Scam Programs and Payment Processors

The past few months have seen a very large number of programs vanish. These programs have either been proved to be scams or can be assumed to have been scams. Most of them were autosurfs but not all. Tradelite, for instance, was an investment program, while World Wide Loan Club was a type of loan program. Both turned out to be either Ponzi schemes or plain scams. Sometimes it is hard to tell them apart after the fact, and impossible before they vanish from the face of the earth with the money which had been spent there.

When this sort of thing occurs, usually the members who had lost money turn to the payment processors in an attempt to recover at least a portion of the lost funds. The response on the part of the payment processors when this occurs is for them to freeze the account of the program pending investigation. This can take time while the payment processor ascertains that the program is no longer operating, and that the owner cannot be communicated with.

At that point, the only thing that a processor can do is to distribute the funds remaining in the program's account based on how much each individual member had spent and how much each member had received from the program.

The past few months have shown that Strictpay, Alertpay and Solid Trust Pay have been very conscientious about returning funds that they still had from scam programs. On the other hand, Liberty Reserve has not been returning funds from failed programs. It is remotely possible that this is due to the fact that these programs did not leave any funds in their Liberty Reserve account, although this seems unlikely. In any case, the safer processors to use seem to be Alertpay, Solid Trust Pay and Strictpay since they have shown their willingness to return what funds are in their possession. On the other hand, recent events would suggest that Liberty Reserve should be used only when there is no other option--as in the case of programs which do not accept any other processor.