04/12/2014. Interview with the Admin of Raisean

Beware! Raisean has stopped paying! Do not invest there!

Hello everybody! Well, it was just slightly later than I was hoping for, but better late than never. I am of course referring to the much anticipated interview with the admin of Raisean, a long term HYIP and the subject of some fierce debate online in recent times, with opinions split quite evenly as to where the program is going and what any new members chances of success would be. It’s one of the longer interviews that I remember having on MNO so I hope you’re sitting comfortably and are ready to hear the admin (Martin’s) thoughts on various subjects surrounding Raisean and others.

Before we hear from Martin I’ll just remind you that Raisean has been online since October and paying plans that include 1%-7% on business days, 1%-2% on weekends, until you reach 150%-170% on your investment, with accruals clocking up every second. So in other words the admin can control the interest rate from one day to the next. The recent controversy with the program is that payments are nearly always the minimum possible level since being hit by a massive DDoS attack a few weeks ago. Rates paid out before and after the attack are poles apart, and that’s why opinion is so divided. Well, the best thing for now is hear what the Raisean admin has to say, and see if you agree. If you like the interview and would like some further information then you can always start with the original review of the program first published on MNO here:

“1. Hi Martin, please introduce yourself to the readers of MNO and tell us please about your own involvement in Raisean. What is your role in the day to day running of the program?

Hello Paul and all MNO readers. My name is Martin Sepear and I’m the owner of Raisean Sky.

2. Can you give us some background information on Raisean? How many others are involved with the program or are you operating alone? How long have you been online?

The company has several people engaged in development, advertising, customer support and overall system monitoring – we are keeping an eye on the Raisean around the clock. There are few more people working on communication channels like social networks and Skype. As I already told once we will hire more people soon to provide customer support using not just English but rather different languages.

We finished the companies formation in August, right after that we began the Raisean development process. In October Raisean saw the light for the first time and started to accept investors deposits.

3. Explain the investment plan in detail to us. What are the minimum and maximum amounts to invest? What determines the rate of interest paid from one day to the next?

The investment plan is quite straightforward. Invest any amount (at least $10) and start getting everyday income from 1% to 7% on business days and 1% to 2% on holidays. First you will get your deposit back and then you will start getting a profit. The minimum deposit amount via crypto-currencies is slightly different: 0.025 BTC and 2.5 LTC. You can withdraw the earnings any time you have at least $1 (0.0025 BTC or 0.25 LTC). That’s all. The basic and most important information about the project. There are no other tricks, extra fees, etc. Daily interest distributed throughout the day, you can see the counters changing all the time. To get the idea you just need to open the ‘Demo Account’, here you can try to withdraw the earnings and create a new deposit.

Raisean calculates the daily interest rate according to the income level which Raisean can ensure and then uses the closest lesser integer. The surplus goes into the Raisean stabilizing fund.

4. What payment options are you currently accepting? What have been the most popular methods, and particularly how have the digital e-currencies performed against the more traditional payment processors?

We’re accepting BitCoin, LiteCoin, PerfectMoney, EgoPay, and Payeer.
Payment systems popularity are distributed as follows:
1) PerfectMoney
2) BitCoin
3) Payeer
4/5) EgoPay and LiteCoin

It’s easy to see BitCoin performing very well. I personally believe in the future of crypto-currencies. Moreover I think in the near future we will report that Bitcoin ranked first among other payment systems.

5. How secure is the Raisean website? What are you doing to protect it and members’ accounts from hackers? Are you on a dedicated server? Who is your host? What kind of anti-DDoS protection do you have?

We believe the Raisean website is very secure. You don’t need to rely on words, just try to be rational and take into consideration that quite serious attackers are still trying to DDoS the Raisean website. If they could perform a successful attack or damage Raisean any other way, they would never DDoS the website.

We have done everything to protect our customers from hacking their Raisean accounts and attempts at their earnings. First we are generating the unique PIN which is necessary for edit the Raisean account settings, then we are sending generated PIN to customer’s e-mail address which was used to sign up. To be able to edit the Raisean account settings, the attacker should also have an access to customer’s e-mail. Taking the opportunity I recommend MNO readers to always use strong unique passwords wherever possible. We had several unsuccessful hacking attempts to seize the customers accounts, using the passwords they used on other websites. That’s why we came to the conclusion that sending PIN codes to the customers it’s not enough security measure. We recommend each customer who seriously concerned about the safety of its own funds to enable 2FA feature and use Google Authenticator, it’s the pretty simple application for your mobile device. Right now I don’t know any other project in this industry which would provide such security level.

The Raisean website located on a dedicated server provided by Black Lotus. They also our DDoS protection provider.

6. On the subject of DDoS attacks, this has been the cause of some controversy in Raisean, isn’t that right? Talk us through the main timeline of the attack, and explain why the website was so vulnerable to begin with.

The controversy arises from a lack of people’s awareness of what a DDoS attack is and how to mitigate it. Most people from the industry never saw the actual attacks, instead of them they had witnessed fairy tales. Now I’ll try to give you a brief explanation about how the DDoS protection works. The DDoS protection demonstrates the ability and willingness of the company providing such services to mitigate a possible DDoS attack. The usual hosting provider will disconnect the website in case of a DDoS attack. Such hosting provider can’t do anything about it and doesn’t want the extra hardware load. Even a sophisticated DDoS protection can’t immediately mitigate any kind of DDoS attack, as many people think. There are many complex and cunning attack methods that still need to be catched, it’s necessary to determine the precise attack pattern to be able to effectively mitigate it. This takes time. By default DDoS protection mitigates any basic attack such as TCP/SYN, ICMP or UDP flood. In our case, the attacks were so complex and sophisticated that the default protection can’t handle them so we ordered and configured the additional proxy server to filter the traffic and effectively mitigate such attacks. At this moment we’re completely strangled the attacks, the website is working great right now.

There were periodic attacks rather than the endless stream of requests. The attack pattern evolved and changed every few hours, the attack usually stopped at night and came back at the morning. There were no successful DDoS attack attempts since we installed the additional mitigation proxy, right now we don’t see any DDoS attack attempts at all. The Raisean website it’s the only website in the whole industry which is immune to such attack. By the way, the name of the hacker who claimed responsibility for the attack is ‘DD4BC’. You can Google it to find the information about his ‘success story’. :)

7. How was it dealt with, and what measures were put in place to make sure in never happens again? What are the long term consequences of such a huge attack on a) the program, b) its cash flow, and c) the confidence of not just existing members, but also potential investors who may now have second thoughts about joining?

I already told you what has been done to mitigate the attack. Now let’s discuss the consequences. You are greatly exaggerated the DDoS situation, what do we have after the attack? Raisean works 100% perfectly, the website is available all around the globe. We didn’t receive new deposits during the attack and the influx decreased for the next few days after the attack. But the most important consequence it’s the invaluable experience we gained as a company, the experience that no one else has.

I would like to address people who do not join us because they are afraid of such attacks. We survived and fully recovered after attack, we have the necessary experience and trained team, we are prepared. Try to think about the websites working good and never faced such problems, to whom would you bet when the attack comes?

8. This leads me to the next set of questions which is to do with Raisean‘s performance in the wake of the attack. One reader said recently on the MNO shoutbox that it was almost like looking at two separate programs, before and after the attack. How would you respond to that?

What’s wrong with the Raisean performance at this moment? I find it difficult to answer this question. We constantly monitor the website and all its modules. Everything works great, we do not see any errors and there are no customer reported errors either. I think dear reader overshooting and exaggerating the situation with DDoS, just like you.

9. In a recent opinion poll taken on MNO, 50% of readers expressed the view than Raisean will not survive the holidays and will be a scam by January. Whether thats right or wrong, it still displays a massive and widespread belief that the collapse of Raisean is imminent. How can you reverse that trend?

Are you one of those who see the glass is half empty, right? You are talking about the half of the readers, but what about the other half? I personally see a pessimistic trend that readers do not believe so much in the projects advertising on your blog. Each new poll just confirms such trend. Maybe it’s time to introduce some extra selection criteria, not just the listing price? :) I’ll discuss December-January considerations in the next answer.

10. It’s perfectly clear that interest rates have been hovering around 1% for a number of weeks now following the attack, but before it they were much better. I know they still fall within Raisean‘s terms, but what do you say to a) the implication that it means your cash flow has suffered, and b) it hurts your chances to attract new investors due to how long it will take them just to break even?

The only thing that influenced the attack is the fact that the daily interest rate fell so quickly. As you can see the daily interest rate started to decrease the days before the attack. We are not idiots and we understand the things you, other bloggers and indeed the whole world said: in December the people activity greatly reduced. As well as our profit. That’s why we decreased the daily interest rate, it’s not an unusual or neither unexpected decision. The project marketing was developed while keeping the December recession in mind. In my opinion it’s odd to invest in a website that promises 1% to 7% daily income and to be dissatisfied with the fact that the website pays 1% daily. On other hand we are very happy with the investors who don’t mind such relatively low interest, the investors who prefers stability and longevity of the project. More and more such investors joining Raisean every day, not so much as investors who joined us seeing 7% per day, but in combination with small daily withdrawals amount Raisean feels good. I can’t say the same words about the projects for which the December stagnation turned into a sudden event.

11. What kind of script is Raisean off? Where did you get it, how safe is it, and why do you think this one is most beneficial for you as an admin and your members?

The Raisean script was self-developed by us. I already told about the safety of the script, when I mentioned 2FA feature. I would also highlight such things as:

– a unique permanent crypto-currency address for each customer, all funds transferred to this address goes directly to your Raisean account.

– payments verification system which makes sure any automatic payment will not fail and will be processed only once. In case of any unexpected payment system response the system will mark the payment suspicious and notify the operator.

– an automated monitoring system. If something went wrong the system will automatically notify the developers.

– payment purses balance never exceeds the necessary amounts. Even in the incredible situation when the potential attacker will get the access to Raisean‘s payment purses he will get only the minimum amount of funds.

– our own crypto-currency merchant. We’re accepting the funds bypassing Blockchain or any other intermediate websites, we’re not depending on third-party outages.

– any requests to the website are bounded by the built-in web application firewall module. It helps us to prevent sophisticated attacks and evade performance issues.

– any e-mail we ever sent (automatically or manually) have DKIM signature which is impossible to forge. We also have SSL EV domain certificate.

There is no other project in the whole industry having all above features except Raisean. Again you don’t need to rely on words, you can check all these features by yourself. And this is only the advantages concerning the safety of Raisean customers. Open the demo account, push the buttons, walk around the website, take a look at the Raisean‘s video reviews – the Raisean‘s advantages will become more obvious to you.

12. Some readers have commented that they find Raisean way too complicated, to such an extent that despite my own efforts to explain things in my review they still say they prefer not to join. What would you like to say to such people? It’s good to be unique, I agree, but is it really necessary for what is still basically an online HYIP to be quite so elaborate when your main competitors seem able to keep things so simple?

I can see just two possible reasons for your readers not to join us:

1) They already joined Raisean since the first day, as they wrote in the shoutbox.
2) After your numerous unflattering comments about Raisean in your ‘Daly news from HYIP Industry’ column I would rather not to join Raisean too. In case the only blog I ever read would be MNO. It’s very sad you didn’t appreciate our great and sincere desire to work and overcome any difficulties whether it’s a DDoS or Black December. On other hand it’s a wonderful opportunity to connect the dots by answering your and your readers questions in the interview.

How could someone consider our investment plan as a difficult one? There is only one investment plan, there are no tricks about deposit amount, no hidden fees and so on. The investment plan is quite straightforward. Maybe some customers get used to a so-called piggy banks projects and expecting deposit return anytime. Raisean it’s the different project with the different investment plan, we are not offering deposit returns as a part of our marketing so it’s odd to expect such things.

The only thing which could seem complicated it’s an extended deposits. But you don’t need to understand them to earn with Raisean, they are not restricting the investment plan nor force you to use them. They give you an extra income. You don’t even need to do something to create an extended deposit, the script will do it for you and will notify you about it. That’s it.

13. Can we see any statistics regarding Raisean? How many members have joined since the beginning and how many are active at the moment? Are you pleased with the support from the members so far? How important a role do they play in bringing in new members?

You can see all available statistics at the footer of each page. Right after the start we faced with a certain lack of understanding from some major activists who invite the people. It turned out that it’s more important to get the bonus once rather than getting the bigger bonus from their referrals earnings. This is ruefully because we don’t consider such an approach is fair. These activists thinks about their referrals as a herd, which they lead wherever they wants – it does not matter, since the main thing for such activists to receive a bonus once. Nevertheless we are pleased that the rest of the activists just likes our referral program that assumes the long-term relationships between the project, activists and their referrals as well as eventually higher referral bonus.

14. How can members contact you if they have any questions or support related issues? Also tell us about your Skype Conference support feature, such as how members can use it, what times is it operational, and exactly how much are the operators there able to do for members beyond simply repeating the FAQ or telling people they better contact the admin.

The members can contact us via Facebook and VK groups or using Raisean‘s Twitter and Google+ profiles. We’re not offering direct Skype support, but you can always see a friendly moderator in the Raisean conferences who will be glad to help Raisean members any time. Almost in any case we will redirect the member to our helpdesk system. By creating a ticket, the member doing two important things: provides us all basic information we need to solve almost any problem (member’s account name, payment information, web browser, country, etc) and proves its own identity. To summarize, the fastest way to solve any issue is to create a ticket using Raisean helpdesk system. This is not only the fastest but also the most easiest and convenient way to solve it.

15. What have been the most common questions and problems you’ve had to deal with so far? Is there anything you wish to say here so that members can avoid having to contact you later?

The most common issue it’s a Bitcoin deposit with less than a minimum amount. Unfortunately we can’t forbid members to transfer less than 0.025 BTC amount. We’re easily solving such issues by returning the funds or letting the member to transfer a missing amount. This is perhaps the most common issue but we will answer any question, don’t hesitate to contact us any time with any issue you have.

16. How have you been promoting Raisean so far? What advertising strategy have you been using? How are you getting new members to join?

Advertising campaign it’s a quite private information. I would prefer not to speak about it in details. The only thing I want to say is the fact that I see no reasons to start extensive advertising campaign in December. It’s better to wait and start to advertise in January or February.

17. I can see you have active profiles on the main social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter etc. How useful have these been in the promotion of Raisean, in attracting new members/deposits, and communicating with investors (especially during the DDoS attack)?

As you rightly noticed the groups and pages in social networks helps Raisean members to keep abreast of the project even in case when the website is not available for some reason. That’s why I would recommend to join Raisen groups and follow us on Twitter. Also do not forget about the live communications with other members, sharing the useful information and so on. Groups and pages themselves does not attract any new customers, they rather allow the active users of a social network to get familiar with the project without leaving their favorite website.

18. What exactly are you doing with investors money? How are you investing it and how are you generating the profits being made to members?

The Raisean website contains all necessary information to answer this question, I see no reason to repeat it here. But on other hand you, Paul, constantly talking about HYIPs and their influx based on a new investors deposits. I am a bit taken aback by such a strange question.

19. And finally is there anything else you wish to say not covered in this interview? Also please feel free to comment on the review of your program published on MNO. If there was anything you felt was unfair, mistaken, or in any way in need of clarification then you are welcome to explain this in your own words here.

This is the quite extensive interview so I think I already said what I wanted to say. I like your review, I think its detailed and qualitative. But your further analytical posts about Raisean I like a lot less. That’s why I asked about the interview to be able to convey to the MNO readers reliable information and shed a light on many things. Thank you for such opportunity!”

Thanks a lot to Martin for taking the time to complete my questions, and I hope you all found the article an interesting read regardless of what feeling you might otherwise have on Raisean. Good luck to everyone involved in reaching their goal.

That’s all I have for you tonight guys, but I do just want to briefly mention one hugely promising new program on my PremiumList called AtrexTrade. I prefer not to make these statements myself (so I’m kinda glad someone else said it first!) but some readers are already suggesting this is a continuation of the old EurexTrade and RemiTrade programs, two massively successful HYIPs which ran a combined total of something like three years between the two of them. Very very popular with a lot of MNO readers, and for a very good reason as they were both outstanding performers. Is AtrexTrade going to emulate that success? Well, the program only just launched so no one really knows for sure, but certainly I’d have to agree with the initial feedback I’ve been sent by some experienced readers who all seem to think the omens are good here. I’m not going to say much about it now as I’m still checking it out for myself, but I’ll have a proper introduction of it for you in tomorrow’s post and a more detailed review sometime after that. The program has already been moved to Paying Status on my monitor by the way, after my own first withdrawal was made instantly. We’ll talk a bit more about AtrexTrade tomorrow, and no doubt still be talking about it for many many months to come I would hope.

So stay tuned for that guys, and of course I’ll also have any and all news stories from around the HYIP industry worth hearing about. Enjoy the weekend everyone, and see you all tomorrow!