08/06/09. InvestiMates Review and Other News

THE PROGRAM IS ClOSED NOW!

Hi everybody! It’s not often in this business that you will see one admin openly admit to being responsible for more than one program, and if you do, they run simultaneously with one typically used as a vehicle to finance the other before they both scam. But not this time. Today I’m looking at the new project from Roger Miller who some of you may remember as the admin of the recently closed autosurf USDozen. The reasons behind USDozen‘s demise were numerous, not really something I need to analyze too closely for today’s review. Maybe Roger will expand on it for us if he agrees to a short interview.

The most important thing for now though is to be sure that USDozen did not close as a scam. The members were informed prior to the closure and all deposit buttons were disabled so new unsuspecting members were not able to join either. As much money as was available was paid back to those not in profit until all available funds were exhausted. I think it’s safe to say that as an admin Roger has treated his members as fairly as possible and has made an attempt to ensure that nobody would lose out too badly. I won’t go on about this anymore, although your opinions are always most welcome. I simply mention it because I feel it needs to be out in the open before we continue with Roger’s new program which is called InvestiMates. And judging from the strong response the program has received in just the first two days online, a lot of you do seem to have a very forgiving attitude if you are treated fairly.

Roger has obviously learned one or two harsh lessons from the recent experience and decided that surfing programs should best take a back seat for now. Not that there was much wrong with his last program or anything, its just that the timing was bad. HYIPs are definitely the stronger option at the moment. So Roger, who’s otherwise quite a good admin by the way, has decided to get started with InvestiMates. And I must say it does have quite a surf style about it, especially the plans. And the plans are quite simple. The first of two available options offers you a daily rate of interest of 10%, which is not only earned daily but paid daily as well, every day for 12 days. Your principal is already factored into the payments so when the plan expires you can expect to break even after 10 days and to finish up with 120% of your initial principal after 12. What could be easier?

The second plan is a bit more of a risk, and so consequently the reward is a little bit more tasty. This plan offers you a chance to earn 12% interest per day, again for 12 days, except this time there is just a once off payment made on expiry. Your principal is again already included in the repayment so this time you will finish the investment term with 144% of your principal. Is it worth the extra risk? That’s your decision but at least in the early stages of the programs life I’d say it probably is.

Both plans are open to the widest possible range of investor with minimum deposits starting from just $5 in either plan with the maximum presently set to $1200. And the choice of payment options available to you is about the safest possible, as far as HYIPs go anyway, with AlertPay, SolidTrustPay, StrictPay, and LibertyReserve. So if you like a little extra insurance on your investment, you know where to join from.

Nothing out of the ordinary to report on the security front. InvestiMates remains up to the high standard previously set by the admin. It’s still on a dedicated server as you should insist upon, and its hosted on the same server as his last effort with all the security benefits and anti-DDoS protection went with it. It was of a good high standard then, and it’s the same now. The script is again licensed from Neversay. Customer support is available in the form of on online e-mail ticketing system, and so far Roger has been as professional as ever in handling questions and inquiries. At least from my personal experience anyway. There is a FAQ page. Information is a bit thin, but to be honest there’s really nothing very complicated going on here. The whole InvestiMates project is being offered to you here as a pure HYIP with none of the usual ForEx nonsense. The navigation is easy and the design is user friendly and nice to look at with it’s fun and quirky style graphics. There’s even a couple of 1960’s style cartoon beatniks with a “bubble” car on top which was very eye catching and gives quite a fun feel to the whole experience.

Overall I am positive about it. There’s probably little need to remind experienced investors about this but for the benefit of new readers, InvestiMates is nothing more than an HYIP game, and never claims to be. That is how it is presented to you and that is how I suggest you take it. The admin to his credit has been totally upfront about all of this and has never claimed anything else. So if you enjoy such games, as I do then InvestiMates is well worth a few bucks. There will be winners here and there will be losers. But what ever happens I think you will be given a fair and equal chance to be a winner, although with no guarantees. But for a slightly improved chance of being a winner, join early.

Other news for today.

First of all, let’s start with the surprising comebacks by a few programs that many of us considered to be dead already. First program was CoolReturn which experienced some downtime problems from the beginning and which I was not able to review for that reason (hopefully I will be able to do that tomorrow). The site seemingly fell victim to a DDoS-attack after just a few days online. Well, it came as no surprise to me as CoolReturn is hosted on a shared server with more than 200 other sites. I think the only reasonable solution for the admin will be to move the site to a dedicated server with proper DDoS-protection and not just introduce a turing number which you can see now when trying to load CoolReturn site. Anyway, the most important thing is that the payouts have been resumed already that made me put CoolReturn back to Paying status. This is what the admin told me when the site was offline and when it just came back:
“My host informed me there was DDOS attack on my site. I am surprised who will attack on one week old baby website. Anyhow completely in touch with host and working to solve this issue. I will keep on updating you…
Site is online and we are working on more better hosting solution including DDOS.”

Merchandies is also back and the admin sent out a newsletter reporting that all the withdrawal requests had been paid. Well, I would say thats not entirely true because out of three pending requests I received only one to my e-currency account. I still have two pending requests but anyway I decided to return the program to Paying status on my monitoring page. I will give the admin of Merchandies a couple of more days to pay the pending requests and hopefully he will pay me soon. Please be aware of that if you intend to deposit in Merchandies in the near future. Yes, the review of Merchandies is also postponed until the admin fulfills his promises from his latest update sent after straight after the site came back online:
“Due to 3 last days downtime, we had Serious DDOS attack. in order to ensure that our members have 24/7 access to their Merchandies accounts, we have decided to prevent possible downtime due to DDoS attacks by upgrading our protection to an even higher level. Merchandies Group uses the services of one of the leading Anti-DDoS protection providers.
So all of pending withdrawal has been processed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Poplans site is supposedly back as well but I found the info on forums that the pending withdrawals had not been paid yet. Moreover, the Rating page has been withdrawn from the site which is not a very good sign. Anyway, I consider this program a goner until the payouts resume.

There is still no update from EvoWallet payment processor regarding the downtime. The site is offline for a couple of days already and is probably dead. I don’t know what the admins of AlterGold hoped to achieve with this new payment processor but the only thing is clear is that they failed. Fortunately, apart from few HYIPs and a bunch of scamming autosurfs nobody accepted their payment processor. There was actually one official reaction offered from the administration of NorthBizz program (reviewed here). They also came to the same conclusion that EvoWallet had demised and promised to pay to everybody who made deposits via EvoWallet to LibertyReserve payment processor. I applaud this decision from NorthBizz which at least helps compensate the possible losses some investors suffered from this scamming payment processor. Here is the latest from NorthBizz:
“EvoWallet payment processor seems to be die. So we decide to stop using it in our website. We changed all EvoWallet deposits and active balances to LibertyReserve payment processor. Good Luck!”

One of the bloggers published the review of SilverLodge where he said that I’m responsible for negative rumors regarding SilverLodge (reviewed here). I would like to clarify some things for my readers. Yes, I consider SilverLodge to be an exceptional program that has been paying since October 2008 without experiencing any significant difficulties along the way (apart from the full transition of the site a few months back of course). The payments from SilverLodge to the vast majority of members are on time (the very few that had some delays were passed by me to Louise and Dominique and they were paid eventually as well). The only reasons for the delay was connected with payment processors issues as I know for sure that many members of SilverLodge were paid thousands of dollars in one go. Yes, SilverLodge is an exceptional program in my opinion but… with a twist. If I had any doubts about them before now I’m 100% sure that SilverLodge is a ponzi (pyramid) HYIP (which is not so scary in itself as 99% of high yield programs operate on the very same principle). Here are the facts that made me think this.
Fact #1. The meeting with Louise in London did not happen for some weird reason. Obviously, something happening behind the scenes which we are not aware of but the reason for not meeting me was quite lame. They never explained it officially either on forums or in their own updates although this meeting was heavily advertised on their site as the ideal opportunity to prove that they were for real. Heck, they were even afraid to give me their phone number and completely ignored my subsequent requests for the meeting. The guy I knew as Louise back in October did ask me to call him so I don’t know what the problem is now.
Fact #2. Nobody has received the promised debit cards that are still being advertised on their site for the staggering amount of $170. The worst thing of all that there is no official update regarding the reasons of a possible delay and the members’ requests concerning not receiving the debit cards are totally ignored by the admins of SilverLodge.
Fact #3. There is absolutely no evidence of SilverLodge administration trading silver being presented to the regular membership. Apart from their claims on the opening of an online silver shop nothing has been done yet and seems the admins totally forgot what they promised to do. Well, I will remind you what they promised to have that done by April:
“We are also ordering from our programmer a silver shop. What will be integrated in the site soon, you can then use the credits you have on your account as well than the account balance to buy beautiful silver jewelry from us, also coins for collectors will be available on the shop. I hope the hop is available during the first week of May 2009, so as you see this site getting some exiting changes once we are fully private, we are also considering a live chat with all members on Sundays every 2 weeks and integrating a forum into our script.”
If all thats not enough for you I’m going to verify their alleged address on Kensington High Street in London next week. We will see if they really have an office there but considering the above mentioned facts I will be very surprised if I find anything interesting there. Anyway, I will try to take pics and put them on my website as proof.
Do you still think that I’m spreading rumors? Not at all. I consider SilverLodge as one of the best HYI programs and even returned it to my Top 5 Recommended list but please invest in SilverLodge only what you can afford to lose as for me it’s just a very well organized investment game and not a real investment opportunity. You can love me or hate me for these words but it’s my opinion which is based on facts, not rumors, and I will stick to it until proven otherwise. But I will respect other opinions as well on that matter.

Fexity (reviewed here) paid the principal back to me last night so since I was one of the first investors of this program I can assume that others got their principals back as well. In my opinion the admin of Fexity Juliette (interviewed here) is doing a great job by paying all the withdrawal requests within hours and regularly updating the members of the program on the recent developments. So recently it was announced that Fexity will go private once it reaches 1,000 members. The bonus will be also closed by then. So maybe it’s the last opportunity to join this wonderful program paying 2% daily for 15 business days or 15% weekly for 3 weeks with the principal returned on expiry. By the way, the script the program is using is quite unique and all the processes in Fexity are automated like the message which I received informing me that I got my principal back to my ecurrency account:
“This is to certify that your 15 days of investment contract of $200 with Fexity is expired. The principal amount has been returned to the e-currency account from which you invested.
You may reinvest if you wish. Please confirm the receipt of Principal Amount. Thank you for investing with us.”

AsianInvestGroup (reviewed here) announced new weekly rates that they will pay to investors for the previous week. I remind you that AsianInvestGroup pays variable weekly returns for their Optimized and Aggressive investment portfolios which you have an option to join when joining. This week brought us more good news from AsianInvestGroup as those weekly rates were increased again:
“Our rates for current week are the following:
Optimized Portfolio – 8.9% weekly (+0.2)
Aggressive Portfolio – 10.7% weekly (+0.7)
Optimized Portfolio Premium (for investments of $1000 and above) – 11.9% weekly
Aggressive Portfolio Premium (for investments of $1000 and above) – 13.7% weekly“.

EuropeanSurfers site which I joined and announced on my site a couple of days ago paid me the first ref commissions today and announced the first referral contest. I’m going to review the site pretty soon but now I would like to say that the growth for the first 4 days was quite moderate and the membership hasn’t yet reached 100. I guess that’s what made the admin to announce the referral contest already. Really, it seems the surfing industry is in hibernation mode for now as not many people are willing to risk their money in such unstable ventures. But maybe the slow growth will make EuropeanSurfers last for a longer period of time? We will wait and see. Anyway, here is the rules of referral contest for all EuropeanSurfers members:
“Good morning and hope you had a nice weekend.
We are proud to announce to you that we just open a referral contest, this is BIG!!!. We will have more than $50 reward for the winners. The prizes are divided in three categories $30 and $20. You can earn one of them by referring new members to the program, by creating a video cast about EuropeanSurfers and adding it to youtube and other investment blogs, by helping members on forums and by using your creativity to show EuropeanSurfers to other members. We would like to give out the rewards to Active members who were a big part of our success.
The contest is officially opened and it will run until Wednesday 17th June, 2009. I hope you will all participate, as there are great chances for all of you to win the prizes. Remember that the use of incentives is allowed, as long as you do not spam or you use any other illegal ways of promotion.
I appreciate your continued support, thanks for being a part of EuropeanSurfers and good luck on the contest, I hope you enjoy it.”

Therefore there was good reason for the former admin of USDozen Roger to open his new website as an HYIP. The site, which was just reviewed, was officially launched just two days ago already has more than 270 members who deposited over 7,000 dollars. Its called InvestiMates and I myself just received my first payout today (I invested into 10% for 12 days plan as less risky one). But for those who like a risk 12% for 12 days with the payouts on expiry will be also a good option. I feel that the admin of USDozen is capable of making this HYIP run for a longer period of time than his autosurf (I remind you that USDozen lasted for about 4 weeks only).

Another autosurf from my list is YesICanSurf (reviewed here). Although it utilizes the HYIP-style model of low-ROI program paying you 1.7% for 120 days (no principal return). So you should really make sure that you surfed for the day in order to get this small percentage. Will it make YesICanSurf more stable and sustainable in the long run? Only time will tell but I don’t see any reason why not, after such a good start and with such a proactive admin like Sarah. Today she updated the members of her program about the server time having been changed (by the way, please be aware this also affected another site – EuropeanSurfers):
“Greetings Everyone, Just need to let you know that the server time has been changed by our server host. This affects surfing a little, as you can only surf once daily. When the time rolls over to a new day, you’ll be able to surf again. (Always check server time in your members area.) Have a terrific week!”

I have joined another program today and although I have not been paid yet I would like to announce it on my blog. The program is called GlobalTraderGroup and it’s another low ROI site offering multiple options of payment procesors accepted including: LibertyReserve, PerfectMoney, AlertPay, EcuMoney, SolidTrustPay and StrictPay. Impressive list, isn’t it? The main investment plans in GlobalTraderGroup are the following: 1.1%-1.5% for 200 business days with daily withdrawals ($20 minimum to invest) and 36%-44% monthly for 9 months ($150 minimum to invest). The two special plans which are currently available are the following: 1.8% daily for 90 business days ($500 investment minimum) and 2.05% for 150 business days ($10 minimum). As far as I can understand the principal is included in daily payments and will not be returned at the end. GlobalTraderGroup is running on Neversay script (with all investments to be made in $1 installments) and DDoS-protected by HushHosting (on a dedicated server). There are some curious features in the program which I will discuss in the upcoming review of GlobalTraderGroup including Live support, Internal transfers between members and ref commissions on three levels. The program has been online since January 2009 and so far I could see only the prompt payments with the more aggressive advertising campaign recently. Hopefully this will stop the program from flying under as such stable paying programs like GlobalTraderGroup are definitely what the Industry needs right now. I hope to deliver you the detailed review of GlobalTraderGroup once I receive the first payment from them.

And so to finish I will just show you the list of programs that paid me for the last 48 hours: SilverLodge, NovalexFinance, GoldNuggetInvest, ForexExperts, SteadyGrowthInvest, CoolReturn, GeniusFunds, PanaMoney, Ivy-Castle, Fexity, AsianInvestGroup, OrybFunds, CorpusTrust, ElegantMoney, SigmaTral, EnscoOffshore, Merchandies, InvestmentForge, TheDollarDiggers, Verifield, XagaEnterprise, EuropeanSurfers (the first payment received) and InvestiMates (first payment received). That’s it for today and I will see you on my blog tomorrow, guys!