
What I saw really disheartened me. The script was very small, and is actually easy to build. It was done by a programmer who has no training on user interface and usability designs. And the most important part of the monitor script that I wanted to find out:
How do you track individual programs if they are paying or not?
Well, it turns out, you need to manually check if each program is paying or not. Once you find that out, you encode the data into the HYIP monitor script. So it’s basically a content management site, you need to encode the data MANUALLY.
So now I know why these monitors take ages to figure out that a program is not paying.
Here’s the next bit of information you will find interesting: The monitor script lets programs advertise in the site, the site admin will then use the ad money paid to fund program for the monitor to track. Whatever profits will then go to the monitor admin.
As an IT Professional specializing in PHP/MYSQL, the same technology that powers most of the internet, I know that a better product can be built. Makes me wonder what these people are thinking …
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.netRegards,
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.
My Investment Tracker 