22/04/2010. Interview with the admin of SolidTrader

BEWARE! THIS PROGRAM HAS STOPPED PAYING! PLEASE DO NOT INVEST!

Hi guys! For the first post today I have an informative interview with the admin of a recently launched short term HYIP called SolidTrader. His name is Graham and I think you’ll agree he has some interesting opinions on how best to manage an online program. Since opening for business they have already made a number of improvements since first being reviewed here. For a start they have just added AlertPay as a payment option and are appointing their own support staff to act as agents on the main public forums.

As short term programs go the immediate future looks bright for SolidTrader, who offer terms including 110% after 3 days, 140% after 8 days, 200% after 15 days, 16% for 8 days, and 12% for 15 days. For more details on the program please refer back to my original review published here.

“1. Hi Graham, please introduce yourself to the readers of MNO and tell us about your own role within SolidTrader. What are your own duties within the program? How much experience do you have in the online HYIP industry?

My name is Graham Roberts, and I am the project manager of SolidTrader, I am responsible for all the online operations of SolidTrader, which include but are not limited to: Monitoring of new, current and expired investment plan, supervision of investment and withdrawal transactions, and last but not least I assign and also complete some of the support related tasks.

2. Can you also give us some background on the program? How long have you been running? What were you hoping to achieve by starting it in the first place? Apart from you tell us who else is involved in SolidTrader?

Behind the scenes of SolidTrader we have seven employees. Two teams of two analysts and five traders work with us. The team of analysts make sure we are the first ones to know when new highly profitable markets open up. The other team manages our trading accounts, each of our traders have been working on ForEx, stocks, futures and commodity markets for eight years.

In the beginning we’ve been offering our investment project offline with a high minimum deposit at $5,000 to invest with us. The idea to launch our project online was made on March of 2010 to allow smaller investors to earn with us and to open our business to the general public. The decision was quickly taken, we hired a web-designer to create our website then we launched SolidTrader as an online project on 14 April 2010.

3. What about the investment plans? Can you explain them in detail to us? What are the minimum and maximum amounts for investment, what rates of interest are on offer and how long do they run for?

We have five different investment plans to suit investor’s needs, each plan was highly tested before being made available to the public.

The first plan (starter plan) offers 110% interest return after 3 calendar days, principal is included, allowing investor to earn 10% clear profit.
The minimum to invest is $5 and the maximum is $3,000

The second plan (Short Term Daily) offers 16% daily interest for 8 consecutive days. Principal is included in daily payouts allowing the investor to earn 28% clear profit from it.
The minimum to invest is $20 and the maximum is $8,000

The third plan (Short Term Contract) offers 140% interest return after 8 calendar days, principal is included, allowing investors to earn 40% clear profit.
The minimum to invest is $20 and the maximum is $8,000

The fourth plan (Medium Term Daily) offers 12% daily interest for 15 consecutive days. Principal is included in daily payouts allowing investors to earn 80% clear profit.
The minimum investment is $50 and the maximum is $15,000

The fifth plan (Medium Term Contract) offers 200% interest return after 15 calendar days, principal included, allowing investors to earn 100% clear profit.
The minimum investment is $50 and the maximum is $15,000

4. Tell us about the payment options available from SolidTrader. What payment processors are you currently dealing with? I believe you are also awaiting verification for a couple of others, correct? How is that proceeding and when can we expect to see them added?

We currently accept five payment processors, which are; LibertyReserve, PerfectMoney, StrictPay, GlobalDigitalPay, and AlertPay which we just added yesterday. We still awaiting a reply from the verification department of SolidTrustPay. Our documents were sent about a week ago so it should be completed within the next few days.

5. How highly would you rate the security of your own website? Tell us about your hosting provider and how highly would you rate them as a service provider?

SolidTrader is hosted and protected by Koddos. We recently just upgraded our DDoS protection level to provide smooth connection to our website and to increase our website security against DDOS attacks. Since our program has been attracting larger audiences we are concerned more and more about DDoS attempts. As for my own opinion about Koddos, I personally am very satisfied with their client support and although they describe themselves as a new company but they seem full of experience and they are very professional in running their business.

6. What about your script? Who is the provider and what do you think the benefits of this script are to both the admin and the investors? Are you concerned about some recent reports of hacking incidents in programs using this script?

We are using GoldCoders script. We have done thorough research and compared all others, but we learned that GC is the most commonly used script which makes it user friendly and they also have complete features. As for security, we had been in touch with GC support and they have taught us very well on how to prevent hacking incidents to our system. We have taken every precaution. Besides that we have our own programmer who always monitors our security.

7. Can you also explain the benefits to potential clients of using SSL encryption to protect the investor’s accounts?

It is not the best practice to run any kind of e-commerce website without Secure Socket Layer Encryption. Any website without SSL certificate could be easily broken into and information we sent stolen relatively easily by hackers. That’s why we don’t take any chances and implemented SSL encryption on our website straight away after we launched it.

8. I said in my review of your program that something I didn’t like about SolidTrader was the design. The FAQ page contains very little practical information in my opinion and I think the explanation of your business is very unclear. How do you respond?

To be honest I don’t see our design will be a problem in attracting new members, but I will let our investors decide how they want to choose to invest. A website with high quality design but problematic payouts or an average website design but paying promptly?

As for the FAQ contents, we should all realize that SolidTrader is a brand new program and there is still many improvements to be made, including FAQ content. We will obviously add more information on our FAQ as questions arise, and only yesterday we added 5 more new common questions to the page.

The information we put on website about our business background is in common language, where average people would understand every word we put there. If we put more specific finance/trading terms on website such as “scalp, put, pips, short sell, cable trade” I don’t think most visitors would understand and would only make our project sound more complicated.

9. What kind of customer support do you offer? What is the best and most efficient way to contact you if I have any questions?

We originally only dealt with a support form through our contacts page. It has been efficient and convenient rather than having live chat support which I consider very time-consuming. However I just assigned support representatives on several online investment forums to assist our members on public forums. We also invite our members to discuss our program on those forums to spread the word about our project.

10. What other outside business and investment activities are SolidTrader involved with? What are you doing with your member’s money and how are you generating such huge profits? Can we see any proof of these activities?

We primarily generate returns in ForEx, Stocks and Commodity trading. Investor money is transferred into our trading account to increase our trading capital. We also understand the lack of trading evidence is a huge barrier to gaining investor trust so we are planning to upload our trading activity soon to our website.

11. I also mentioned in the review that your texts are not original. Why not? If this is the case how can investors be expected to believe anything else you tell them about your business?

Paul, allow me to ask you one question, how many programs have you seen used original text with unique business background (such as investing in atom, nano, even water) and how many used pre-made texts with very common business background (such as trading in ForEx, stock, shares etc)? If history taught us anything in this industry there is only one thing that differentiates good programs from bad ones, just one simple thing; payment. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Yes, we use pre-made text from several online resources with similar business backgrounds to us, and I don’t think it will be a huge problem for us to build a successful program. We believe the most important factor is to gain investor trust is by continually providing our investors with the returns stated on our website, and to provide them with instant payments as stated.

12. Are there any plans to develop SolidTrader further in the near future? Will there be any interesting changes made soon? How are you planning to keep the program competitive with so many new HYIPs opening every day?

For sure there will be plenty of changes and improvements to our program. Some that we are currently working on include adding more payment processors, launching an advertising campaign, and uploading our trading proof. Instant payments has been proven as an effective way to attract investors and we also have planned advertising campaign to attract larger audiences.

13. What have been the most common questions, problems, or complaints you have had to deal with so far? Are there any particular issues that people keep contacting you about that you would like to address here?

Yes there is one problem which has been mentioned a lot by our investors. Our SCI interface for deposits has been quite an issue for us, and member deposits are sometimes delayed for a while before being reflected in our database. We have been receiving numerous complains about this matter however it’s not a big problem for us. Our customer support is working around the clock and we usually take care this matter within minutes.

14. And finally is there anything else you wish to say not covered in this interview? If there was just one thing you could say to the readers to convince them that your program is better than any other then what would it be?

There is one thing I’d like to address to your readers. Always invest sensibly in any type of program as there is no such thing as a 100% guaranteed investment. Remember in this industry it’s all about timing! No, we don’t use persuasion and luring methods to convince our prospective investor, actual and continued payments is our method to convince them.

Thanks for the opportunity to answer this interview Paul. Wish your blog every success!”

That’s about it for the moment folks! Thanks a lot to Graham for that and best of luck to all the investors who decide to get involved. And pay particular attention to the very sensible piece of advice offered by him in his last answer.

Before I go, don’t worry! I didn’t forget about the news. I’ll be back a little later this evening with all the important stories of the day as well as a new review of one of the latest additions to my monitoring page. So stay tuned for that and see you all then!