THIS PROGRAM HAS STOPPED PAYING! PLEASE DON’T INVEST!

Hi guys! For those of you who read my news from yesterday’s post you may remember I said I joined a new HYIP-Surf hybrid program called OrybFunds. They proudly describe themselves as “a revolutionary HYIP and autosurf hybrid”. Anytime I hear that word an image of Leon Trotsky or Fidel comes to mind, neither of whom would approve of the online investment industry very much, lol! Seriously though, it’s not exactly a totally new concept at all. It’s been used several times in the past, and in fairness there have been a couple of cases where it was a huge success. Of course other times it was an utterly atrocious failure, but no need to mention any of them here!

With the obvious exception of USDozen, there isn’t really all that much to get excited about in the surfing world at the moment and I guess that maybe the admin here thinks that the combination of a surfing program with a regular HYIP might be the way to go. Given the state of the surfing industry right now I suppose it definitely can’t hurt. There is a lot going for OrybFunds right now and it does have tons of potential. However for one very important reason I don’t see it mounting a serious challenge either to USDozen as an autosurf or to any of the top recommended investing sited as an HYIP. I’ll get to that shortly but it’s only fair that I point out some of the positive aspects of OrybFunds first.

One such positive aspect is with the plans. They are quite sustainable. There is, naturally, a surfing option and a regular HYIP style option for you to decide from. Or indeed if you can’t make up your mind as to which one you prefer, you can join both as I did. Both options have several variations within and I’ll start with the investment option. The plan runs for 150 days so I guess we can call that a long term one. During that time you will receive daily payments that vary from 1.5% to 2.4% depending on the size of your deposit. It breaks down like this: the minimum deposit is $10 and on amounts from that up to $99 you will receive the minimum 1.5% daily. Amounts from $100 to $499 will earn 1.7% per day. Amounts from $500 to $999 receive 1.9% daily. Amounts between $1000 and $4999 are paid 2.1% per day. And finally for the big spenders an investment from $5000 up to the maximum allowed $10,000 will earn you 2.3% daily.

And now the surfing option. The returns again fluctuate based on the size of your deposit and are just slightly better that the investment option. But only just. For similar sized investments you will be paid 0.1% more on your investment, and remember you will be required to surf every day for 150 days so just be sure you are fully aware of what you are getting yourself into. If you are happy with that then you will be paid as follows: the minimum spend here is also $10 so from that up to $99 you will earn 1.6% per day. Amounts from $100 to $499 will earn 1.8% per day. Amounts from $500 to $999 receive 2% daily. Amounts between $1000 and $4999 are paid 2.2% per day. And finally for the big spenders an investment from $5000 up to the maximum allowed $10,000 will earn you 2.4% daily. You will be required to surf 10 sites per day for the duration of the plan. At the moment LibertyReserve is the only payment option accepted.

The security of OrybFunds is another thing in their favor. The first thing I noticed was the script which is completely unique and custom designed for the program. And it’s all quite safe and secure with their use of SSL encryption. They are also hosted on a DdoS protected dedicated server. So whatever else happens along the way, we are unlikely to encounter serious problems on that front. For customer support you are provided with an e-mail address and an online e-mail ticketing system. They also offer occasional live support via a live chat function but it’s unclear how many hours per day and at what time this is available.

So my first major criticism of OrybFunds is this. I know that surfing sites just don’t appeal to everyone. It doesn’t take very long but many simply don’t like the inconvenience of it all. And that’s fine. If you are one of those people then the regular investment option is available for you. But I have to ask myself would even the most ardent surfer enjoy the prospect of 150 consecutive days surfing? OK, so I joined but I’m monitoring the program. There is the added incentive of daily payments rather that payments on expiry so that might make it seem a little more enticing but still, 150 days in a row? If you didn’t like surfing to begin with then this will hardly encourage you. I also think the reward for joining the surfing plan is just not sufficiently better than the investment plan to make it all that attractive. At an extra 0.1% that translates as a mere extra cent for every $10 you invest.

The next problem I have, and in my opinion this is altogether more serious, is the payment options. This simply isn’t good enough. I know LibertyReserve is still arguably the single most popular payment processor around at the moment but that’s not enough. The simple fact of the matter here is that the program just will not get the popularity it deserves with LR as the only option. This is certain to stifle the programs long term prospects unless it’s addressed by the admin soon. Particularly amongst North American investors and just larger investors in general who tend to prefer the more, shall we say, law abiding options. No disrespect to LibertyReserve here you understand. There a fine company and they definitely have their uses. But if I’m going to start throwing around large sums of money in programs that don’t provide you with so much as a working telephone number, then I feel a lot better doing under the protection from scams and fraudsters offered by the likes of SolidTrustPay and AlertPay.

But I’m not trying to be overly negative on OrybFunds either. It’s true I have some criticisms, but you know it’s really nothing that’s difficult to fix. The plan itself is sound enough and the amount of work put into the design clearly indicates that the admin wants this to be a serious program. It just requires a little minor surgery in the area of payment options and this could just turn out to be an interesting project.

Other news for today.

First of all, I apologize that I haven’t reviewed TheDollarDiggers yet as the program is really getting more interesting as its official launch of June 1st approaches. I’m going to review it just on the day of its official launch when it’s clear what shape it will takee and what features will stay in the final version of the program. Really, there were so many programs online and sometimes it’s really difficultt to say which is which. So it requires a lot of effort from an admin to make his program stand out from the others and offer some unique features to investors. So I think Thomas, the admin of TheDollarDiggers, is going the right way by offering different types of revenue to the members including manual surf, paid-to-click site and cycler. Today I have received another update from Thomas. In this update he has some interesting thoughts of how he’s going to make his program more popular among online investors along with other plans which he hopes to accomplish before the official launch:
“In just 4 days from now, TDD will be in full swing. I will now announce some of the changes that will happen on that day.
Supposedly with Digger Plan, I will raise the limit to $1000 on June 1st but yesterday and today I made some calculations to see if it will be sustainable and found out that it will not be good for TDD to have that high limit. So not to put TDD in a situation that will eventually turn and give problems, I decided to just raise the limit to $500. It will still be the same, 2% daily for 15 days and principal back after expiry. The new name for it will be Digger Quick Plan.
With the 3 Stage Cycler Plan, I will raise the limit of positions that members can buy from 153 to 500, this is your entry position in Stage 1, free positions obtained from cycling out on Stage 2 not included. So once you hit 200 positions in the 3SC Plan, you must wait for some of your positions to cycle out from Stage 3 before you can buy again.
Now I am sure many of you saw the 3rd Plan added already in the BUY ADS section in your Members area. Yes we will have a new plan implemented on June 1st. It is called the Digger Infinite Plan. So how it works?
Digger Infinite Plan is offered to members who wants to put larger amount in TDD. Per unit in this plan costs $500 and maximum amount member can put is $5000. Possible raise of limit can be and will be done upon request of the majority of the members. The percentage offer in this plan is 3% weekly, not much but if you will sum it up it will still give you 12% monthly pure profit. Now why it is called Infinite? Because upgrades in this plan will never expire unless you decided to take out your principal money. There are some restrictions to follow though before you can buy upgrades in this plan.
The restrictions are –
1. Your principal have a lock in period of 31 calendar days before you can request to pull it out from this plan. You can withdraw your weekly earnings though even if your principal is still in the lock in period.
2. You must buy 10 positions in 3 Stage Cycler Plan first for each Ad Pack you will buy in this plan.
Ratio – 1 Ad Pack ($500) in Digger Infinite Plan = 10 ($1.30/position) positions in 3 Stage Cycler Plan.
Example –
You want to buy 3 Ad Pack costs $1500, you must buy 30 positions first in 3SC costs $39.
If not followed I will treat your upgrades as a donation to TDD.
3. No compounding allowed.
Why the above restrictions are and will be applied? It is to make sure that each Plan is and will be productive. All of them are co related to each other and all of them are designed to give maximum earnings to all the members of TDD. I will work on the Terms and Rules and FAQ page to reflect this final changes on TDD before the Full launch.
I am excited and I hope that all of are excited too. I am working hard to make TDD a success and I am going to plead to you all that we work as a TEAM and we will all achieve success.
Btw, if you have any comments, clarifications, suggestions or even violent reactions with all I mentioned above, please send me a support ticket. All will be accepted and appreciated and will be answered.”

Well, many programs are different from others but not always in a positive way. Sometimes the admin’s personality can make or break a program. Take Edward Brown, the admin of EdwardBrownInvestments (reviewed here). I’m simply tired of his childish behavior and bizarre thoughts. Imagine that he called the AlertPay payment processor a scam which is absolutely ridiculous to hear especially from the admin of an HYIP which are in themselves illegal in the US:
“AP was very favored over many people ever since they started up. However, I don’t think they can last much longer being so popular! They are blocking accounts without notice or reason, making chargebacks, taking money from it’s clients, not paying their taxes in the US, and much more!”
First of all, AlertPay is one of the best and most respected payment processors out there and is perfectly legal (unlike many others). Second, AlertPay is NOT blocking people’s accounts for no reason. But many of my already know that if you use AlertPay you have a much better chance to get your money back from a scammer. Just recently in fact I got an email from one of my readers that got a substantial refund from his last deposit in ImperialFinances made via AlertPay. All he had to do is to file a dispute. So AlertPay really is freezing members’ accounts but it only applies to the accounts of scamming admins which is the only right and proper thing to do and who are possibly Edward Brown’s friends (since he defended them so much in his rant). And no, AlertPay is not paying taxes in the US, but simply because they’re in Canada, which is still an independent country last time I checked.
Anyway, let’s get back to his program which recently celebrated 6 months online. Or what is two months really because for the first four months it was hosted on a free hosting so could hardly be seen as a serious program by sane people. Possibly it doesn’t matter now as now it seems Edward Brown became “President, Chairman & CEO of Edward Brown Industries“. Wow, the question is: who gave him this title, is it royal blood, lol? Sorry for the rant here but I just hate to see how he mislead the investors by putting his own program (in a very modest move I must say) and another cheap scam on free hosting as his top recommended programs for you to join. That’s what I call total bias and self promotion.
The most important thing though is that EdwardBrownInvestments is still paying to the investors which is always the most important thing, and has some great plans for the future. But the question remains if his program has a future at all with such stupid behavior and the misleading practices he uses (you can read my interview with Edward Brown himself here and draw your own conclusions about his personality). And this is the latest update from EdwardBrownInvestments program:
“Hello Everyone! Today I would like to give everyone some updates regarding EdwardBrownInvestments.
First off, I think everybody should know that EBI has been growing stronger every day, and we recently celebrated our 6 month anniversary earlier this month!
The first update is that we have added live chat to the website. You can find it on the homepage and contact us page. Please take note however, that we are using the same LiveChat account as our blog. So just click “EBI Support” in the live chat box if you have a question or comment about EBI.
Also the next update has not really happened yet, but we are working on it. We are going to get a brand new site & script from one of the industry leaders. This script will be custom built, and top of the line. Also EBI will be getting all new graphics when this happens as well!
We expect the new site to be fully operational by June 20, 2009. However, this is only an estimation.
Finally, when the new site is up, EBI will also be adding some more payment options including PerfectMoney, SolidTrustPay, StrictPay, and BankWire. (Also, we are going to create 2 more “Jet Plan” type plans in addition to the 125 day plans.)
So just look forward to some MAJOR growth of EBI in the next few weeks! Thanks for reading everyone, and if you’re not a member already, then join asap!!
Oh, and also, your comments are welcome. Have a great day!”
Careful there Edward, all that backslapping could lead to a serious injury!

Let’s move on to more serious programs now and first I would like to mention GeniusFunds which is one of my favorite programs (you can read the detailed review here). Just to refresh your memory: GeniusFunds offers you 1.0%-1.9% daily or 6%-9% weekly with your principal locked for the period of 150-180 days. There are four payment processors accepted including AlertPay, SolidTrustPay, PerfectMoney and LibertyReserve and the minimum to invest is only $10. GeniusFunds is currently on top of many ratings and has been paying to investors for several months now. However for any successful program there will be those who will try to take advantage of its popularity by trying to get the members to compromise their sensitive info in GeniusFunds and steal their money. So there were so phishing emails sent to many members recently of which the administration of GeniusFunds warned the investors in the most recent update published on their website:
“It has come to our attention that a spam e-mail, claiming to be from GeniusFunds, has been circulating recently. The e-mail informs the recipient that he had won a prize in a lottery operated by GeniusFunds. We advise our investors not to follow any links embedded in these e-mails. GeniusFunds does not operate lotteries. These e-mails are designed to steal your login credentials and gain access to your account.”

The admin of LonixFinance (reviewed here) continued to improve his program and after moving to a dedicated server the program started to accept AlertPay payment processor which is definitely a positive addition to the four existing payment processors. Now we must admit that LonixFinance became one of the most attractive short-term programs paying 26.6%-30% for 4 days. Here is the most recent update from LonixFinance:
“Hi Dear Member, We are happy to announce you, from today we accept AlertPay. Our AlertPay account verification and website integration has been completed and is ready to use. You are welcome to deposit using these payment processors. As we told always, we are searching to find more better payment processor in future.”

I think it’s high time to stand up to the scammers threatening good HYI programs like hyip365 team. I can call them only lame extortionists that feed on cowardly admins that agree to pay them their ransom in exchange for good votes on forums and monitors. I consider this as extremely dishonest practice and only can call the admins that pay them “stupid” because they encourage the scammers to continue their business. Really, why should they stop when their business is flourishing? So if you see some bad votes on monitoring sites out of the blue just ask yourself if they are true or came from a bunch of scammers trying to destroy a good performing programs. We should fight this evil every way possible because they try to cheat and mislead the investors which is not better than scammers. The reason why I’m telling you all this today is that the last victim of hyip365 is UnitFX program (reviewed here). The program was a great program for the duration of the last 3 weeks and always paid on time but today it was attacked by many bad votes posted by these scammers. I myself would hate to see UnitFX go because of bad votes left by some jealous losers like hyip365 but that’s how the industry works. Any program stays online while it gets members’ support and if people’s psychology is not changed and they keep trusting paid positive or negative votes on monitors such scammers like hyip365 will flourish while the honest programs like UnitFX who refuse to pay them will suffer most. So I can confirm that UnitFX is still paying and those votes are from scammers as the admin of the program told on his site:
“All negative votes made by HYIP365. Please keep this in mind while visiting monitors! Check our status on our Forums and Blogs. Thank you.”
I appreciate his honesty and unwillingness to pay to the scammers and urge the investors to support his program UnitFX and show to those scammers hyip365 what we’re made of.

The site of AsianInvestGroup (reviewed here) was offline for a few hours today due to another DdoS attack. Fortunately this minor outage is over now and I know for sure that the program is back to its normal instant or very fast payouts (depending on the payment processor). Here is the update that was published on TG forum while the site was offline:
“The site is currently under DDOS attack and you might have problem accessing it. We are working on this problem.”

I have to move another program to Problematic list on my monitoring page. Surprisingly another one bit the dust and it was DamexTrade which barely lasted for a month. Honestly I didn’t expect that this program would fold so soon but everything can happen in this HYIP world. I have two pending payments now and I know that many other members of DamexTrade were not paid either. So I have no choice but to move the program like I did with HighRiseFinance yesterday which by the way is going to Not Paying status already as the admin didn’t reply to my emails at all and continues to pay selectively which is not tolerated by my blog.

And now I’ve just found out that GearsOfProfit closed. Three failed programs in two days – that was harsh I must say. And another serious blow to hit many of the investors. Compared to many other scammers though, the admin here announced about the closing of the program on his site. And to his credit he closed the registration and deposit options and promised refunds to the members not in profit. I remind you GearsOfProfit offered three short-term plans to the investors and lasted for more than 1 month which is actually a very good achievement for this type of program. This is the farewell update from the GearsOfProfit admin published on the site:
“New registrations has been disabled. Accepting of new deposits has been disabled.
Dear valued members, We decided to close the GearsOfProfit project. We can’t keep constant payouts flow, because a lot of old members withdraw all of their deposits and go away. We can’t earn profit for active deposits on time. You must understand that the high ROI is a high risk too. We know that words can’t excuse us, but we haven’t choice in this situation.
What else? Tomorrow we start to build refund list. This list will be published on the main page of the GearsOfProfit site and on the GearsOfProfit blog.
P. S. We’ll update you tomorrow.”

On the other hand I can say that I moved ElegantMoney to my Personal Favorites listing today as I feel some mighty potential coming from that program which just launched. In addition, I also got paid for the first time today. I’m going to review the program in a couple of days on my blog so stay tuned for that. For now I can only remind you that ElegantMoney just launched yesterday and accepts all the major payment processors. The plans in ElegantMoney are: 115% after 7 days, 140% after 14 days and 200% after 1 month. There is no need to request your payout as they will be made directly to the e-currency account you deposited with.

What’s the fuss with trading robots I wonder? Are they really so good and give you good results from Forex trading? I mean they are just programs so how on earth can they predict the future? Or maybe Forex is just something like algebra that can be analyzed by precise mechanical minds? I mention this because two programs today announced about the possibility to purchase their own trading robots.
First was NorthBizz program (reviewed here):
“We are happy to announce you we developed our own forex trading robot. The robot make forex trading more comfortable and give a trader more free times. This robot is designed and optimized to trade USDCAD pair. Currently we are testing it in a demo account to view its live result. When the test period completed, we are ready to start sell it at our website.”
Then ForexExperts (reviewed here) followed:
“Forex Trading Robot on SaleMay 28, 2009
Our Technology Team has already developed Shark Forex Trading Robot. It is can be used to all curencies, but not including Gold and Silver now. If you want it, you can order it for only $1,988 from me. I believe it will give you a special feeling when you trade.”
I’m only wondering that if these robots are so efficient who is going to be losing on Forex market once they become widespread. As you know if there are winners on Forex markets there should be losers as well. This is the task which I think even the smartest machines will not be able to solve for a very long time.

This is it for today except to add the list of programs that paid me for the last 24 hours: XagaEnterprise, Treckswana, SilverLodge, NanoMoneyCorp, GoldNuggetInvest, ForexExperts, AmericanWorkGroup, GeniusFunds, NovalexFinance, UnitFX, PanaMoney, OrybFunds, Verifield, LonixFinance, Poplans, MajorBarter, Fexity, EwoCapital, NorthBizz, USDozen, SteadyGrowthInvest, SigmaTral, EnscoOffshore, EdwardBrownInvestments, TraderSolid, InvertsmentForge, TheDollarDiggers and ElegantMoney (the first payment received). I wish you a very happy weekend and see you on my blog tomorrow!