What To Do If You Were Scammed

Getting scammed in the HYIP arena is quite common. This is possible primarily due to the irreversibility of E-gold transactions. “Get paid, stay paid” – one of the popular E-gold mottos, which sometimes plays a bad joke with its users. All experienced HYIP investors can perfectly recall the time they were first scammed. Contacting E-gold in this case turned out to be of no help – their response clearly stated that all E-gold transactions are final and further information on the recipient can be provided only upon the issuance of a court order or a legal subpoena. Nonetheless, the retrieval of funds with a lawyer being involved frequently costs more than the amount of money lost – as a result, victims normally leave it at that and never take any further action. This benefits scammers and encourages them to open new and new fraudulent schemes intending to lure even more naive and greedy investors and cheat them out of their money. What can be done to avoid it?

The first and the most important step – prevent it from happening. Do not believe everything the program’s website promises to you, just like you don’t believe everything you are told by strangers. The fact that an investment program has a website does not mean that it’s not a scam. Also, don’t get greedy. Withdraw every time you can make a withdrawal request. Do not compound and dream of how much revenue you will be getting after a certain period of time. Remember: the most important thing is to get your “seed money” out as soon as possible. Then you can play with the profits in any manner you wish. Until then just keep withdrawing to recover your initial deposit.

Step two: make it public. If you have fallen for a scam, let everyone else know about it. Don’t be embarrassed – no one will make fun of you because of your loss; furthermore, other investors will be extremely grateful to you for warning them. There are numerous ways you can do it. The fastest ones are reporting to News-Navigator.Net and HYIPNews.com. Within several hours upon the submission of your report, it will be published on these websites and the program you lost your money with will publicly become known as scam. This will prevent the crooks behind it from luring more funds into their E-gold account. Alternatively, it would be a good idea to create a thread with your warning in the “Scam Warnings” folders on all the major HYIP forums (such as TalkGold.com/forum , HYIPDiscussion.com, MoneyMakerGroup.com etc).

Step three: fight back. Despite the fact that E-gold is highly unlikely to send you your money back, it is essential that you report your loss to them. As a result, they will freeze the scammer’s account and he will no longer be able to access his funds. In addition, contact the program’s hosting provider (the company which hosts its website). Their e-mail address can be found in the website’s WHOIS data. You can retain this data by entering a website’s address into the lookup on WHOIS database sites, such as whois.ws or whois.net. In your message to the hosting provider, make sure you insist on the website being shut down as soon as possible, with any relevant data (such as client’s IP address) being forwarded to you for further investigation. Another way you can retrieve the scammer’s IP address is by looking up the full headers of any e-mail messages you received from him (such as notifications, updates, or responses to your customer support inquiries).

Finally, report the fraud to legal authorities. It can be done online at absolutely no cost. Just go to ifccfbi.gov/index.asp, click on the link “File a Complaint” and fill in all the required information. This is the official website of the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, administered by the US National Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center. You don’t have to be an American to file a complaint with them – victims of Internet fraud can file complaints online regardless of their citizenships or countries of residence. The more complaints are submitted the sooner the legal authorities will commence their investigation. For this purpose, you may be willing to distribute the IFCC website address to any other people who have been scammed together with you. This can be done either through the above-mentioned HYIP forums or rating sections of the scamming program on monitoring websites (where members place their “paid” or “not paid” votes, normally accompanied by comments).

Even if you think you might never see your money again – don’t give up. By taking all the actions we mentioned you do not only improve your chances for the recovery of lost funds, but also prevent others from suffering losses and harming the scammers in the long run. If everyone who has been scammed followed our suggested course of action, there would be way fewer scams in the HYIP arena.

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