15/05/09. Ivy-Castle Review and Other News

THIS PROGRAM IS DELAYING PAYOUTS! PLEASE DON’T INVEST!

Hi everyone! I don’t know about the rest of you but I for one am glad to finally see another Friday. I hope you’re all looking forward to this couple of days off as I am. But of course there’s always time for money-news and today I’m looking at a not quite new but recently launched program called Ivy-Castle. You may recall I first mentioned it a couple of days ago when I joined it at the same time as TraderSolid (reviewed here). And while I did say I was less enthusiastic about this one, that does not mean it’s bad. In fact it’s about an average option in its own right and at least worth a closer look. Remember there simply must be room for diversity in every portfolio if you want it to succeed.

We’ll start by looking at the plans I suppose, but this isn’t really as easy to explain as usual. I know that the admin of Ivy-Castle is hoping to engineer a gradual shift away from the shorter more medium term plans and eventually focus on longer term options. That doesn’t mean the existing ones I’m going to describe here are going to be scrapped or anything, but it might be worth your while to check back from time to time to see how things develop. I’ll keep you updated here on my blog as usual anyway. But for now we have two choices you need to be aware of. A daily payment plan and a weekly one, both of which run for 28 calendar days.

The daily plan, or “Vitamin Plan” as they so colorfully put it, pays you a variable rate of interest that can be anything from 1.8% to 2.5% per day depending on the size of your deposit. This works out as follows. $10 to $999 earns 1.8%. $1,000 to $2,999 earns 2.0%. $3,000 to $4,999 earns 2.3% and finally $5,000 and upwards with no stated maximum will earn you 2.5%
With a minimum investment of $10 it’s affordable to most and your principal gets returned on expiry. So if we look at a practical example of a nice easy figure of $100 invested you can expect a daily payment of $1.80 meaning you will not see a profit until after the program expires. It will leave you with a total profit of $50.40, and then return your original hundred.

The other plan also runs for 28 days and offers 4 weekly payments of between 13% and 20%. Payments here are calculated like this. Deposits from $10 to $999 earn 13% weekly. Deposits from $1,000 to $2,999 earn 15%. $3,000 to $4,999 earns 17% and $5,000 and up will earn 20%. So if you’d like to put our imaginary $100 in this plan you will be paid $13 per week and finish the term with a total of $52 before having your principal returned. As you can see the difference between the earnings in the two plans is so little as to make me wonder why they bothered to implement two plans at all.

The list of payment processors accepted by Ivy-Castle is quite extensive although not all of them are so popular. The familiar site of PerfectMoney and LibertyReserve is there of course, along with the less seen Pecunix, EvoWallet and C-Gold. The pick of the bunch however is the addition of AlertPay which is a rare sight among HYIPs.

The security of Ivy-Castle is reasonable. I can tell you that it’s hosted on a dedicated server, and that is a great start. I can also tell you that it’s a Staminus server, and they simply don’t come much better than that. And I can tell you that they do have protection from DdoS attacks. Of course you can always feel free to do your own research in that area. In fact I would encourage you to do so. The script is licensed from GoldCoders so everything is fine in that department.

Communication with the admin is via an online e-mail ticketing system. I have to say a major criticism of Ivy-Castle here is that background information is a bit thin to say the very least. There is no FAQ page for example and a lot of information is simply not made available to you until after you join. One example of where they fall down for instance is the poor explanation of their plans. Again you have to sign up before they are fully explained. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to put this right but after three weeks online it hasn’t been addressed so I doubt that it will. Of course if you like the plans then it matters little to the program’s performance, but I don’t see why I should have to join up before I find out if I consider the plans to be suitable or not. I suppose the real point I’m trying to make here is that it’s hard to describe Ivy-Castle as user friendly.

The approach from Ivy-Castle to put themselves forward as a biological research company was, well, interesting, and I must say a refreshing change from the usual drivel about Forex trading. But it’s no more true than the claims of most other HYIP sites. The text being used is a straight copy-paste from the website of an actual Bio-tech company called LAE Bio that has it’s manufacturing facility in the town of Rockville, Maryland in the USA. Apart from the place being made semi-famous in the song by REM (“Don’t go back to Rockville”) that remains the only piece of information I know about that city, lol! But realistically, Ivy-Castle should be approached with the same caution as any HYIP. Remember that they are not quite a new program so your best chance of earning a profit may be gone, but might be worth a few bucks as long as you remember it’s a gamble.

Other news for today.

First of all I would like to report you that I finally received a reply from Louise, the admin of SilverLodge (interviewed here) today. And as I expected, no meeting will take place again today. Although Louise states that he is in London already but he is ill (had a bad cold) and so cannot come to the meeting. Still I would appreciate if he called or texted instead of emailing me. I don’t think it’s a big deal to call a mobile phone even if you’re ill. Anyway, since Louise is ill and his partner Dominique is handling the site alone expect some delays in replies to your emails. I myself had no problems with SilverLodge and once I have confirmation that all those who complained about the delays with STP cashouts are paid I will gladly return SilverLodge to a higher place on my monitoring page. Although Louise told me that everything is fine I prefer to get some confirmation about it from the people that experienced such problems. I hope once Louise recovers we will finally be able to meet in London and I would like to wish him a speedy recovery. By the way, since now Dominique handles all the support issues you can write to her should any problem arise at dominique.silverinvest@gmail.com I can confirm that she has already solved one issue with a reader here quite fast. I hope that problem with STP cashouts was just a technical glitch which will not affect the program. Again I must admit that SilverLodge keeps paying despite further delays with our meeting. I would appreciate though if the members are informed about the delay with the meeting via mass email. I suppose we should hear something encouraging from Louise by the beginning of next week.

It seems PrismoFunds is really gone. I gave the admin the benefit of the doubt yesterday because the site was paying till the end. It seems to me now that the site is gone and cannot be recovered. I have also received no response from the admin of the program so far. I doubt very much that this was a planned act as the program kept paying until it’s diappeared. Otherwise, they would simply leave the site open for unsuspecting investors like ImperialFinances did and stopped paying. Anyway, until the site is back online I can’t say one thing or another because I don’t really know what happened. So I hope to get some response from the admin of PrismoFunds in the near future.

Poplans (reviewed here) again increased the daily interest for the 10 day plan. From now on you will be paid 12.97%-16.97% for 10 days. I have already adjusted the plans on my monitoring page and would like to remind you that PerfectMoney is also accepted by Poplans now (together with LibertyReserve).

It seems that GoldNuggetInvest site (reviewed here) is back online after upgrading their DdoS protection. I hope this also means that all the support requests will be answered in time from now on. I would also like to clarify the change in ratings. Again, I don’t think that GoldNuggetInvest is a bad investment choice. I think it’s still a very attractive program for investing and the recent changes with upgrading the protection level to Enterprise level and incorporation in Belize are the best indicators that GoldNuggetInvest in a perfectly healthy state. So GoldNuggetInvest is still in my Top 5 recommended programs. Other programs in Top 5 include now such programs like NovalexFinance, GeniusFunds, PanaMoney and NanoMoneyCorp. They were all very good performers for a long time and worth your close attention.

I hope USDozen will be in higher positions soon as well. The first payouts on expiry should be processed by tomorrow (121% after 11 days) and I hope we will see the first positive votes that will make the program grow even further. I’m planning to publish an interview with the admin of USDozen Roger once the first payouts on expiry are processed. So stay tuned for that!

Although OakCash (reviewed here) is back online after some downtime I still had some difficulties with logging in. It seems their SSL was not working properly despite what was said in the recent newsletter I received from the admin:
“Hello Member, Today we have some error on https few hour ago. But Now already fixed and member can login to account for deposit or withdraw. Sorry for inconvenience.”
Fortunately, it seems by now the issue was fully solved and members are able to make the withdrawals again:
“We have a little issue with server protection so every member login back to homepage. Now issue has been tested resolved. Let me know if problem still persist. Sorry for inconvenience.”

If like me you’re still receiving fake e-mails allegedly from CascoFunds (reviewed here) with the offer to act fast and get into 125% after 3 days or similar plan by transferring the money to some ecurrencies you might be interested to know that they are spoofing emails and the real admin of CascoFunds has nothing to do with scammers. This is what I found on his website:
“CascoFunds Inc never send mails with any special plans. Our investment programs are always on our website. Do NOT invest to any special plans offered via mails more“.

This is all the news for today and in the end here are the programs that paid me today: Poplans, MajorBarter, SilverLodge, ForexExperts, PanaMoney, GeniusFunds, NovalexFinance, NorthBizz, Ivy-Castle, HighRiseFinance, DamexTrade, InvestmentForge, OakCash, FlowBroker, EwoCapital, EdwardBrownInvestments, TraderSolid, SteadyGrowthInvest, USDozen and EnscoOffshore. See you on my blog tomorrow with an interesting interview!