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

Hello all! As promised yesterday I’ll be having two updates today, so please check back a little later tonight for all the main news stories. What I have for you first however is a hugely engrossing interview with Jonathan Evans, the admin of a new long term HYI program called BusinessVentureFunds.

For the last three weeks they’ve been listed on MNO BusinessVentureFunds have gotten their fair share of interest from investors and it’s not difficult to see why. Just take the manner in which they return your principal when your investment with them expires. See my original review of BusinessVentureFunds published here to see a description of that, but you can see that they are well organized and very serious about making every effort to keep their program online and financially stable for as long a time as possible. But I think Jonathan does a good job of explaining his program below so let’s here from him.

I’ll just remind you first that BusinessVentureFunds is a long term HYIP with three investment plans paying between 2.15% and 2.85% for 120 business days to AlertPay, LibertyReserve, and PerfectMoney with your principal returned on expiry.

“1. Hi Jonathan, please introduce yourself to the readers of MNO and give us a little background information on yourself and your experience in managing other peoples money.

Hi Paul, My name is Jonathan Evans and I’m the administrator of BusinessVentureFunds. Though this is my first online venture, I have other managerial experience and I also have a Masters degree in Business Management. Since my younger days, I had always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I have already partly achieved those dreams. Through this venture I hope to help others in their entrepreneurial ambitions as well as provide investors with a great investment opportunity.

2. Can you share some facts about the BusinessVentureFunds business with us? How long have you been in operation? Are you the sole employee or do you have an assistant or a partner?

BusinessVentureFunds was launched with the goal of giving individual investors the ability to get in early at a company’s start-up stage or in special situations in which there is opportunity for explosive growth. Our online venture has launched on 23rd Mar, 2011. So, technically we have been in operation for just about 3 weeks. And No, I am not running this alone. A very close associate of mine for many years by the name of John is my business partner in this venture. He is more of a silent partner and he takes care of the behind the scenes and day to day operations of our venture. I also have a customer support team in place headed by another close associate of mine by the name of Rita.

3. Assuming someone is coming into the online investments industry for the first time, can you talk us through a step-by-step guide in how to become a member of BusinessVentureFunds and what happens afterwards?

We at BusinessVentureFunds wanted to make it extremely simple and easy for members to invest with us and receive their profits. We follow a direct investment and payment system. Members have to follow just 3 easy steps to make their deposit.
1) Click on the “Invest Now” link and enter their email address and click Next.
2) In step 2 they have to chose their preferred Ecurrency option and also enter the amount they wish to invest and click Next.
3) Finally, they have to verify the details they have entered in the previous steps and if everything is correct, they can proceed to make their deposit.
After completing the deposit, members will automatically receive an email with
details of their deposit. After this there is nothing else needed to be done as payments are automatically sent to the member’s ecurrency account directly every business day.

4. What are you offering investor in terms of plans and profits? What is the minimum and maximum amounts you can invest?

Our investment plans pay an interest ranging from 2.15%-2.85% per business day for a total period of 120 business days. The minimum to invest is just $5 and the maximum is $5000 per deposit. The interest rate is dependent on the amount of the individual deposit.
1) For deposits in the range of $5 – $500, the interest rate is 2.15% per day
2) For deposits in the range of $501-$1000, the interest rate is 2.5% per day
3) And for deposits in the range of $1001-$5000, the interest rate is 2.85% per day

At the end of the investment term of 120 business days, the principal amount is returned back to the investor. There are 2 Principal repayment options from which the investor has to choose. Every investor will receive an email from us automatically 5 business days before the end of the investment period asking for their choice. The choices are-
1) (Default) – The default option if we don’t receive a reply with an alternative choice is that they will get 2% of their principal amount paid per day (calendar days – Monday through Sunday) till their principal is completely returned.
2) Second option is they can choose to close their deposit and ask for an immediate return of principal in which case there will be a 40% fee imposed on the principal. This amount will be paid within 3 business days after the request.

5. Can you explain the early withdrawal system to us? Under what circumstances are members allowed to leave the program and claim back some of their principal before their investment expires?

We don’t have an early principal withdrawal system as such. It is more of a refund system in which if a member is not satisfied with our service or if for any reason wants to withdraw their principal, we allow them to do so provided that they are not already in profit. They will receive their deposit amount minus the interest paid to them till that point of time.

6. What payment processors are BusinessVentureFunds currently dealing with? I believe you have indicated a desire to introduce AlertPay, is that correct? How close are we to seeing that happen?

We have already introduced AlertPay a few days back and now members can make deposits with Liberty Reserve, Perfect Money and AlertPay. We think these payment processors are the most popular at the moment and cover the majority of investors. In future we are also planning to introduce direct bank wires for people who would like to avoid dealing with online ecurrencies.

7. Can you give us any other general statistics on the program, for example the number of active members, total deposits, total withdrawals, etc?

I am sorry Paul, I don’t want to reveal the exact statistics but all I can say is that we have achieved good steady growth since our launch and every day we receive a lot of deposits from both new as well as already existing members.

8. What would be the best and most efficient way of contacting you if I have any questions or problems? The website offers “Live Support” but I never see it working. Why is that? What time of the day (GMT) can I find an operator there?

The most efficient way of contacting us is through the support form on our site or by directly emailing us at support@bvfunds.com. Yes, we have Live Support option but we have had some difficulty in getting operators for the Live Chat. So, currently we are unable to provide live chat on a regular basis, but in future we are going to be adding more support staff. So you can expect to find a fully working 24/7 live chat support in the coming months.

9. What have been the most common questions, problems, or other support related issues that you have had to deal with so far? Is there anything you would like to address here so that members can avoid having to contact you?

The most common question or request we have received so far was the request to add AlertPay as a payment option which we have already implemented. Apart from this most of the other common questions are being added regularly to our FAQ page.

10. Can you tell us in detail about the security of BusinessVentureFunds? Who is your hosting provider and how highly do you rate them as a service provider?

We are hosted on a dedicated server with top notch DDOS protection from KODDOS. They came highly recommended and so far I have to say that they are indeed a great hosting provider. We have not had any significant downtime so far and they are quick to respond to support tickets if any. We also have an SSL certificate from COMODO for secure browsing.

11. Can you also explain in more detail why you are not using a traditional HYIP related script? What are the advantages to either you or the members from this? Is there a downside?

We decided to go with the simple direct investment script since we feel that it is one of the safer and more convenient options available at the moment. There is no need of worrying about member accounts being hacked or our LR accounts being hacked through the script. We pay directly to the member’s ecurrency account. Also, I am sure that members appreciate or will soon begin to appreciate the convenience aspect in this. Members do not need to keep track or login and make withdrawals every single day. Their profits accumulate directly to their ecurrency accounts.

The only downside that I can think of is probably that members cannot track exactly how much interest they have earned till date except by checking the history pages in their ecurrency account. To overcome this, we are currently working on a system where members can enter their deposit batch number to view their earnings statistics. It won’t be a “members area”, it will just be a simple page displaying the stats. Our programmer has not started working on this yet because he is currently held up, but I will ensure that this is done within the next few weeks.

12. What other outside business and investment activities are you involved with? Can we see any independently verifiable proof of these activities? I said in my review that you gave almost no practical or useful information about that. Why not?

We are basically a venture capital fund and we invest in small- and medium-size startup companies that we research into and find to have strong growth potential. Also, one more point I want to put on record about our program is that we do not actually generate 2.15-2.85% returns per day from our investments alone. It is not possible to get that high an ROI consistently in any field. The rates we offer are based on part profits and part principal repayment and part incoming funds. Since we do not offer principal return fully (we return your principal at 2% per day or 60% as whole at end of term) part of the principal amount is included in the interest payment, part of it is from profits we generate and another part of it is from fund expansion. It is very difficult to put an exact percentage number on the profits that we generate since most of our investments are locked in for quite a long time. Regarding proof of our investment activity, we have not added any of the details on our website as of yet because we are still a very new program and also there are serious security and privacy issues to be concerned about. However, we will definitely keep providing regular updates on our business activities to all members through our newsletters.

13. Tell us more about the general advertising and promotional strategies being used by BusinessVentureFunds. In a very competitive market what are you doing to bring the program to a wider investment audience?

Before launching, we had already allocated a fixed budget which would be spent on promotion of our program through monitors/forums/advertisement banners etc in our first month. From our research, we first chose some of the top monitors such as MNO, GoldPoll etc first and included them and after we launched we got monitoring offers from close to about 300 monitors from which we chose some other monitors based on their popularity. As of now, our program is listed on close to 70 monitors (You can find the complete list on our rate us page). Now we are going to be shifting our focus to further development of our site. Our main priority is to bring up multi lingual versions of our site and offer a 24×7 live chat support option for our investors. We believe that satisfied and excited investors are our best source of promotion. When investors are satisfied they will automatically refer others to our program and this will enable us to grow further.

14. Are there any plans to develop BusinessVentureFunds further in the near future? Will there be any interesting changes made soon? How are you planning to keep the program competitive with so many other options open to investors?

Yes Paul, we have a lot of plans to further develop BusinessVentureFunds in the future. As you rightly said, there is a lot of competition in this industry with new programs coming up every day. So, any program which wants to remain competitive and attract investors has to stay on its toes and constantly innovate and cater to customer needs. As I already mentioned earlier in the interview, we are going to be adding new languages to the site soon. Bank wires payment option will be introduced for investors who don’t like to deal with ecurrencies. I also firmly believe that being easily reachable to the customers is an important part of any business. So we are definitely going to be working to put together a good team of Live Chat operators which will enable our investors to easily reach us in case of any issues. Also in the coming weeks, we are going to be launching a few contests and promotions which I am sure will create a nice buzz around our program! I will send out email updates as and when we launch the contests.

15. And finally, is there anything you feel that wasn’t covered in this interview that you think the readers of MNO should be aware of? Was there anything in the original review that you feel was unfair, inaccurate, or that you would like to comment on?

No, nothing in particular Paul. I just want to thank you for this interview and I hope that all MNO readers enjoyed it and managed to get some useful information about BusinessVentureFunds and our operations. I look forward to attending the Live Chat session on MNO and interact directly with all MNO readers.”

Thanks a lot to Jonathan for that and let me just wish him every success with his program. I hope you found it in some way helpful in deciding whether BusinessVentureFunds is a suitable addition to your own portfolio or not, so best of luck too to all the existing and future members there.

That’s about it for the moment guys, but not for the day. I’ll be back later on tonight with a round up of the day’s main news stories so see you all then and enjoy the rest of your Sunday!