09/02/2011. Interview with the admin of UnicornInv

UnicornInv is officially closed! Do not invest!

Hi everyone! It’s been a slow enough news day so I’ve decided that the main post today will be the following interview I did recently. It’s with an admin that I think many of you are already familiar with and no doubt quite fond of. Why? Because his program is the current sponsor of the MNO Forum Cash Contest where cash prizes have been given out everyday. So today you are welcome to meet the man behind all of that. His name is Thomas and of course I’m talking about UnicornInv, a long term HYI program first reviewed on MNO here.

Before hearing from him let me first remind you that UnicornInv offers investment plans that pay 1% on every business day or 6% weekly with no expiry date. You have the option to request your principal back after 180 business days, by which time of course you should be well in profit anyway.

“1. Hi Thomas, please introduce yourself to the readers here. Tell us about UnicornInv, about the nature of your company and about your personal role in running it.

Hello Paul and thank you for the opportunity to introduce ourselves to your readers. My name is Thomas Andersen and I am the administrator of UnicornInv. In real life I am working as an underwriting agent: selling life insurances, equity-linked insurances and pension schemes. UnicornInv was born out of a ‘schnapps idea’ about a year ago. A friend of mine heard about the so called ‘Rich Man’s Market’ and subscribed to various services available that are offering stock picks. After weeks of research, we opened a brokerage account with an online brokerage firm, a necessity to buy stocks online and started buying our first few stocks. Our goal was NOT to invest in the so called “highest dividend stocks”, but in stocks of fast growing companies, mostly in emerging markets. Next we have to set targets for solid returns. Know how much we want to make off of a particular investment. Once that goal is met, we sell and move on.

2. Can you also give us some background information on the program? How long are you running? What are you hoping to achieve with it and are you running it alone or do you have a partner or assistant?

We opened at the end of November 2010, after months of evaluating the bits and pieces necessary to run an online investment venture, i.e. which script to use, where to advertise, the right hosting partner, the selection of payment processors etc.

We try to be different from the common HYIP ‘programs’ – the add-on ‘program’ to any investment project says it all! We have noticed the devastating downturn of the online investment arena during 2010 and had long discussions, if this is the right time and a good idea to start such a project, since so many people got their fingers burned – and I am not talking about the HYIP industry alone. Each and every investment is kinda risky. So we concluded yes! Of course there is a market (there is always a market in any trade) and for sure there is money to be made in todays financial markets. So here we are!

I am running UnicornInv with my co-admin Peter. We are equal partners, but the tasks are varying. Peter is mainly responsible for the technical side and security of UnicornInv, an assignment that should not be underestimated and is helping with support requests as well.

3. So what exactly are you offering investors? Explain your investment plans to us in detail and tell us how profitable are they. What have been the most popular options so far?

We are offering two investment plans only. A daily plan returning 1% daily from Monday to Friday and a weekly plan paying 6% weekly. We are not planning to add further options in the near future. Most of our clients have invested in the weeklyplan so far.

4. What payment methods are available? What payment processors are you dealing with and which would be the most popular?

We are accepting Liberty Reserve, Perfect Money and SolidTrust Pay. At the beginning Liberty Reserve was the most popular choice of our clients, but I must admit since the introduction of SolidTrust Pay just before Christmas, more and more clients are joining and funding their account by means of STP.

5. What kind of advertising strategy are you using to promote UnicornInv? I notice that you don’t issue many updates as compared to most online projects. Don’t you think this has been detrimental to keeping your program in the public eye? Or is it a deliberate plan to stay low-key?

Again – we are using a different approach, compared to most of our competitors in this industry. Apart from your fine blog, we have only bought banners on a few other selected blogs. Our advertising strategies are mainly mouth-to-mouth propaganda (which is working very fine for us) and Pay-Per-Click advertisements with various providers. We have achieved a Alexa rating of less than 200K since we are online and are confident to be in the 100K region in two months time. We only issue updates or news, if we feel that there is something important for our client base, instead of bombarding them with weekly or even bi-weekly emails. We feel our clients are with us, because we are paying them a steady return of their investment – and not because we are sending out a newsletter every few days.

6. What are the most efficient ways of getting in contact with you if a member has any questions or problems?

The most efficient way is to fill the form at our contact page (https:// www.unicorninv.com/contactus.php). We try to answer all emails within 24 hours, usually within a few hours. Please note that on Saturday and Sundays support is limited.

7. To date what have been the most common problems or questions put to you by the members? Is there anything in particular you would like to address here in order for members to avoid having to contact you at all?

Well, luckily there were no problems, at least no real problems. We had a small glitch while implementing STP deposits into the script and deposits were not automatically credited, but that was sorted out within a day or two. Some clients complained about spam they have received and we needed to take actions and banned the culprit, with reference to our Anti Spam Policy.
Common questions are about withdrawals, interest calculations, compounding or if we will accept Alert Pay in the future. I will address these questions briefly:
a.) We are processing withdrawals usually once a day from Monday until Friday only. Withdrawal requests received after our Friday withdrawal session will be processed on Monday, same for withdrawal requests received on Saturdays and Sundays.
b) Regarding interest calculations, we are planning to add a interest calculator to our website.
c) We do NOT offer compounding.
d) No, we will NOT accept Alert Pay in the future.
Other queries we are receiving are sufficiently explained in the FAQ section of our website. We recommend to all our clients and interested parties to view this section first, before contacting us.

8. Can you tell the readers in detail about the security of the UnicornInv website? Who is your hosting provider and how highly would you rate their services? Tell us also about the script and why you chose it.

Sure Paul, that is a very important subject! We are hosted on a dedicated server with BlockDos. As you mentioned it on your blog many times, they are a kind of industry leader. Very attentive, very responsive and very effective. We rate their service being excellent! The script we are using is the famous Gotenks script. We were looking for the best and most secure script available and chose it. Another feature is SSL decryption, but that should be a standard feature of any HYIP.

While we are talking about security: No matter how secure a script is, if one is careless with their account access data – their account will be hacked sooner or later. So please NEVER use the same password, user name etc. for your UnicornInv account, that is used for your email or payment processor account(s).

9. I said in my review of your program that not all of information about your business is entirely original and that I’ve seen it elsewhere before UnicornInv. So can you tell us why texts aren’t original and what exactly are you doing to generate profits for the members and what are the day to day activities you are involved with?

Yes that is true, Paul. In the planning phase of UnicornInv we gave the guy who set- up our website some advertisements from services my partner and I are using to generate the profits for our clients and asked him to use some of the information there. He did so and I noticed that he didn’t rephrase all of them. But after consideration with Peter we came to the conclusion to leave it like it is. All the information given on our website is correct and accurate, we are paying a fortune for different alert services – so no need to invent the wheel over and over again.

10. Can you give us any statistics on UnicornInv as regarding the membership, the deposits, and the rate of growth? Are you satisfied with the progress you have made so far? How would you like to see the program develop in the short term future, over the coming three months?

We do not disclose any statistics about our membership base, deposits or the rate of growth. What I can say is that we are very satisfied with the direction UnicornInv is going. Our short term plans over the lets say next six months are to continue with a unvaryingly growth.

11. And expanding on that, do you have any plans to further develop, expand, or otherwise improve UnicornInv in the near future?

Yes, we have some plans to further develop our project. We are looking for ways how to distribute excess profits made, to our client base, without amending the investment plans. We are planning to modify our web design in the next few months, in my opinion it should be a bit more conservative and less fairytale-like and are looking forward to add a page with our current picks (stocks in our portfolio), that will be only available for active (upgraded) clients. So everyone please stay tuned.”

Thanks a lot to Thomas for that and I hope you found something useful there in determining if UnicornInv is a suitable venture for you or not. And of course good luck to all existing and future members.

Usually when I publish admin interviews this is the point when I’m asking you to check out MNO again later tonight for the news update. Not this time however as that’s about it for today. There will be a full update tomorrow though, and hopefully if I have the time a bit earlier than usual. So stay tuned for that and see you all on MNO then!