AlterGold deceives you! They have neither license nor office. Be careful! Part 2

AlterGold has no license for the work with the finances of the third parties. This company doesn’t exist for 3 years as it has been stated on their website. How does Alter Gold deceive its customers and lead the Internet users on in the second part of the journalistic investigation directed against AlterGold payment system.

In any event AlterGold has won some positions on the market. The analysis of the industry has revealed that AlterGold has its positions on HYIP market. However, the presence of such hyips as AGMoney.biz, altergoldshare.com, Altergold-profit.com suggests that such consonance with the brand may mean that there is some special team which creates hyips to develop an artificial market for the system. However, two of the three hyips listed above doesn’t work, or it’s better to say have already performed their scam task and became a thing of the past. The whois service testifies that the following projects are also connected with altergold team and conduct scam-operations on the Internet: www.dailyincomesurf.com, www.promohaven.net, www.sharepro.biz, www.fastprofitnetwork.com

As soon as AlterGold felt the smell of money and got its first clients, it has got the first problems. For instance, one could see on the Internet the frequent claims that AlterGold locks the user accounts. Such kind of decisions the company was explaining by the so-called proofs that some users were conducting some illegal activity. However, according to its license AlterGold was operating with the funds of the third parties and this means that it has no right to block the user’s account without the court decision. Nevertheless, the system continues locking the accounts of its users. The number of the users’ claims is so great that we won’t list them all and offer our readers to read them on the forums personally.

It is also widely known that for its own promotion AlterGold payment system has introduced its referral program which was offering the users to get some payouts. Today we can find some information on the Internet according to which AlterGold was scamming people with the referral payments as well. One of such proofs is the complaint of the user with a great amount of posts on Moneymakergroup who claimed that he hasn’t got any payments along with other users. Interestingly enough but here appears the same user “Designfx” using the same nick on the forum of MMG, who admits that the referral payments have not been paid due the activity of the cheaters. This “reason” can be universal and each of us who wanted to earn on the referrals may get nothing. Or it’s better to say with the accusation of cheating. In addition AlterGold doesn’t give publicity to the evidences that someone violates some rules. For that reason the system cannot be discharged and is guilty in not paying the referral bonuses. And who needs the payment system that doesn’t fulfill its obligations? Yes, nobody needs!

Also, there is some piece of information that system charges the account use that is really absurd and preposterous. When the banks charge you for the use of a safety deposit box it is caused by the payment for the rent, guard and other bank expanses. Despite the automatic operations, it seems that the admins of AlterGold do something to serve the client’s account. Surely, such fraudulent policy towards the users caused the discontent and very soon one could see the messages like this one:

I was astonished to be charged $4.95 for account usage fee for January. Now I read that the fee has been reduced to $2.95. Did I receive a refund of the extra I paid? No way.

Also more than once the Internet community was discussing the issue that AlterGold has used some elements of its site borrowed from the other processors without respecting the author’s right. So, long time people on TalkGold forum were discussing the plagiarism of AlterGold that have used the structural elements of http://libertyreservedirectory.com/ to make its own site http://altergoldlinks.com/ without respecting the author's rights. It’s interesting to note that instead of saying anything against the plagiarism of the company, the support team of AlterGold laid the blame for the plagiarizing on their designer. Quote: “We didn't. A designer did.”

In other words, the team of AlterGold lacks the union and a professional team of managers ready to answer for the actions of their staff.

As it is known, one of the features of AlterGold is a possibility to get a debit card. However, even here everything was not all roses. Immediately after the appearance of the first users of these debit cards the first displeased users appeared. Once on the online forums the participants were discussing some posts where the users of AlterGold claimed that the company sends the used cards having the evident signs of use. However, it's not so very serious. Some sources reported that those cards didn’t work. Such posts can be viewed on various forums, even on the same Talkgold.com.

AlterGold company constantly says that the system is developing and posts various messages on the forums but here is an interesting fact: the company does not update any news on its site. So, the last news on the site is dated February 11, and today as we now is August.

And now ask yourself: does AlterGold know you if you’ve put a fake name and haven’t submitted any document when registering? No, it doesn’t. Hence, AlterGold tries to evade the rules of Western Union and to send money transfers to the people it doesn’t know. Surely, users benefit somehow from this situation; however we don’t know the reaction of Western Union when it will find out that Alter Gold uses its services. Probably, after this event Western Union will start to audit and to find out the names of the transfer senders and receivers, and the purposes of the transfers. So, it means that the use of AlterGold can cause the intrusion of Western Union into your privacy!

The next point of our analysis is a promotion of Alter Gold payment processor. The first obvious thing is that Alter Gold has purchased the links to promote in Google and other web search engines. One cannot fail to notice this fact as the system has rushed to the tops of the search engines. However, the purchase of the links is legal and not forbidden but here we want to cover another issue: we think it’s not good to deceive the users who think that only the best and the most popular processors appear on the tops.

In the trends of the site traffic one can find some interesting moments as well. Let’s look at the traffic chart of the website:

Here one can see the apparent ups and downs of the line showing the traffic on AlterGold. We asked the leading seo experts to esteem the traffic on the site. The majority of analysts agreed in opinion that AlterGold buys the traffic thereby one can mark the random ups in points E,F,G and H points on the graph. A straight line, showing a normal level, also counts in favor of the traffic purchase.

The sudden jumps on the graph show that in those periods the people were made to enter that site, or in other words, people were sold as a traffic that is quite immoral on the part of AltergGold. As we can see, a normal traffic level of the site is the one shown at A, B, C and D points, and all other jumps can be theoretically explained by the traffic purchase, i.e. by the intrusion of AlterGold.com site.

All the facts mentioned above just bear evidence of the traffic purchase by the owners of AG. In other words, the system just bought the pop-windows on various popular sites to capture the headlines. And it means that Alter Gold has used the methods of forcible attraction.

Psychological methods of AlterGold
The owners of the system have chosen the banners as one of the ways to promote. We have addressed an advertising man, Alex Trenni, to analyze the banners and their nature. Here is his opinion:

First of all let’s consider some of the most prominent banners of AlterGold:

So, having made a psychological analysis of the banners we can conclude the following:

The creators of the banners – owners of AlterGold aimed to:

-to gain a strong confidence of people

Fur this purpose they displayed lots of young smiling faces – a target group in other words. Crowds of smiling persons are often used in neuromarketing to attract more consumers. Furthermore this unknown crowd on the banner suggests that AlterGold preferred to avoid showing a single individual with an inscription on behalf of this particular person. In such a way AlterGold is apparently an organization that conceals its real face behind these impersonal young people whose pictures are likely being used without their consent which breaks their copyrights.

- to have visitors create a new account with AlterGold and fund it;

Marketology advisors all over the world warn customers against slogans calling upon to make something immediately as that is a typical feature of a counterfeit company. A reliable company that positions itself to be a payment system appreciates customers’ choice and points to the quality and innovative features of a service offered rather than prompting them to open an account and load their money. This makes us to think that AlterGold has an exclusively mercenary interest in its consumers. What is more, such tricks have been actively applied for years by a fraudulent HYIP industry and AlterGold’s passion for this kind of marketing policy suggests that earlier the company interlaced with HYIP sector teeming with scams and frauds.

- to inculcate contiguity of AlterGold and plastic cards in customers;

Designers and marketing managers confess that an advertisement containing images of money and plastic cards is found to have strong impact on customers’ minds to make them gape for services pushed. However, years and abundance of such advertising campaigns overburdened social mentality with fancies of money and plastic cards so much that circulating these images today means nothing more but inefficient approach or bad form of marketing.

Summarizing these observations as a qualified marketing manager I can conclude that AlterGold makes every effort to impose its services on consumers. Its manipulations applied to ensnare customers are mostly unethical and this is not the system I would like to use.

DDoS attacks and AlterGold

We can thrash over the ddos attacks in the fate of AlterGold payment system as there are too many mysteries in this story. First of all, more than once AG was victimized by the attackers more and was disabled for several days. Along with the customers of the system we cannot understand why the company was refusing to install the reliable DDoS protection systems. We understand a payment processor as a tool which is always available online, otherwise it’s senseless as for the other functions it can easily be replaced by the online banking or any other financial tools. However, the management team of AlterGold, probably, cannot understand this simple rule and from time to time pass into nothingness, becoming a black hole on the Internet, which don’t hold out any hope of return to its customers.

We also cannot understand why AlterGold, which pretends to be the Better Payment Processor don’t use a really reliable DDoS protection service. Everybody knows that the intensities of DDoS attacks are constantly increasing, the botnets become more scaled and if the company purchases a weak and insufficient ddos protection, it just wastes the money and doesn’t care for its customers.

There are even such opinions that AlterGold makes itself not available purposefully to let people to get used to such outages. And later it will be able to disappear with the clients’ funds under cover of DDoS attacks.

However, according to the reports of some reliable sources AlterGold not only suffers from the DDoS technologies but actively use them as well. There is some information which hasn’t been checked to the end saying that such payment processors as Pecunix are regularly being Ddosed by AlterGold. And such actions violate all the laws of the Internet ethic and the principles of a healthy competition. Unfortunately, probably AG forgets that when you attack someone today you risk to be attacked tomorrow, the thing that we can witness from time to time. AlterGold has discredited itself, its IP addresses and everything related to the AlterGold brand.

Public opinion on AlterGold

We have conducted a philological analysis of 50 Internet forums and found out the three mostly used words related to AlterGold were the following ones: payment processor, scam, exchange ag.
An interesting issue: according to the results of the philological analysis the query “scam” is on the second position, which means that the general attitude of the auditory towards AlterGold is a negative one.

It would be senseless incite the readers to fight with AlterGold or to foretell the bleak prospects. A scaled analysis has revealed that probably we deal with an absolutely new type of scam, a fraud payment processor.

However, in addition to the circumstantial evidences showing that AlterGold is a rather shady player on the market of payment systems that tries to swindle and to scam people, there are some legal facts which point out directly that it’s dangerous to deal with AlterGold.

Everybody knows that when you work with any company it’s very important to know what is that company from a legal perspective, whom does it belong to and the main thing – its location. The latter is especially important as people on the Internet want to know the location of the company they entrust money to. We have involved the best law specialists and a group of lawyers from Panama to know what AlterGold is in reality, what’s Digital Group, which pretends to be an entity owning AlterGold.

Well, a legal analysis of the situation including the inquiries to the official registration agencies of Panama has revealed that Digital Group company exists indeed however the statement on the website that they operate from 2005(Copyright © 2005 - 2008 Digital Group) is a total rubbish.

The company named Digital Group was registered only on January 17, 2008. It means that AlterGold provides a false information, being fully aware of it. It would be interesting to know that according to the traffic graph on Alexa the system has started its promotion in the beginning of January:

It means some period, approximately 2 weeks, AlterGold payment system worked without any legal ground. As a matter of fact the funds of the users were managed by a common man who could disappear any moment.

Now let’s examine the registration data of Digital Group company. It is a real company and we have found it in the register of the Panamanian companies under ID 1277070 and data card 59519. However, that is the only available data on the company standing behind AlterGold. Then the dark spots begin.

The think is that AlterGold assures us that it is headquartered in Panama at the following address: Advance Tower, First Floor, Ricard Arias Street, P.O.Box 0823-01310, Panama. The admins of AG try to make us believe that the building located at that address belongs to the lawyers of their company. However, according to our information the building located at the address mentioned above, belongs to the largest world bank HSBC, hence any talks about AlterGold are out of the question. This building is rented by a law firm. And in words of one syllable it means that in this building works a firm of attorneys which registers the offshore companies. So, it follows that those people who are at the back of AlterGold payment processor have just bought there a paper company, registered in Panama and told all the users that they have their office there. Such companies can be bought just for a few thousands of dollars.

So, if you come to Advance Tower, First Floor, Ricard Arias Street, Panama, you will see only a great number of mailboxes which will welcome you in a dark room where you can see only the clerks who come there from time to time to check the mailboxes. Being more precise we can say that the address of AlterGold company is just a fiction – only the mailbox.

A more detailed company examination allowed us to find out the members of the company. Presiden: Dafe Francis Asheshe
Accountants: Juliet Omoniyi
Sectertaries: Rukewve Asheshe Edafe

However, most probably, these are just the nominal persons who will carry the ball in case if AlterGold disappears with the money of their customers.

At the same time, according to the law of Panama the people mentioned above should have the guarantors. And they really have, here are their names:
Jose Francisco Castrellon
Zuleyka Aleman Calderon

Some sources report that these people have a car rental business and nothing more.

We decided to check the registrant of AlterGold’s mailbox P.O.Box 0823-01310. We hoped that here, we finally will meet an entity but it appeared that the mailbox of AlterGold is registered to the name of some person, And according to our data neither of the persons mentioned above has registered that mailbox. In other words, the customers of AG send letters not even to the company but to some unknown person.

One of the names has brought us to the place where probably AlterGold is based. The traces of Juliet Omoniyi led us to Italy. If you remember the plastic cards of AlterGold along with Western Union and Money Gram are sent from there. Here is direct evidence:

http://www.moneymakergroup.com/Altergoldcom-Currency-t177157.html&st=60&...

This can prove that the owners of AlterGold are in Italy. Now the task is to find out in what city. The question led us to the site where this woman offers her services in the sphere of offshore creation (http://offshore-setup.net/index.php?do=stats&lang=en&id=16).

Thus we came to conclusion that people who are at the back of AlterGold and whose names are specified in the registration documents of Digital Group (AlterGold payment system) are located in Milan, Italy. But for some reason they “forgot” to tell about this fact to their customers. Anyway, in case if AlterGold disappears with the money of their customers we know where and whom to search for.

We also have entered the name of Juliet Omoniyi in a social utility FaceBook and probably here is the woman staying in the background of AlterGold founders:

Nevertheless there is one more fact in the biography of AlterGold which the company conceals very carefully. The thing is that according to the website AlterGold payment system is owned by Digital Group Inc. However we found out that the company deceives its customers even with the name of their company as in the records of Panamanian companies it is registered as Digital Group SA. A small detail you may say but for…

According to the law of Panama the “SA” business entities have no rights to file an application to the Ministry of Finance to get permission for the work with the funds of the third parties and hence have no license. So, the conclusion is:

Digital Group represented on the market by AlterGold payment system HAS NO LICENSE for operations involving the funds of the third parties. Hence, it can be subject to a court proceeding or simply closed, i.e. every client of AlterGold runs risks to lose his or her money at any moment.

AlterGold acts carefully, all steps are proven, however the suspicions that the admins of AlterGold are somehow tied with HYIP industry prevent us from trusting AG. We know neither the location of AG’s headquarter (if exists) nor the future of our money in AlterGold system. We also cannot figure out the innovations that AlterGold can offer us and why should we become its clients. Instead we realized that clients and rivals have neither trust nor respect for AlterGold, and are those components the main ones for any online payment system?

Part 1: http://www.ecommerce-journal.com/articles/altergold_is_a_scammer_of_the_...