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

Hi everybody! As I mentioned in yesterday’s post I joined a couple of new programs recently that I want to take a closer look at over the coming few days. And the one I want to start with is an intriguing new site called WLInvestments.

I say it’s intriguing, and really it does vary in quality throughout and ranges from quite good to quite amateurish. Although overall I am positive about the program itself, I will try to give you as much information as possible on both the advantages and the drawbacks as evenly as possible as I see them anyway.

Starting as usual with the plans WLInvestments could best be described as a medium to long term HYIP. There are three plans for you to choose from, starting with the one they call “Investment Opportunity“. This plan runs for 50 business days and offers you a daily interest repayment of 1.3% paid 5 days per week, Monday to Friday. Investments start at $20 and go up to a maximum of $5000. A practical example would be if you were to let’s say make a deposit of $100 here, you could expect to get paid $1.30 per day, or $6.50 per week, for 10 weeks. That would give you a total profit of $65 on top of your initial $100 which is then returned on expiry. WLInvestments will then deduct 2% for fees leaving you with $63. Although you don’t see a profit until after the program expires, 63% is still an excellent rate and achievable as far as HYIPs go. Also should you wish to withdraw from the plan early you will be penalized to the tune of 10% of your investment.

Next is what they call the “Investment Light” plan. The amounts you may invest remain the same, starting at $20 and maxing out at $5000. This time however the term runs for 100 business days and to reward you for this extra risk you are offered a daily rebate of 1.6% per business day. So for $100 invested here you can expect 5 daily payments per week of $1.60, adding up to $8 per week for 20 weeks. That will give you a total profit on expiry of $160. That will also mean that you break even after 63 business days and see pure profit after that. Your principal will again get returned but please note that once again a fee will be deducted by WLInvestments leaving you with $158 in total profits.

Finally there is the so called “Investment Transformation” plan. Again the minimum and maximum amounts to spend remain unchanged at between $20 to $5000 but this time the investment term runs for 200 business days. In return for joining this one you can expect to earn 1.9% interest per business day. That means that if we put our imaginary $100 in here we can expect to earn $1.90 per business day adding up to a total of $9.50 per week for 40 weeks. You can therefore expect to break even and see your first profit after 53 days and see out the investment term with a total profit of $380 after which we hope your principal gets returned. Fees are again applied at the usual rate leaving you with a total profit of $378. It might seem like a lot at first glance but remember that it’s paid over the course of almost nine and a half months so it’s really not such an outlandish claim to make at all.

OK, so far so good. I like the plans. They are both profitable and realistic. So what’s the first drawback I mentioned at the start? That would have to be the choice of payment processors. Or should that be the lack of choice? At the moment your options are limited to LibertyReserve. No disrespect to them, they have their own uses and advantages, but it is simply not good enough for any online investment program to be so heavily dependent on just one payment processor like this. What happens in the event of some significant downtime from LR? And let’s be blunt, we have seen that more than once in the recent past. Either for maintenance work or DDoS attacks the reasons are irrelevant but the results are the same. Bank wires are also accepted but that remains very much a minority payment method among HYIP players. It’s something that’s only going to hold the program back, but of course it’s not a difficult problem to fix either. The lack of a proper referral commission system though won’t exactly motivate hordes of online investors to enthusiastically promote the program either.

The final point I want to make about the plans is that while compounding is not allowed, there is a bonus system in place for those re-investing in the second and third plans. 10% is paid for continuing with the Investment Light program and 15% is paid for Investment Transformation.

Things brighten up a bit though when we look at the security. WLInvestments is hosted on a dedicated server by what is quite simply the best available hosting provider available today by a country mile. BlockDos are protecting them and if downtime becomes a serious issue here, then frankly I’ll be shocked. And the domain is registered for a full 10 years. There’s no script, which of course can have certain good points but also certain bad ones as well. On one hand you have the advantage of automatic payouts but that is counter balanced by the lack of any kind of members area where you can view your account details and records. I could also mention the benefits of an offline membership database. The lack of a script in this case lends to a slightly amateurish feel to the whole program in my opinion. Feel free to disagree but I’d only attach a limited amount of importance to that when it comes to longer term programs anyway, first impressions being of lesser importance here.

But the most intriguing thing is that that’s all in stark contrast to the extensive work put into creating and supporting the cover story that WLInvestments is a registered bank in of all places Somalia. Perhaps the last corner of the globe with little if anything remaining of a functioning central government with authority over its own territory. So I don’t know how that is supposed to benefit the investor. They also claim registration in Ghana and the Bahamas as a registered asset and investment management firm. They have even went so far as to create extensive biographies for the entire cast of characters we are led to believe make up the staff of WLInvestments. Interesting reading but there isn’t a single telephone number between the whole lot of them despite all the addresses. It’s all very elaborate. Probably too much so for most of the more experienced HYIP players that prefer not to waste their time with this and get straight down to business.

Communication and customer support is through a series of different e-mail addresses, each one pertaining to various lines of inquiry you might have with different aspects of the business. The FAQ section is quite good by the way so should go some way towards answering many of the “general inquiry” type of question. Overall though I can’t help but feel substance has been sacrificed for style here and some work needs to be done if WLInvestments is going to compete seriously (and be taken seriously) against some of the big names operating low ROI long term HYIPs out there at the moment.

Other news for today.

InvestiMates broke another record today – $750,000 in deposits. And it’s not a made up figure like what you have probably seen on some cheap scamming sites with a stolen script and cheap hosting boasting to have attracted millions of dollars. InvestiMates is another generation of HYI programs with a no nonsense approach and honest admin who never hide the truth from you and say from the beginning that you’re participating in a game with no additional income (99% of HYIPs are nothing more than games anyway). I hope this example of an extremely successful program with over 3,000 members already that deposited $774,275 in total (at the time of writing) will encourage other admins not to hide the truth behind elaborate but pointless stories but instead rather work hard like the admin of InvestiMates Roger is doing (read my interview with him here by the way). Maybe with such an honest approach and a dedicated attitude we will have more similar good and long-lasting programs like InvestiMates now. I remind you that the program pays you 10% for 12 days with daily payouts and 12% for 12 days with payouts processed on expiry. If you wish to find out more about the InvestiMates program please refer to my review published here. Here is the latest from Roger:
“Hello Mates, It’s been a while since my last e-mail update so here I am again, updating you about the current events on InvestiMates. First thing I should tell you is that InvestiMates has once again reached another milestone in it’s life, we just broke the $750,000 mark and total members has reached 3,144 from the time I am writing this e-mail. Yipeeee… this is a reason why everyone should be happy to be part of InvestiMates.
Another reason why I sent this e-mail is to let you know (if you still don’t know) that SolidTrustPay has been down for 3 days now, if I am not mistaken. So therefore, I am unable to process the withdrawals that are pending for SolidTrustPay. But once STP is back up, I will process those withdrawals in a fast manner as possible. For now, if you want, you can redeposit your SolidTrustPay balance if you were planning to withdraw them. This way you can also earn some profit while waiting.
Another issue, I want to talk about is that, there are fake votes being posted on the monitors about InvestiMates. We all know that these are fake because we do not have any problems with our program here and only those who are not happy to see InvestiMates growing, will have the reason to post fake negative ratings on the monitors for our program. So please ignore them or better yet, rate InvestiMates to burry those fake ratings.
Oh before forget this one, do you think we should raise the maximum deposit to $5,000 for each plan now? Some members are requesting this from me. What do you think? Let me know, by emailing me, use the contact form for this.
Have a nice day everyone. See you at the forums as usual.
Regards, Roger“.

By the way, if you’re concerned about the inaccessibility of SolidTrustPay payment processor for the last three days now you should really look a bit more often at their official blog at www.solitrustnews.com This is an official blog and I was unaware that some of my readers still don’t know that it exists. The only good thing from the latest update published there is that their hosting provider BlackLotus is currently working on the problem and that the site will hopefully be online soon. No specific timeframe has been given yet as the attack on STP site was quite sophisticated and according to STP admin unseen before. It’s very possible that the attackers are the same cohorts of blackmailers that attacked GoldNuggetInvest (also hosted with BlackLotus) or from a competitor payment processor. This is just speculation of course but a reasonable explanation should be offered anyway to help exclude the possibility of such attacks in the near future. Although it’s very possible that the main reason for attacking SolidTrustPay was to raise concerns in their clients’ minds and get them to change STP to another payment processor. Well, I think this part will become a reality shortly as soon as the site is back online. Many investors will definitely rush to withdraw their money and exchange it to another more reliable e-currency. However after the panic settles I believe SolidTrustPay will get back to normal. I myself trust them and am not going to withdraw everything from them and I advise you to do the same. For those who enjoy the technical jargon here is a very detailed update from SolidTrustPay administration updating us on the current state of things and what really happened during the course of the last three days of total outage:
“On August 11th Black Lotus received complaints of service degredation to the web site SolidTrustPay that were not detected by the network sensors. It was initially thought that the server was offline for unexplained reasons. After connecting a KVM and checking traffic on the server locally it was revealed that there was a very small attack that was somehow causing service daemons to stop responding. Black Lotus management later determined that the source IP’s were spoofed in such a way that the routers could not detect the spoof, a method never before seen.
On August 12th at 1:41AM Pacific, Black Lotus Leadership Team had manually filtered the attack and brought the site back online although with significant performance detriment. During the course of the early morning the attack shifted into a very large infrastructure attack against Black Lotus and upstream provider Peer1 Network prompting them to null route the IP address. From there packet levels reached and began fluctuating at levels of approximately 1,500,000 to 2,500,000 packets per second. The Black Lotus Enterprise network is rated for a total capacity of approximately 2,000,000 packets per second.
Black Lotus then ordered the site placed into global distribution mode at 6:29AM Pacific in order to facilitate the larger packet loads. Peer1 accepted the order but ultimately failed to route the traffic back to Black Lotus citing concerns that 2,000,000+ packets was above a level they could safely handle. Throughout the course of the day Leadership Team began ordering conference calls with the upstream NOC to negotiate lifting of the null routes.
By evening the routing issue was in the hands of Leadership Team and upstream engineers who were conducting manual, deep level analysis of the traffic to determine what methods could be implemented to reduce the flow of traffic to a more manageable level.
Time to full resolution is currently undetermined.”

Perhaps SolidTrustPay has started to feel a very strong competitor in StrictPay now. Being quite new compared to STP StrictPay although is very stable and doesn’t have any significant downtime. It has already built a solid reputation when dealing with online investors. In addition, it has the same options like Debit Card, ACH/Bank Wires/Checks deposit and withdrawal options, their support is fast and efficient and I would say StrictPay is gaining in popularity among investors at quite a swift pace. Anyway, as I said many people will look at other options and withdraw their money from SolidTrustPay to different payment processors (most probably to StrictPay and AlertPay) after STP site is back online. And probably to make this option not possible or at least complicate the process SolidTrustPay has notified StrictPay that they are stopping all interaction with them starting from August, 15th. Well, I don’t feel that this step will be met by SolidTrustPay members with much enthusiasm especially considering the serious flaws that were discovered during the recent downtime. But anyway, it’s payment processor internal affairs and I believe the investors will draw their own appropriate conclusions from the situation that was described in this latest update from StrictPay administration:
“StrictPay Customers, We have been notified by SolidTrustPay that they will no longer do business with StrictPay. We received this message from SolidTrustPay:
“SolidTrustPay will no longer be able to allow StrictPay to interact with its system as of August 15, 2009. As you are a Money Services Business, SolidTrust cannot provide you with services. You may not receive any deposits IN to your account after the date above.”
As the SolidTrustPay website has been offline for much of the last couple days, we have decided to stop allowing deposit and withdraw requests through them immediately, and all requests currently in our system will be canceled. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, or contact SolidTrustPay if you would like a more thorough explanation about why they will no longer work with us.
Team StrictPay. The Best Payment Solution.”

The downtime of STP payment processor will definitely affect many programs regardless of how much longer it will continue. Some admins have taken preventive measures already and the admin of SazaInvestments (interviewed here) decided to postpone all the weekly payouts until after SolidTrustPay is back online. I’m not sure if it’s a positive decision for those that would like to withdraw to other payment processors but surely it’s a fair approach. Let’s hope that STP issues will not be just an excuse for delaying the payouts. Anyway, so far I have had only good experiences with SazaInvestments paying 8%-10% weekly and I’m sure many investors will agree with my opinion and will give themm the benefit of the doubt regarding this matter. If you want to read more on SazaInvestments please refer to my review published here. This is the latest from them:
“Up to now STP is still down. If they won’t come online again in about 12 hours we will delay the payout button till they will be available again because we want everybody to be able to request the payouts in the same time and that’s just fair we think. We will announce when the withdrawal button will become available so that anybody to be able to request payout in the same time so to be fair to everybody. If you can think of any other meaning for this please feel free to send us support tickets. Regards, SazaInvestments Team.”
P.S. It seems the admin of SazaInvestments just reconsidered and changed his mind regarding paying the weekly payouts. Here is the latest update from him I received just a few minutes ago:
“STP still having problems so we will delay the withdrawal button till morning when we’ll see how things are doing with STP. If it won’t be online again in the morning, we will probably open the cashout button and we’ll see how to handle STP problem then. Considering that SP just announced that STP don’t allowed them to interact for withdrawal/deposit with STP on SP we consider this a very bad sign and we’ll look forward to search for a solution for our STP investors. We will send another newsletter regarding this issue in the morning. Please be sure that we’ll find a solution good for everybody regarding this issue. Regards, SazaInvestments Team“.

Please notice that the site of OnisGroup (reviewed here) might be inaccessible for some time and that if you’re redirected to other sites mentioned in the following update please don’t hesitate to use them and carry out all the usual operations with your account you normally do with your OnisGroup account. Here is the update regarding this issue:
“We are performing planned major update on the server. New domain names will be introduced: onisgroup.net and onis-group.com.”

CashXpress is improving! The administration of the site announced today that StrictPay had been added as another payment option (together with already available LR and PM options). To add your StrictPay account please click on “Change password” in your CashXpress internal account and enter and confirm your StrictPay number. In addition, cashouts will be processed 6 times a week (Saturdays will also become payout days). These updates will surely attract more new members to CashXpress program that pays 1.04% for 4 days, 3.13% for 13 days and 4.24% for 24 days returning your principal back on expiry for each plan. I remind you that you can get informed on all the features of CashXpress program in my review published here. And here is the update:
“Dear CashXpress members, first we like to say thanks to all CashXpress members for your great support! It’s much appreciated. We are pleased to announce as from today, August 13, CashXpress introduces a new investment option for all members. CashXpress members can now also invest with StrictPay. Also we like you to announce that any withdrawal request will be also paid on Saturdays. That’s it for today. Have a great day. Your Gary Mo (CashXpress Programmer)“.

The admin of AdsDailyPro autosurf that was just announced on my blog last night sent out another update (after 23 days online) informing the members of the modest level of growth (the program has reached over 300 members) and invited all those with any doubts to verify the program’s paying status by taking a look at some payment screenshots available on the site of AdsDailyPro. Just like other programs, AdsDailyPro reports on the current issues with STP due to which all the payouts to STP have been postponed until it’s back online. Here is the latest news from AdsDailyPro that will be reviewed on my blog soon:
“Hello everyone, A lot of wonderful things happened here on AdsDailyPro lately, I am sure you noticed too.
First of all our membership counts now more than 300 members, which excellent and based on site statistics we are expecting to hit 500 members by the end of this week.
Another achievement, which is the most important, is that we paid so far more than $2850 to our members and I invite you to check again some of our payments here and to share your comments with us.
Our first contest was a success and we are planning to make a new contest, stay close to us for more details soon (I give you a clue, will be related to referrals).
I noticed that SolidTrustPay is down, so thats why there will be some delays in processing STP payments, but as soon as they will be back, I will process all cashouts remaining for this payment processor.
This being said, I would like to thank to all of you for your hard work in promoting AdsDailyPro.
With regards, Diane. AdsDailyPro.”

Another popular low-ROI autosurfing program YesICanSurf (reviewed here) is on the second day of their celebrations dedicated to reaching 1,000 members at the beginning of August. There are more bonuses currently available for the members of YesICanSurf and you can read about it in more detail in the following update from the program:
“Greetings YesICanSurf Family !
We are now into Day 2 of our Celebration Surf party!!
Today, we are full throttle into our upgrade bonuses posted on the home page scroll:
Upgrade $100 (50 adpacks) and receive $20 (10 adpacks) FREE !!! That’s an awesome opportunity
to increase your adpacks and earn more. This offer ends on August 16th, so come one, come all !
More Surf Party specials to come !!
Family, we are asking all of you to come into our Surf family circle and believe with us that by the end of this month we’ll be at least 2,000 members strong! Can we do it ?……YES, WE CAN! In Napoleon Hill’s words: As A Man Thinketh, So Is He.
Lets Prosper Together, Phil and Sarah.”

I’m glad to let you know that AxaCofinance program (reviewed here) paid me the first weekly payment today I received my 11% weekly interest very fast after making the withdrawal request. Well, it’s a good start for the program and I wish them a lot of success. Other programs that paid me today include the following: GoldNuggetInvest, CashXpress, BestInv, 12DailyClicks, AssetsParty, PlusInv, FoxFund, PanaMoney, OnisGroup, InvestiMates, CoolReturn, DirectResult, XagaEnterprise, NanoMoneyCorp, GlobalTraderGroup, InvestmentForge, ExcellentProfit, SolidCapital, GeniusFunds and WLInvestments (the first payment received).

Berore I finish today’s news section I would like to tell about a new promising program I have joined today. It’s funny name and called GloriousProfit and hopefully this is what it’s gonna bring us. The investment plans are simple: you will earn from 5% to 5.5% daily for 30 days depending on the amount deposited (the minimum allowed is $10 with $20K set as the maximum). The principal is included in your daily earnings and not returned at the end of the plan. GloriousProfit has a professional design, is being run on a licensed GoldCoders script and is hosted on a Staminus dedicated server. Quite a good set of features there for a start! The choice of payment processors that are accepted by GloriousProfit is limited by StrictPay, LibertyReserve and PerfectMoney. But according to their banners I believe the admin of GloriousProfit is going to add SolidTrustPay as soon as they are back online. After just 2 days online GloriousProfit has about 150 members and that’s a very good achievement for such a new program. The investment plan is also quite sustainable in the long run and I believe with professional management the program can run for a long time. Anyway, I will review GloriousProfit on my blog as soon as I receive my first payout but you’re free to check it out now for yourselves if you wish. That’s all for today and I will see you on my blog tomorrow!