Shiftmoney Closure Analysis

Hello readers! Today I am going to discuss about the closure of ShiftMoney which is already discussed by other bloggers. But, I want to discuss my point of view and record this information in my blog for future reference.

We all know well that ShiftMoney is a high ROI risky Short term program with a well designed quality website with lot of cool stuff. ShiftMoney was started on 12-Oct-09 and closed on 28-Oct-09 just after the expiration of Plan B deposits which pays 150% after 15 days. This is one program which faced lot of troubles from day 1 itself. In spite of quality website, this program had very bad start. No big support in forum and people are asking lot of questions about the so called e-currency business. In addition to that it had Alertpay verification issue, website down time issue, SolidTrustPay verification issue, Certificate issue etc.,

In HYIP, your success depends on other people's failures. If all others are playing safe with a program then your success is also not guaranteed and you should try to come out as quick as possible. Especially a short term program cannot sustain too many bad signs, but this one had atleast one bad sign every alternative day. I invested 125$ (75$ AP and 50$ SP) on day 1 itself in Plan B which pays 150% after 15 days. I was confident that this program will sustain atleast for one cycle. But, within couple of days it got issues with Alertpay verification and I thought that I did a mistake by investing 125$ in this program. But, that 125$ is just 20% of my seed money which is actually a maximum that I invest in a program. I won't invest more than 20% of my seed money into any program irrespective of how much promising it is. I mostly invest 5 to 10% of my seed money in one program and I will consider to invest little more if it is doing good.

Now, let me take various issues related to this program and discuss that in detail. Following discussions are my perspective of this program closure.

First things First - Shiftmoney is a well planned SCAM by an intelligent admin who has very good experience in scamming. We should be really very careful with these smart admins. They know how to market the website and then scam the investors.

E-currency exchange business - This is really a new concept but it backfired the program badly. Alertpay won't allow exchangers without proper approval. So, they blocked there account immediately. They faced the same problem with SolidTrustpay too. These payment processor issues really affected the popularity of the program to great extend. But, I still can't understand why except me no one else got refund from alertpay till now. I got my refund within 3 days after raising the ticket to alertpay. But, at that time alertpay didn't even taken my ticket for processing. See the steps given below regarding my alertpay dispute,

STEP:1 [Oct-16]Bernard announced that Alertpay is discontinued and asked us to raise a dispute.

STEP:2 [Oct-16]I raised a dispute in Alertpay immediately after receiving the newsletter from admin

STEP:3 [Oct-19]I got full refund of 75$ to my alertpay account. I already published a proof for this in MMG.

STEP:4 [Oct-22]I got a mail from alertpay that my ticket is received and will take 15-30 business days to solve the dispute. If you want proof for this then contact me.

Now, my question. Why I got refund on Oct 19th itself if alertpay is seeing my ticket only on Oct 22nd? I suspect Bernard refunded my transaction because I own a blog. I found this suspicious only when doing closure analysis for this article. The important point here is - Bernard was still having access to his alertpay account at least till Oct 19th. Also a member of MMG contacted alertpay and confirmed that the account is not blocked. Then, why he didn't refund anyone? This explains that the motive is to scam soon and to not run the program for long time.

Why admin should discontinue alertpay if it is not actually blocked? Simple. It is very very difficult to withdraw funds from Alertpay. There should be lot of investments in Alertpay which admin could not withdraw. So, admin should have discontinued alertpay to force the investments on other payment processors.

Certificate of Incorporation - I am following this link (http://www.ifsc.gov.bz/notices.html) for last 1 year and I didn't give much importance to that. Are you seeing anything surprising in IFSC warning notices? We all know that hyips are mere game and the certificate of incorporation are all fake unless they have a link to verify it publically. So, this is actually not a big news for me. But, this added to the problems that Shiftmoney already has because this information is published on forums and some blogs.

IP Address series - I noticed the IP address range when doing DD for CorpoNano. I found that Shiftmoney, RoyalROI, Pexmofund and CorpoNano are having adjacent IP addresses. But at that time I didn't give much importance to that. When Zoundmute (mmg member) published that in Shiftmoney mmg forum, it made me to think more. Because unix-trust also got next number in that IP series. In hyip there is nothing wrong in investigation. We have to investigate more to find out the scammers. It is possible that one admin or group of admin is using a single hosting provider, ddos protection etc., and scamming the investors. I am not saying that the hosting provider is helping these scams. What I am saying is these scammers are comfortable with those hosting services and ddos protection which is a minute detail to trace these scam programs.

I also found that most of the scammers are using Koddos ddos protection. This may be a co-incidence but RoyalROI, PexmoFund, Metualis, forex-monk are all used Koddos ddos protection. It is not clear which DDOS protection was used by Shiftmoney and foxiver scams. All these programs are top scam programs of 2009!!!

Why all of a sudden Shiftmoney closed the website and ran away? No, most of you are thinking that Shiftmoney closure is sudden and unplanned. But, I am seeing this as a well planned one. Admin announced 5% bonus to LR deposits to collect some nice funds to his LR account before disappear. Also, admin knows that it is difficult to get deposits after all these bad signs. There is not much positive posts on forums too. In addition to all these IFSC issued warning for this program and it is displayed on forums and blogs. I am sure Bernard can't answer to this and decided to scam immediately.

What we learnt by following this program?

• Admins can say whatever they want to build trust in forums and to scam new bies. Here admin claimed that ecurrency exchange as a real business and showed that he is very serious about his program. But, the fact is he is very serious to get lot of investments so that he can scam big amount
• In my perspective admin played a big drama about the alertpay issue. Still my alertpay ticket for refund is in OPEN status. Alertpay usually closed the ticket right after the refund. If alertpay issued refund to me then why they didn't close the ticket till now?
• Smart admins are really very dangerous to the hyip arena. They have dedicated server, SSL, DDOS protection etc., But, finally they will scam you even before the end of first cycle. It is really very difficult to find out these scam programs. Next time, they will change the hosting service, ddos etc., to scam us. Diversifying is the only key to minimize the risk
• Bernard and Felix are two fictional characters created by the scammer. I guess both these guys are that same scammer
• A program which is heavily marketing from day 1 onwards means that the admin is using the previously scammed money to advertise. We should be aware of this in future.

It is better to not invest in any short term programs for next 2 months. Be careful and take very calculative risks as the upcoming festival season is very bad for hyip and autosurf programs.