Well, I hope for the majority of my readers LR is finally up and running smoothly. The ongoing downtime has continued for more than 3 days and LibertyReserve is now hosted by Prolexic -a world-wide anti-DDoS protection provider that e-gold uses as well. But the main question remains: will LibertyReserve maintain it’s leadership as the most stable and attractive e-currency for HYIP players or will it become just yet another good e-currency without any general advantages over its main competitors?

Let’s first take a quick look at the history. LibertyReserve became enormously popular among online investors in the autumn of 2007, perhaps taking advantage of some difficulties with the e-gold payment processor. But also because of reasonable fees and a huge advertising campaign in HYIP-related mass-media. So generally speaking it just occupied a niche for a HYIP loyal payment processor that was empty due to there being no other obvious leaders in the payment processor scene in late 2007.

As you know, LR took the biggest slice of the market pie. And for the companies that appeared on the scene later it was extremely hard to dislodge LR or even to compete with it. Such payment processors as AlterGold or PerfectMoney that appeared just recently couldn’t even dream about rivalry with LR. (Heck, some programs even accepted LibertyReserve exclusively at this time.) But then DDoS-attacks came and they were so large and extensive that the LibertyReserve company was just not ready for them at all and therefore lost the image of a stable and secure company.

Back then in May of this year LibertyReserve was offline for 7 consecutive days which was an enormous blow to them. Already some clients were less than satisfied with their service and tried to withdraw money from LR and move it to other payment processors, which were more stable or at least seem to be so.

Among them there was the PerfectMoney payment processor which rushed online like a storm and for several months it became so popular that all the big online programs tried to include PerfectMoney on the list of their payment processors. Unfortunately, the birth of rising this new no fees star (PerfectMoney) in the payment processors industry coincided with the awful DDoS-attacks directed on LibertyReserve. A a simple coincidence? Or did it happen deliberately?

In the opinion of several people that I contacted, and all with good hands-on experience the with payment processors, I found out that allegedly some Russian group of hackers was behind the recent enormous DDoS-attack on LR which made it move to Prolexic servers. And according to one man who contacted me not long ago the story was as follows.

LR was contacted by this Russian group of DDoSers and they tried to extort a huge amount of money for stopping those DDoS-attacks. By the way, as you may know from AlterGold admin’s comments it’s very probable that PerfectMoney really operates not from Switzerland as they claim in their interview published here but from Russia. Both LibertyReserve and PerfectMoney were hosted by the Russian Dragonara company and miraculously PerfectMoney avoided the DDoS attack while LibertyReserve suffered huge losses due to them. So before LibertyReserve moved to Prolexic the only company that took advantage of the situation was PerfectMoney. You can draw the necessary conclusions yourself but I have more evidence from a very respected source that Dragonara and PerfectMoney come not only from the same country but from the same owner as well.

As you can plainly see PerfectMoney is becoming more popular every day due to attacks and extortion attempts on LibertyReserve. On the other hand, I can’t understand why LibertyReserve kept silent about these attacks and only makes some unusual comment regarding gold backing. Obviously, the matter is not gold backing. But LR then hides this info from its customers. Why? Well, I think there are some reasons for it but I can’t name them for now.

Right now as I’m writing this the situation still remains stagnant, but critical for LibertyReserve even though it moved to Prolexic. The site was online for the most part of the day and I even managed to receive all the payments from the various programs I’m in. API and SCI interfaces didn’t work properly before LR got offline and I hope that’s why LibertyReserve will now fix all the latest issues. Otherwise, if it’s still under DDoS-attack I advise you to move at least part of your funds to other payment processors when LibertyReserve is back online.

By the way, if you think about moving some of your funds to AlterGold here’s some good news for you. From now on you can fund your AlterGold account from LibertyReserve or e-Bullion with no fees. So take advantage of this offer as it will not last for long.

Here’s the email from AlterGold I received today:
“AG would like to make an exciting announcement. Yesterday we decreased fee on deposits with MoneyGram, Western Union and Bank wire transfers and today we are offering a NO FEE account funding from LibertyReserve and E-bullion.
Now you can fund your AG account with either LibertyReserve and E-Bullion at no cost to you. This special offer won’t last long so take advantage of it while it last. Simply login to your AlterGold account and click on “Add Funds” link.”

If you still have no idea of what AlterGold is you’re welcome to read my interview with the admin of this payment processor published here.

In my honest opinion, the situation with LR is bordering on the ridiculous. And it’s not because of the attacks and outages but because of LR’s attitude to their customers whom it doesn’t even attemt to communicate with regarding the truth behind this downtime. I really hope that the situation will be clearer soon and LR will be more stable but, sorry, I can’t believe in their promises anymore.

Other news for today.

I decided to save the best part of the news for tomorrow or even later. I still need to gather more details on the complete picture. I just wanted to say that the more I look into it the uglier it all seems to me.

When LR was online I was paid from almost all the programs that I monitor. Among them are: BristolCapitalGroup, UniCreditInvestment, ProfitsAddict, ApolloInvestGroup, MaxShare, e-Confidence, SafeAtom, EliteMoney, AcmosTrade, AgruFund, Tradelite, LargeSum and LibertyInsider. I’m glad that those programs didn’t use LR downtime as an excuse not to pay their debts and hope they will continue for a long time.

By the way, if you’re a member of LibertyInsider you must have noticed some downtime the program experienced last night. Well, the downtime was brief and the admin came out with the explanation almost immediately when LibertyInsider site came back online:
“There was a technical situation with our server. Due to unknown reasons our Bind/Named service was down and it was not backing up but after a long procedure our technicians were able to successfully restart following service. We are sorry for inconvenience and we are doing our best to assure this will not happen again.”

I received my last withdrawal today and immediately redeposited. And I hope you’re not missing LibertyInsider as this is a great program with several medium term plans be it 10% for 12 days surfing plan, or 5% for 28 days and 1% to 8% till you get 150% on your investment. Read the interview with the admin of LibertyInsider Cedric for more details here.

Though I was paid from UniCreditInvestment today (all my pendings) I noticed some strange similarites between the site’s FAQs with another famous program, P2P. So I sent an interview to the admin and received an answer already regarding this. I’m sure the interview will be interesting and the answers will satisfy one of my readers who made me aware about those texts. I hope to publish UniCreditInvestment interview tomorrow on my blog! Stay tuned and see you then!