20/09/2010. Interview with the admin of PawnShopFund

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

Hi everybody! For the first update of the week I’m pleased to tell you about a couple of things new on MNO. First of all on a personal level I’m writing today’s piece from the train from Rotterdam to Luxembourg where I will be spending the next few days before moving to Basel for the weekend. It’s my first ever time there so I’m excited about exploring this very small but very old and historic country.

On a business level however I would like to make a slightly more exciting announcement. Over the course of the coming months I am hoping to enter into occasional collaborations with the admins of some of the better, higher quality HYIPs covered on MNO. This will involve daily cash prize competitions sponsored by the admins and run in conjunction with the MNO forum.

So today I’m delighted to tell you that our first partnership will be with Frederick Johansen, admin of the excellent PawnShopFund. Here’s what’s going to happen – every day for the next couple of weeks Frederick has very generously offered to sponsor a cash prize for the winners of a contest that is going to run on the MNO forum, specifically on the thread relating to PawnShopFund. Everyday Frederick will pose a question relating to his program. In most cases the answer can be found somewhere on the PawnShopFund website. The first MNO forum user to post the correct answer (on the MNO forum of course!) wins a cash prize of $5 with no obligations.

Please note that I will be administering the prize money, not Frederick. Therefore the money does not go to your PawnShopFund account area, it goes directly to your LibertyReserve account. All you need to do in order to win is to be a member of the MNO forum. When the question gets asked – and in the interests of fairness to readers in 24 timezones the question will appear at random times on different days – simply be the first person to submit the correct answer on the PawnShopFund thread along with your LR number. And that’s it! In the event of someone disputing the correct answer the final say goes to Frederick, but it’s the first correct answer that gets the prize.

So today’s question is as follows – What is the company registration number of PawnShopFund? I guess that it will be an easy one for those who know how to search for info on the website where UK based sites are registered.

And so back to today’s post. In keeping with the theme already started it’s an interview with the admin of PawnShopFund himself – Frederick. Since last July he has been doing a fine job in running the program and is slowly but surely building a well deserved reputation as a competitive and dependable long term HYI program. I’m hopeful that the start of this daily contest will only serve to cement that reputation, but if you read on you’ll see that Frederick comes across (to me at least) as an experienced admin with many interesting ideas about both how to take his own program forward as well as some insights to the wider HYIP industry as a whole.

I’ll just remind you than PawnShopFund is a long term HYIP offering terms of 1.8% for 45 days, 2.1% for 60 days, 2.35% for 60 days, and 2.4% for 75 days. You can find more information about this and the program in general by referring to my original review published here, and if you’d like to discuss it, share your experiences with it, or of course to enter the contest then do so by visiting the MNO forum thread given over to PawnShopFund here.

“1. Hi Frederick, 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, and nice to meet your readers too. My name is Frederick Johansen and I am the main admin of the PawnShopFund HYIP investment website. I am living in Netherlands where we have the headquarters of our international Pawnshop businesses. PawnShopFund is my first HYIP program, but I am not a novice in this industry as since 2006 I was acting as an investor in various HYIP programs, so in this time I was able to realize what makes a HYIP program a success.

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

PawnShopFund was launched almost 60 days ago and it is achieving great results in this difficult period, I think. The background of the program is as an officially registered United Kingdom company, named Pawnshop-Invest LTD, the authenticity of it can be verified at our website on the provided link to the UK House of Companies. There are three persons employed with this company at the moment two administrators, and one live help operator, also there are a further two employees working in our Pawnshop business, but also helping in setting up the legal background of the HYIP program, they include our lawyer and the cash-flow manager (in this case called a deposit manager). I want to mention here that unless I am mistaken a unique feature in this industry is available for our investors – our Deposit Certificates, which is an official manually signed, stamped and filled act. I also want to mention that our profits are covered by the earnings generated by our pawn shops. Investors principal is used to pay loans to our customers, and the return offered by us is from the daily rate paid by our customers for their pawned objects. A detailed description is available at our about pawnshops and us page.

3. Assuming someone is coming into the online HYIP industry for the first time, can you talk us through the process of joining PawnShopFund? What do I need to do and what can I expect to happen next and over the following number of months?

First of all you will need to have a LibertyReserve, PerfectMoney, or eventually AlertPay account with funds in it. Then just sign up for an account with us and deposit your funds in one of the plans. In the coming months and years you should expect a daily fixed return for as long as you keep your investment with us, paid by instant withdrawals.

4. What are you offering investor in terms of plans and profits? What is the minimum and maximum amounts you can invest? How long do the investment terms run for and how can I get my principal back?

We have four different plans and each of them has a minimum deposit term after which you can either withdraw the principal amount or you can just keep earning from it forever.

The first plan is the Short Plan, which requires a minimum of $10 investment and will earn 1.8% for 45 days.

The total profit earned in these 45 days is 81%. The second plan is the MidLow plan of 2.10% ROI for 60 days with a minimum investment of $50. The total profit earned with the MidLow plan is 126%.

The third plan is called the MidHigh plan which needs a minimum investment of $250 to earn you 2.35% for a minimum 60 day time period.

The fourth plan is our most popular plan giving you 2.4% daily return for a minimum period of 75 days, the minimum investment in this plan is $100.

The maximum for every plan is set to $50,000 but using BankWire you can deposit a sum even more than that.

You can get back your principal after the end of the minimum deposit term by hitting the Release button near to your deposit history.

5. What happens if I want to leave the program early? Is there a minimum lock-in period for my deposit? Is there an early withdrawal fee? Now that you’ve been online since July do you find most members are preferring to stay with the program past the suggested expiry dates?

You can leave the program before the end of the minimum deposit term. You just have to request the pay-back of your deposit, and also you have to agree to pay from your principal an emergency withdraw fee. This fee is the remaining days until the end of the minimum deposit term for your deposit, in percentage. As I can see, and I am really glad to say, that those who have already joined and deposited with us are preferring to stay with us longer than the minimum deposit term. I would say that 80% of investors are either leaving their deposit after the minimum deposit term, or else are withdrawing and reinvesting a higher amount.

6. What payment processors are PawnShopFund currently dealing with? What have been the most popular choices? I see you require 24 hours to process interest payments but most of mine have been instant I think. Are you still facilitating that?

We are accepting at the moment LibertyReserve, PerfectMoney and AlertPay payments from the e-currencies and there is also BankWire deposits available for higher amounts. LibertyReserve is the most popular choice and I totally agree with this. Yes we wrote at our FAQ page that you should allow us to pay your withdrawal requests within 24 hours but this is only for situations when the payment system’s website is offline, or for a temporary communication error your withdrawal request is gone to pending. But I can say that in 99% of the cases withdrawals are processed instantly to every e-currency accepted by us.

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

This info can be found at our website. I decided to share these statistics because I believe that it’s important for an investor and I can assure you that all those statistics are genuine. Anybody having any doubt I can show you proof about the admin area or even about the rows in the MYSQL database. I will never fake the stats or hire paid posters/voters to deceive our investors.

8. What would be the best and most efficient way of contacting you if I have any questions or problems? I see that you have a working Live Chat feature, but can you tell us what kind of working schedule you keep there? What hours (GMT) am I most likely to find a Live Chat operator?

At this question I must mention that this feature is a LiveSupport feature not a LiveChat feature. What is the difference? You can ask here for support if you are having difficulties or questions about the program, having problems with signing in, withdrawals, etc, but you are not welcome here to chat about the weather, Karl Hurricane, end of the world in 2012, or the affairs of Tiger Woods, etc. I am mentioning these because we were involved in discussions with these subjects.

Live support is online 24/7.

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 is about the compounding, and the answer is no, at the moment we are not having a compounding option.

10. Can you tell us in detail about the security of PawnShopFund? Who is your hosting provider and how highly do you rate them as a service provider? What script are you running off? Is your website protected with SSL encryption?

At the moment we are hosted at a full dedicated server provided by Dragonara Ltd, and I can rate them to 5 stars as they are really doing a great job. Our script is a licensed GoldCoders script. Some of you may ask why we are not having a custom script. The answer is simple, in 4-5 years of my experience as an investor I can say that when a custom script gets hacked it is extremely difficult to recover. Sometimes it took weeks. But if there is anything discovered like a new security hole, bug or similar in a GoldCoders script, they get solved in a matter of hours. GoldCoders is a widely used script so fixing any problems takes less than for any other script.

Yes, our website is protected with SSL encryption.

11. I’m aware that you changed hosting provider recently. Why was that?

It was because our old hosting provider had much more less security. And their dedicated server is just virtually dedicated not physically, so there were some hacking attempts therefore we decided to move to the best servers in the industry.

12. What other outside business and investment activities are you involved with? Can we see any independently verifiable proof of these activities and why have you not provided us with any addresses of the shops your company operates?

You are free to visit us at our address provided at our support page, and there you can also get addresses of our pawn-shops. We are not making these addresses public over the internet as in some countries where we have shops online HYIP programs are strictly prohibited.

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

At the moment we are having various ads (banners, stickies, text ads) on some important HYIP monitors (where we are also listed) and 8-10 forums. I also want to clarify why we are not advertising at the three major forums. At this crisis period advertising costs on these can ruin any program I think. A proper campaign for a month on these three forums would cost more than US$30,000. I think that a genuine HYIP program that uses investors money to generate profit and is not just another ponzi should not be spending so much on an advertising campaign. In business life when we are talking about a successful advertising campaign, it should bring an income of five times more then the price of the ad. In this period I believe that this is impossible even for the big forums.

14. Are there any plans to develop PawnShopFund further in the near future? Will there be any interesting changes made soon? How are you planning to keep the program competitive in such difficult times?

Yes the most important thing that we are planning to change our design to a much more professional one, also we are planning to establish phone support (however from 1300 members only 2 requested this). We are also planning a powerful advertising campaign later when we think it would be better value and bring better results. But in the current market situation it is better to wait with this.”

That’s it for today guys, except to say thanks a lot to Frederick for taking the time to answer my questions and also thank him for sponsoring the MNO daily contest for the next two weeks. Best of luck to him, best of luck to the PawnShopFund investors, and best of luck to anyone participating in the contest. The question again is: What is the company registration number of PawnShopFund? You can submit your answers in the special MNO forum thread here. And if you don’t win please don’t worry as you will have another chance to win every day for 14 days while the contest is running.

So don’t delay, first correct answer gets the prize so visit the PawnShopFund website to find the answer, then submit it on the forum immediately! And don’t forget to include your LR number!