23/01/2015. EgoPay Important Update and Daily News from the HYIP Industry

Hello everyone! What a strange, bizarre, and downright surreal day I’ve just had! Longer term readers will know I’ve traveled quite a lot over the years running MNO, living in different countries and generally just loving the exploration. But I’ve never seen anything quite like today when I managed to step very briefly into North Korea. on a tour of the Demilitarized Zone and Joint Security Area which keeps the two sides apart. It was very clear to me when they gave me a document to sign releasing the United Nations from any responsibility for my welfare should an invasion take place at that particular moment that this was not going to be a day at the beach! They really spoon on the paranoia with a near constant, and 100% deadly serious, reminder of the rules when you see the North Korean army which include no pointing, no eye contact, don’t smile, don’t talk to them, don’t wave, don’t hold anything in your hands, etc. Anyway, my curiosity was really on a high by now, and I proceeded with my journey, only to realize there wasn’t much to be worried about. You get to walk into a specially constructed room built directly over the border for diplomatic and military meetings between the two sides. You enter from the southern door, and cross over the border to North Korea without ever actually leaving through the door at the northern side. I guess the North don’t want their troops getting too close to foreigners or the South Korean soldiers, so they tend to keep their distance and they don’t come in. You only see them standing outside the window. OK, it doesn’t quite constitute a weekend partying with the Kims in Pyongyang, but I don’t care, I still got to set foot in North Korea!

Speaking as a monitor, I am of course constantly thinking about the HYIP industry, and even tonight can see some parallels. You know, not being able to see everything that’s going on, not knowing what the other side are thinking, not knowing if you really need to be worried about every situation, why are things so dangerous here, and so on. Because currently I see a lot of HYIP investors and HYIP admins both frightened of something and will not dare to move. This, of course, was caused by the current situation surrounding EgoPay that has most definitely affected the HYIP industry big time and made both sides just sit and wait to see how the unfortunate situation unravels. A lot of people with their own agendas will try to tell you EgoPay didn’t cause much damage to investors or admins, which is certainly not true. At least 25%-30% people (according to the results of the recent MNO poll I’ll be getting to in a moment) suffered to some degree from the EgoPay scam, and that’s a worrying figure if you consider HYIP admins might be around the same. So you can expect some new fast scams from admins trying to compensate for EgoPay losses, and perhaps also some unexpected closures of veteran programs that lost money in EgoPay soon. Fortunately for many investors watching the MNO blog and monitor closely and keeping themselves updated on the latest trends it will be hard to lose money in such scams, as surely only the best programs can afford monitoring here at the moment. Of course, it might be pricey for the admins who try to scam fast, as the only ones who will benefit from such expensive listing are honest admins ready to work hard and build a reputation for months to come. I firmly believe in the decision to raise all prices last year and am quite satisfied with the results, ie I don’t monitor obvious scams and my readers avoid losing their hard-earned money unless of course they pay too much attention to less scrupulous monitors/low grade blogs. This policy is not going to change, so my readers will be able to see only the most elite programs from admins looking to stay with us for as long as possible. The ever changing landscape in the HYIP industry will also be shaped by how fast the best admins can adjust and evolve, and introduce new payment methods for investors. By the way, if you haven’t read my article on the future of payment processors in the HYIP industry after EgoPay’s collapse I would strongly suggest to read this article on MNO, especially now that my programmer Andrew has developed a set of frightening banners advertising it.

EGOPAY – UPDATE ON THE CURRENT SITUATION WITH NO PROMISES TO RETURN MONEY

While we’re on the subject of EgoPay, their administration broke their silence last night in an attempt to explain recent events and their lack of communication for so long after they were aware of their alleged problem. I wouldn’t go into much detail about what they said, because frankly it’s an utter lie from start to finish and a blatant insult to the intelligence of the people it’s aimed at. We are told the owner of EgoPay is to blame for personally stealing the money of exchangers and regular customers of EgoPay, leading to the resignation of the EgoPay CEO who allegedly couldn’t get the situation under control.

It just seems a bit unorthodox to me from a legal point of view that you can publish the name of the alleged thief/hacker on a public website (subject to the same laws of slander and libel as a regular print newspaper) without this person ever being investigated, arrested, and formally charged by the police. Stealing millions of dollars is surely a serious matter, but tipping him off with a public statement and no mention of any police operation? Sorry, but I know BS when I smell it, and this story is just plain steeped in it!

There are also no mention of returning funds to their rightful customers, just some nonsense about a new team in charge (obviously the same people changing their names), who in my guess are already in the process of making EgoPay version 2.0 which will conveniently forget about the current debts (the same stunt StrictPay tried to pull a couple of years ago). Will empty promises and unbelievably badly thought-out explanations help EgoPay survive? I honestly doubt it, however I would support any decision to return money to the exchangers. EgoPay have stolen (or as they like to put it “frozen”) millions of dollars belonging to their customers. And if one particular person is to blame and they know all about it, why are they sweeping it under the rug and behaving like accomplices?

Instead of all this nonsense about fictional people with made-up names, where/s the police report? Or the civil action lawsuits? That’s a rhetorical question of course, because they don’t exist. Just a badly written newsletter with no relation to the truth. All I myself can do now if to try everything possible to protect my readers from a second scam in EgoPay and try and make as many of you as possible aware of the dangers. So unless you’re actually given your money back and hear from the exchangers that start accepting out-exchanges again then do not deal with EgoPay. Just for the sake of being fair and even handed I’ll re-post the most recent update from the official EgoPay blog below and will let you judge. If you see something of any practical value to the victims or anything even resembling the truth there then please tell me, because God knows I sure don’t. More questions on EgoPay will follow in the new polls on the MNO TalkBack page, so keep reading for that:

“FURTHER EGOPAY UPDATES
On December 28th during the holiday period, Egopay suffered a hack that greatly impacted key merchants and partners. False values were made available in the merchants platform, when no actual value was transmitted in Egopay. This hacker then proceeded to convert this fake value into irreversible currencies all within a one hour window. These merchants believed that this value was in their Egopay account, but unfortunately it was not. Upon discovery, at this point, Egopay immediately put restrictions in place and placed transactions from being automatically completed, to manual review to contain further damage and impact on our merchants. The Shopping Cart Interface (SCI) was also restricted. The impact amount was between 1M to 1.5M total for a handful of merchants.
We concluded, that this hack must have been perpetrated by someone from within who knew the inner workings and had privileged access, so we took immediate actions and suspended everyone that we suspected while this investigation was underway. Unfortunately, this resulted in our support services being delayed or non-existent. Support tickets were not being answered and our transaction interface was taken down to stop any further exploit. Considering the evidence on hand, Egopay was left with no choice but to take these drastic actions.
An investigation team was called in to help on December 30th, 2014. This is when things began to unravel. The team was repeatedly asking for certain accesses in order to do their job, but it was not forthcoming. Egopay reached out for help from its payment partners, including Astropay and Payza as well a few key merchants to gauge interest in helping remedy this situation. Egopay was looking for help to discover the truth of the hack, for funding or liquidity, as well as to help consult on how to resolve this situation.
The hack also exposed a gap in the cash reserves of Egopay. On January 5th, 2015 it was uncovered that the real owner of Egopay (Amir Aziz) who operated behind the scenes was embezzling money from the company for a period of time. We took immediate action to restrict all his accesses as well. Between January 5th and 16th, the remaining Egopay employees (Tadas & team) did not know who to trust anymore.
On January 16th 2015, the investigative team was finally granted full access to the servers and systems. On January 18th, 2015 Amir Aziz social engineered his way with the hosting provider to reset his accesses and grant him access again to the servers which he used in turn to delete his Egopay account from the system (we would assume to cover his scheme) and removed all other Administrative accesses.
We have since regained full control on everything and made all the necessary restrictions and improvements which resulted in outages over the weekend. We felt the need to completely bring the web-site down (during the business day of Jan 20, 2015) for complete security upgrades.
Repeatedly while trying to provide answers to our members, something new would unfold making any explanation meaningless. Rightfully, people are upset at us. We failed to communicate. We failed our membership base. We take full responsibility on this.
We fully realize that this mess is here and we need to deal with this. With new experienced staffing coming onboard to help us rebuild, we will be striving to come back strong to make good on our obligations with our members and respected partners.
Tadas has stepped down as CEO of Egopay, allowing for a new team to come onboard to make or break this situation. We ask for your patience in helping us rebuild ourselves so we can serve you to the best of our abilities as we have in the past.
We apologize for this inconvenience, and will further communicate any news on this site.
Egopay Team“.

COINASSETS – EGOPAY EXCHANGE OFFER AVAILABLE FOR EVERYONE

If you’re desperate to get rid of any EgoPay funds stuck in your account I would strongly suggest to take the admin of CoinAssets up on his offer as not only did he resume accepting deposits and withdrawals via EgoPay, he also repeated his offer of exchanging your EgoPay funds to PerfectMoney or BitCoin at a ratio of 4:1. While this would have being considered simply ludicrous just a month ago, this offer is now perhaps the best one I’ve seen on the market. I’m not sure why the admin wants or needs EgoPay funds and even offers to buy them from customers, but perhaps he knows something the rest of us don’t. In any case, to take the offer please email him at the address specified in the latest newsletter and remember that the offer applies to members and non-members of CoinAssets alike:

“EgoPay Exchanges Open to the Public
We have resumed processing withdrawal requests and deposits with EgoPay. We have also re-opened exchanges of Egopay.com balances to Perfect Money or Bitcoin. The exchange rate we have set is $1 in EgoPay to $0.25 in PerfectMoney or Bitcoin. Our exchanges are open to anyone including non-members of CoinAssets.
Please send an email to admin@coinassets.net if interested.
CoinAssets“.

CoinAssets has been a really great program for all the MNO readers, making payments for about seven weeks already on the 4%-6% for 90 days plan for investments starting from a $20 minimum via PerfectMoney, EgoPay, Payeer, and BitCoin. Due to its brilliant performance many investors have seen some nice profits already and the program itself is skyrocketing to the top position on the MNO Premium List which it will surely reach soon if the admin keeps up the good work. For a full and detailed review of CoinAssets please click here.

SOLCAPITAL – NEW PERPETUAL INVESTMENT PLAN AVAILABLE

Even though no one from the original investment plans offered by SolCapital – 8%-10% for 15 business days, 140%-180% after 15 business days – are in profit yet due to the program still being so new, the admin still launched a brand new plan that will appeal to those who like having tighter control of their deposits. The new plan will pay you from 1.6% to 3.3% (depending on the investment amount starting, just like for the other two plans, from $10) and you will be able to withdraw your principal after a 7-day long lock-in period is over, or keep the money in your account to keep earning interest indefinitely. Judging from my previous experience with admins who added perpetual plans after the initial launch, they mostly did quite well from it. Hopefully SolCapital will be no exception. Note though that the new perpetual plan pays you on calendar days which clearly differentiates it from the original plans paying on business days (Monday to Friday), so in that sense some of you might find it more appealing. Apart from that I can only add that SolCapital has been paying fine so far with withdrawals processed by the admin within a few hours to PerfectMoney, Payeer, and BitCoin accounts, while EgoPay has been dropped with the admin promising to replace it with Payza in the near future. Please read the following newsletter dedicated to the new investment plan below while the older plans were already perfectly in the review on MNO posted here:

“SolCapital: New Investment Option Available!
Hello dear customers,
After we sent out an email about our new feedback option, we received countless requests for more investment opportunities. Our customers’ opinions and wishes are the most important thing to us, so we decided to take action.
We are proud to present to you our new investment plan: 1.6% – 3.3% daily forever; principal back any time after 7 days, minimum deposit to join is just $10. For more in-depth information about this new investment option, please visit our investment plan page.
That’s it for today. We hope that you are satisfied with each new investment option that we bring your way.
Best Regards, SolCapital Ltd“.

MNO TALKBACK – POLL RESULTS AND NEW QUESTIONS ADDED

With so much talk and lively discussion going on around the industry at the moment on the general state of payment processors and the pros and cons of each individual service provider, you might also have noticed this has been the subject of some recent opinion polls on the MNO TalkBack. So I think it’s about the right time now to take a look at the results of the old questions and replace them with something new. For the new questions however I’m going to stay on the subject of EgoPay, by far the hottest topic in the industry now, and even though we can argue about the impact recent events there have had, I think we can all agree that it hasn’t been good. I do take some hope from the fact that most MNO readers didn’t get hit too badly financially speaking, however I’m more concerned about the longer term psychological effect that may result from the loss of confidence as much as the loss of actual money. The first question in the last poll then asked readers about the extent of their personal losses in EgoPay, or specifically “Did you lose much money in the EgoPay scam?”. Unfortunately 16% of readers voted “yes, I lost a lot of money”. That could have been a lot worse, but still it’s disappointing. I know it’s easy to wag your finger at people after it’s too late and ask why you’d be keeping large amounts of cash there in the first place instead of a bank, but from my own experience I also know a lot of this might just have been bad timing, you know, just bad luck that the scam happened on the same day you received a big principal return or something like that.
12% of readers said “yes, I lost a little money”, which I was surprised at because I thought more people would have had small amounts there, such as the daily interest payments from one program that you may allow to build up before making a single withdrawal request. Then again, I might be surprised but I am still pleased that it wasn’t more.
The biggest single group of 43% voted “no, I had zero funds there”, so congratulations if you found yourself in that group, while the remaining 29% of readers simply voted “no, I didn’t have an EgoPay account”. That’s not to say those people still won’t feel the effects of the scam however, because if a program you happen to be a member of collapses because of problems with EgoPay, well, I don’t think I need to spell out the obvious for you here, do I?

The second question was just as straight forward and asked about a possible replacement for EgoPay, or more exactly “Do you think Payza is likely to replace EgoPay in the near future?” 25% of MNO readers seem to think this is an obvious yes, voting for the option “Yes, Payza is a strong payment processor with lots of potential.”
A far more commanding number of 39% are somewhat in agreement, but take a much more guarded line voting “Maybe, if Payza softens its approach towards accepting new HYIPs.”
The remaining 36% of you seem a bit more dismissive of this idea, preferring to vote “No, Payza will not be able to compete with PerfectMoney, Payeer, and BitCoin.”

For the new set of questions then we do as I said stay on the subject of EgoPay. The first question is a straight forward Yes/No option for you. EgoPay have just issued another statement on what’s been going on with them lately. What I want to know is do you believe them? Now, I rarely get too involved in these opinion polls myself, after all, why would I? I already know what I think, the point is for me to know what you think! Given the sensitive nature of this one though, you can quite clearly see my own thoughts on the matter in the news update just posted above, and no doubt I’ll have cause to repeat that many times over the next week. However I just want to say don’t let me put words in your mouth. It’s up to you to vote, and it’s completely anonymous. I mean if you’d like to share your thoughts then by all means, you are most welcome to do so no matter who you think agrees or disagrees, I only ask that you think about it for a moment and then vote honestly whatever way you really feel on the subject.
Just to keep things official then, the exact question will be “Do you really believe EgoPay will give customers their money back?”
And as for the answers, it’s a straight “yes” or “no”.

The second question for the new opinion poll is about how you view the wider impact of the EgoPay scam and the longer term affect it might have on the industry. Like I said above, you don’t even have to have had an account with EgoPay, much less have any money there in order to feel the pinch. If only one other program (or exchanger for that matter) that you are depending on for money finds themselves in trouble because of this, well then, there’s your proof – you lost money indirectly, but you lost it nonetheless. Do you think it’s really all that serious though? My final question then is this:
“What damage to the HYIP industry do you think is being done by EgoPay now?”
Possible answers are as follows:
1. “Not much, EgoPay wasn’t popular, and the industry always recovers”
2. “Moderate, too many programs and exchangers had too much money there”
3. “Massive, once the full effects are known investor confidence will be destroyed”

I think the answers are all fairly self-explanatory, so I hope you’ll all participate. Remember that voting is 100% anonymous – just you and your conscience – so please take just the couple of seconds required to submit a vote on the MNO TalkBack page. Thanks in advance to everyone who does!

GET PAID REPORT FOR 23/01/2015

Here is the list of the programs from my monitor that paid me for the last 48 hours:
From MNO Sticky list: –
From MNO Premium list: CoinAssets, CryptoFarm, BITC1, MajesticSwan, Silveks, BTPerfex, SolCapital, CryptoStrategy, AtrexTrade, Rockfeller, RollNRich.
From MNO Standard list: CompassBusiness, HashCoin.
From MNO Basic list: ForexShare, PhenixPro, OgdenOrganization, RoxInvest.

Just before I finish with the news for tonight, I’d like to issue a pre-emptive warning about AssuredAssets. Instant withdrawals were switched off without warning or explanation last night, and though we should allow 24 hours before changing the status to Problem, I believe the MNO readers should be aware of this and perhaps postpone any planned new deposits into AssuredAssets until the situation is clear. Please watch for the status of every program on the MNO monitor closely for any changes, and not to miss any new promising programs of elite quality that could be listed soon. Follow MNO on Facebook and Twitter and read the most up-to-date news from anywhere in the HYIP industry on the MNO blog! Thanks for reading and see you all soon!