24/02/2011. Interview with the admin of Escaliva

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

Hi all! It’s been another fairly uneventful day in the HYIP industry so far but as they say no news is good news I guess there’s nothing to complain about. That might be just as well for Leonard Coffman however, he’s the admin of what can only be described as a success story in the field of short term HYI programs and tonight I have an interview with him which should now get your undivided attention. His program is called Escaliva and in many ways has been one of the surprise packages of the year so far.

The admin describes himself as innovative in his first answer, and looking at the investment plans he’s developed for Escaliva it’s hard to argue. For the last seven weeks now (an impressive run for any short term program by the way) he’s been combining the stability of long term style low interest payments with the appeal of short cycle quick profit investment terms. And in a market where you really need to set yourself apart from the rest of the competition and offer something unique, maybe not to succeed as such but to be come a real leader, Escaliva have certainly impressed so far.

Leonard has quite a lot to say for himself here and I have to commend him for doing such an excellent job of explaining Escaliva to us all here. So I suppose I better let him get on with it. But first let me just remind you that his program offers you a return of 2.8%-5.6% interest per day for 7 days, and your principal handed back back on expiry. For further information I would suggest you start by reading my original review of the program published here.

“1. Hi Leonard, please introduce yourself to the readers of MNO and tell us please about your own involvement in Escaliva. I’m also kind of curious about the origins of the name. What exactly does “Escaliva” mean?

Hello Paul and MNO readers. I’m Leonard Coffman, Ph.D. in Finance & Administration. I also consider myself to be a visionary and have an innovative mind. I have been working in the field of finance and investments for over 20 years, mostly as a financial consultant for several firms. Right now I’m one of the founders and also a CEO of Escaliva. My main job at Escaliva is to ensure the company’s profitability and making major strategic decisions.

The origins of our company name “Escaliva” came from our ambitions to change people’s view of online investment programs, and how they communicate with each other, like how “Google” replaced the word “search”, and we want the word to be unique and catchy. The word “Escaliva” itself may not have a meaning right now, but we are slowly creating brand recognition throughout the world and I can tell you, the word “Escaliva” will be used as technical term in business conversations in a matter of few years.

2. Can you give us some background information on Escaliva? How many others are involved with the program or are you operating alone? How long have you been online?

It started back in late-2001 when I had an idea of traders and investors from different fields of investment collaborating together to maximize the return of investment. For example, gold investment can be very profitable with a high fluctuation on one day, but on another day it may not fluctuate at all, and we cannot earn income by gold investments alone. So if we have many traders from many investment fields working together, we can focus our investment onto what’s earning us the most right now. This idea became real in July 2002 when I established a company of mutual interests in trading and investing. There were only 4 of us back then. We did not hire many people as our operations are top-secret and even with 8 years passed; we only have 16 people in our company, including myself. We have transaction records and statistics of over 8 years and we decided to open an online investment project that offers a fixed interest rate to be simple enough for everyone to join us. Since 8 January 2011, Escaliva was launched, and right now we are doing extremely well and adjusted.

3. What plans are available to investors in Escaliva? Explain them in detail to us. What ROIs are on offer? What are the minimum and maximum amounts to invest?

At Escaliva, our target customers are not just investors only, but everyone who is interested in making an investment, big or small. With this principle in mind, we tend to make our investment plan as simple as possible, and so we come up with only one simple plan with interest rate varies by the investment amount.

Starting from $20, you will be able to join our investment at Escaliva. Our interest rates are divided into 3 tiers, as following:

2.8% daily interests for any investment below $1000.
4.2% daily interests for any investment between $1000 and $4999.
5.6% daily interests for any investment of $5000 or above.

You will be earning your interests every day, including weekends and holidays for 7 days before the plan ends and principal returned to your account balance.

We also offer you an option to compound your interests in case you did not want to keep withdrawing every day and want to maximize your ROI instead. You can set your own compounding rate from 0% to 100% when you make a deposit, and you can change it under “Your Deposits” page.

If you do not understand how compounding works, I will tell you how. Normally if you do not use compounding (0%), your daily interests will be available in your account balance. If you set your compounding rate to more than 0%, then that percentage of your daily interests will be added to your principal instead of account balance. This means that you will be able to withdraw less money today, but you will earn more daily profits in the future. For example, if you invest $1000 on 4.2% daily plan, you will earn $42 interests per day. If you set your compounding rate to 50%, then $21 will be credited to your account balance, while another $21 will be added to your principal. Your principal is now $1021, and you will earn $42.88 the next day. After the plan ends, your principal will be credited to your account balance, depending on how much you compounded. This is a good way to maximize your profitability if you do not plan to withdraw every day.

So to sum it up, here is the list of ROI for each plan with 0% and 100% compounding:

2.8% daily
Compound 0%: 119.60% ROI
Compound 100%: 121.33% ROI

4.2% daily
Compound 0%: 129.40% ROI
Compound 100%: 133.37% ROI

5.6% daily
Compound 0%: 139.20% ROI
Compound 100%: 146.44% ROI

If you check our Escaliva home page you will see a real-time calculator that tells you how much you are earning daily and what is your total profits and ROI.

I also want to reveal that we are also working on a new investment plan adjusted to member requests and high demands. Yes, that’s a teaser and that’s all I can tell right now.

4. What payment options are you accepting at the moment? Don’t you think that such a limited selection has hindered the growth of the program? Is there any particular reason you have avoided adding any others?

At this moment, we accept only Liberty Reserve payment processor. We cannot say that having only Liberty Reserve as the only payment processor has hindered our growth because we can say that we are very successful with Escaliva. We cannot tell how it would be different if we are accepting payments from other processors as well, but we do not regret our decision. However, I have to admit that we were wrong about Liberty Reserve being the only payment processor most people prefer, and we are planning to integrate new payment processor into our system. Just wait and see.

5. How secure is the website of Escaliva? What are you doing to protect it and members’ accounts from hackers? Are you on a dedicated server? Who is your host?

We respect our member’s privacy and we only asked for information that is mandatory for us to operate, which is only the Liberty Reserve account number. Your Escaliva account’s password is encrypted with md5 hash, a one-way encryption tool that is known to be unbreakable if the password itself is strong enough. Even if a hacker somehow managed to get into your account, they will not have any information that will help them crack your Liberty Reserve account because we didn’t ask or store your Liberty Reserve information except for account number on our server. Moreover, we offer double security by having an email confirmation every time you wish to change account details. This way, even if someone got into your account, they will not be able to change your Liberty Reserve account number to theirs, and therefore they cannot steal your money. However, we would like to remind you to use strong password, preferably mixed with alphanumeric and special characters for your own protection.

Escaliva is hosted on a dedicated server from LeaseWeb, an industry leader in hosted IT infrastructure, specialized in dedicated hosting. Escaliva is guaranteed to run at great speed and expect to have no downtime; otherwise we wouldn’t be able to offer our members instant withdrawals in the first place.

6. I said in my review of Escaliva that I had some very mixed feeling about your security and that you didn’t seem to be using any kind of anti-DDoS protection. Why was that? Why do you think it’s not so important? Is this still the case?

As I have said before, DDoS protection is overrated. DDoS attack isn’t something that anyone can do, or can be achieved easily. To overwhelm a server with millions of packets per second require you to have a network of hundreds if not thousands of computer sending those packets simultaneously. In an online investment scene, I only see DDoS protection as a false sense of protection. People overreacted about DDoS protection and that’s why it is almost become a traditional standard for online investments to have. I have different opinion and I believe that DDoS protection is not as important as many people emphasize it for. In fact, I do not believe that DDoS protection plays any major role in becoming a successful investment program.

7. Can we see any statistics regarding the site? How many members have joined since the beginning and how many are active at the moment? Are you pleased with the support from the members so far? How important a role do they play in bringing in new members?

Although we cannot reveal a lot of statistical data about Escaliva, I’m going to let it slip a little. We can say that for those who sign up with Escaliva, approximately 50% of them have made at least one deposit with us. This conversion rate is higher than what we expected and we are very pleased with the support from our members.

8. How can members contact you if they have any questions or support related issues?

There are several ways to contact us if you have any questions or need any support regarding Escaliva. We offer live support chat for users to get real-time response from our support. We recently have our Twitter page so that you can keep updated with us. Those are the alternative ways to contact us, but the best and most preferable way to contact us and get a response is to contact us using our support form (http://www.escaliva.com/?a=support), or send us an email directly to escaliva[at] gmail[dot]com. We monitor our email account at all times and all your questions will be answered in details.

9. What have been the most common questions and problems you’ve had to deal with so far? Is there anything you wish to say here so that members can avoid having to contact you later?

There had been a lot of members contacting us asking several questions daily. Most questions are common questions that have already been answered in details on our F.A.Q. page (http://www.escaliva.com/?a=faq). Sometimes we even get a list of questions, where all the answers can be found on our F.A.Q. page. So I would like to take this time and space to say that if you have any questions, please check our F.A.Q. page first. We have listed many commonly asked questions there and it would be best if you read the whole page.

10. How have you been promoting the program so far? What advertising strategy have you been using? How are you getting new members to join?

We rely on words of mouth, cost-effective advertising, investment forums, monitors, social networks, and of course, Money News Online blog! We believe that the best way to promote our program is to keep a clean track record at all times, and that is what we are doing right now. If our program is genuinely good, people will tell their friends about Escaliva, their friends will start telling their friends, etc. This advertising strategy might be slow, but we are not in a hurry. There is no rush for Escaliva to run a large advertising campaign and put our ads up everywhere, which in my opinion, is often overpriced with diminishing returns.

When members invested in our plan, we use those investments to generate profits for our company and share them back to our investors at a fixed interest rate as well as referral commissions to the referrer. After one investment plan and deducting the profits that our traders made from the amount we paid, we are left with partial amount of money. For example, if we could make 10% profits off from your investment in each cycle, we would need to have more than $10,000 investment from a $1,000 worth of advertisements to be profitable, and to be honest, we don’t see the investment in overpriced advertisement to be worth it.

11. How have you managed to survive online this long and continue making payments? How much longer do you realistically think the program can survive as it is?

As I just answered in the previous question, we use our members’ investments to create profits for our company while sharing these profits as interests and referral commissions to our investors and referrers respectively. This also means that even if no one is investing with us, we would still be generating income from our own investment, just like what we have been doing since 2002. Our company had been in operation for 8 years now and by becoming an online investment program was to open the opportunity for other people to make money alongside with us, as well as bringing more income to the company, not changing our whole revenue model. Therefore it isn’t fair to ask how long our program is going to survive, as we have been around for a very long time already. I can only say that you can expect our program to be around for a very long time.

12. What exactly are you doing with investors’ money? How are you investing it and how are you generating the profits being made to members?

We add our investors’ money into our own investment, and invest them on daily basis. Escaliva is a mutual company and consists of many professional traders from various investment fields, and we invest in what’s most likely going to be most profitable right now. I have previously mentioned about this when talking about Escaliva background. This is what we do, this is how we generate our income, and this is how we generate profits for our investors.

13. Do you have any plans to develop, improve, or in any way change Escaliva in the near future? How are you planning to keep the program competitive with so many new ones opening all the time?

We are developing and improving Escaliva at all times. In fact, we are adding new features and improvement to Escaliva almost every week, and there will be several new features adding to Escaliva in the weeks to come. This is also why we recently have our Twitter account, so that you will be updated as soon as we roll out new features for Escaliva, and I promise we will not stop bringing new features to Escaliva.

14. And finally is there anything else you wish to say not covered in this interview? Anything in the review you may not agree with or wish to comment on?

I believed I have said everything I wanted to say here. I would like to thank you Paul and MNO readers for following our interviews to this point. It has been a pleasure for us to be a part of MNO and to serve our members since the launch of our program on 8 January 2011.

Every day is a new opportunity, and we hope you find your opportunity in Escaliva.”

Thanks a lot to Leonard for that, and I hope you all found his answers informative and helpful in deciding whether this is a suitable project for you or not. More importantly though, best of luck to all the present and future investors in joining the ranks of those who have already profited so handsomely from Escaliva. All I can say is long may it continue.

That’s all for this evening folks, but of course don’t forget to tune in to MNO again tomorrow for all the latest happenings involving the programs on my monitoring page. See you all then, guys!