AlterGold is a scam of the epoch? Or it’s a new fraud machine…Part 1

“AlterGold is part of a new trend - scamming e-currencies,” – said one of the forum users on the Internet, characterizing AlterGold payment system. Lately, the reporters of Ecommerce Journal have noted the increasing displeasure with AlterGold.com. Many users openly accuse the payment processor of fraud and all vied in telling various cases of fraud. The team of Ecommerce Journal could not afford to stand back and made an independent investigation, having involved the independent experts to analyze the situation.

Part 1

A deductive method is the in which could be helpful in the analysis of AlterGold payment system. It is just what Sherlock Holms used to investigate his crimes. So, dear readers, we need some facts and arguments. Let’s start from the day of AlterGold payment system birth.

Since AlterGold is marketed as a payment processor on the Internet, we think that the life journey of AlterGold should start from the appearance of the site and mainly, of its users.

The interesting facts are revealed from the beginning of the AlterGold domain and site existence. So, according to the data provided by the hosting specialists the website of AlterGold from 11.04.2007 to 12.10.2007 was hosted on Hostors.com. Everything seems to be ok, however here one can find a very striking nuance: this post provider is rather popular in illegal and fraudulent industry of HYIPs. In support of this fact one can find the words of the admin of this hosting center who was advertising his service on moneymakergroup.com, a forum which is famous enough. Here is his post:

This means that the CEO of AlterGold was connected with the illegal HYIP industry before the appearance of AlterGold payment system.

At the moment when Alter Gold has come to the market the reseller of the domain for AlterGold was a very suspicious company, namely www.monetarysoft.com, which didn’t provide any information about itself when addressed. One can find only the name of Muhammad Furqan Ahmed (Abdul-Mustafa) on the site that means an evident connection of this person to the unstable Eastern market. There is nothing blameworthy in this name however let’s consider for a moment if the site of the “Better payment processor” could host on a suspicious host platform and provide at sign up the phone number which, according to our information, does not exist.

Let’s address the service of Alexa.com to find out the moment when AG came out.

According to the graph of activity the project of AlterGold started operating actively only since January 2008. Now, let’s turn to the information the domain. According to the data from the whois service the date of creation of the service domain taking into consideration that the domain is usually registered in the beginning of the project creation as the preparation of content usually takes much time and the name of theproject, one can conclude that AlterGold payment system started in the summer of 2007.

However on the site the admins say that Digital Group Inc., which provides the brand of AlterGold on the market, exists from the 2005. It means that the company started misleading people from the very beginning. Surely, the company could exist before but the owner purposely stress that the system was launched in 2005. This way of attracting the clients is dangerous as every client will say farewell to AlterGold if feels that he or she was deceived.

So, let see how AlterGold entered the market. We should admit that the system didn’t skimp with the promotion methods, even with the ones that infringe and disrespect the opinion of other users by thrusting the opinion of the numerous shills on the people. To understand where AlterGold has started its way, let’s see the present promotion strategy of AG. Today AlterGold chose the forum Talkgold.com as a main promotion platform and has bought the right of becoming the official payment system of the forum. However, everything began in January when AlterGold has come to TalkGold using the armies of posters.

The first advertising post appeared on Talkgold on January 14. We want to note the primitivity of the promotion action organized by the poster offering a notebook as a prize for the attracting of the maximum referrals. Interestingly enough but the information about the granting of the laptop has not come yet. The post about the laptop was definitely published by the person who participated in creation of AlterGold or its co-owner. Such conclusion could be drawn because the poster “Designfx” used “we” when addressing the users.

Starting from now, we're opening a referral contest. The monthly prize will be a Dell Laptop.
Any one who will use my referral link: altergold.com/?aff=AG100119, to register on
Altergold, will be qualified in this contest.

Having analyzed all the posts of this user we found out that this person is a hyper active investor in the HYIP industry and has his own hyip monitor GlobalMonitor. Such monitors as Search-Autosurf.com, Investguardian.com and DragonProfitShareGroup.info also belong to this user as it was stated in one of the posts. As we know hyips are illegal and this means that one of its co-owners of AlterGold violated the law by conduction operations with the hyips. This user had the HYIP monitor; hence, he was promoting the illegal investment projects which were run on the Internet without any license. And since the activity of the user “Designfx” has ended almost immediately after the post about the referral program of AlterGold, we can say that the nick “Designfx” on talkgold was pumped with the endless posts like “hyip paid..paid..paid” to endorse them.

Also AlterGold actively used the paid posters who intentionally and trivially tried to put some catchwords and remarks about the goodness of AlterGold everywhere they could. So, it means that AG preferred its own way to conquer the market: instead of using the legal methods, offering the innovative solutions and respecting the competitors, the posters tried to talk everybody’s ears off about the system they should use. For example, solely on talkgold such posters were: lordbarronzek, jamhifive, lordbarronzek, hajileeloc, duma, braveheart74, noblesoft, jamhifive, V0r0x, Giselle, Giselle, Sempra, noblesoft, superani, digital29, Roy07, Digisoft4, amine48rz, mafaltti, adex123, braveheart74. The posters worked so hard that the site admins even had to ban the proxies of the posters. Look here: http://www.cashmotor.biz/hyips/10267-altergold-payment-processor.html, as we see from the URL of this page here was an article about Altergold payment processor, however the article itself was deleted.

Also there are some real evidences that AlterGold pays the posters. So, one of such ones has admitted to getting the payment for the posts:

http://www.makemoneykingdom.com/showthread.php?t=7330

To enter the market successfully AlterGold needed an exchanger that could help to exchange AG to other e-currencies. And here it will be interesting to note that the same user “Designfx” opens a new discussion on the same forum where she asks to evaluate a new exchange service worldegoldexchanger.com. Though further we can see the attempts to prove that worldegoldexchanger.com is not his exchanger. An interesting fact the date of launch of this exchanger is 2003(Copyright © 2003 - 2007 All Rights Reserved). But after checking we found that the domain was registered in August, the same time when AlterGold.com has been launched. At that time the exchanger offered to send the plastic cards to make the transfer operations more convenient.

We spoke to the users who have ordered the cards and they told that the cards were sent from Italy. “Designfx” in his post tells the same: About getting my card within 3 days...it was possible because they are from Italy and that's not far away from me. Hence, the owner of this exchanger lived somewhere in Italy. However, this exchange service existed not long and today it is not available. Another proof that this exchange service was making business together with AG is the traffic history graph of the site:

There are some information that worldegoldexchanger.com was scamming its users as we can meet a great number of posts where people claimed that the exchanger has swindled them. Here is one of such posts, posted on http://www.moneymakergroup.com/Worldegoldexchanger-www-t178090.html&pid=...

The readers will be interested to know that the plastic cards of AlterGold payment system are also sent from the same address in Italy. So, this means that if worldegoldexchanger.com has disappeared, AlterGold payment system also can disappear one day.

Peter Barbson