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Australian Internet Censorship

Posted by Aegist on October 29th, 2008

In case you live in Australia and haven’t seen the headlines lately, there is a political movement attempting to create and implement a censor for the internet in Australia. Should this software be implemented, all internet access from Australia would be passed through the filter and any ‘illegal’ content would be blocked. This would be forced upon every Australian, and no option will be available to opt-out of the censorship. There will however be an option to opt-out of the secondary filter, which will block all X rated, and R rated information and images. Yay?

While it may sound simple enough - blocking out ‘illegal’ stuff can’t hurt anyone can it? - the consequences are far reaching. Firstly, it will slow all internet access in Australia, since there will be an extra step of processing through which every single request must pass through. Secondly and most importantly, once the filter is set up it will be easy to extend its reach to other undesirable topics. Not to mention the fact that the government has already spent millions of dollars researching this, and trying to find something that will do the job…

The important consequence with regards to Arbitrage, is that there are already calls to include ‘online overseas casinos’ in the filter, because they are technically illegal in Australia. So there is a chance that Australians will have access to bookmakers drastically reduced, and the few bookmakers we can reach will perform sluggishly because our internet has to be constantly checked by Big Brother for us.

Hooray for Freedom?

I am deeply troubled by this idea, and I hope all of you are too. The potential for abuse of this filter is overwhelming, and is a grave threat to all future freedom of expression.

Please take action, and follow one or more of the possible actions listed on the website over at NoCleanFeed.com. Sign the petition, mail the minister, email your ISP and complain about the proposition… make it known that Australians do not want to be controlled like citizens in other repressive regimes likes China or Iran…

For more information, read the Age article on the expansion of the filter. Better still, look through the website for Electronic Frontiers Australia to get the full story.

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A Current Affair go after Suncity Equities and Investments Scam

Posted by Aegist on October 23rd, 2008

A Current Affair (ACA) have just run a second story on Arbitrage Investment Scams operating out of the Gold Coast - this time focussing on Suncity EI. They ran a story about 4 months ago on the same topic, but focussed their attention on Kent Woodhouse (AFL Arbitrage) - I wrote a short article on that at the time, and you can see it here.

This second installment on this topic was almost identical to the first story, just with different names and stories. There was the same amount of chasing people through offices, and down the street, all while talking to the poor victims of these scammers about how much money they have lost.

I have to admit that I find it a little odd that at no point have ACA contacted either myself, or anyone at ArbForum. You cannot look into this field and not accidently find yourself either here, or on arbforum - combined we have far more information on arbitrage trading, and these arbitrage investment scams than anywhere else online. Yet I still haven’t heard anything from them - which is particularly odd when you consider that I actually contacted ACA (and Today Tonight) myself about these scams over 6 months ago myself - well before they ran the first story.

I guess they aren’t interested in actual information - they just want the hard fast ‘fear’ and ‘hype’ associated with the story. I understand that. The story is too complicated to bother with details when all you really want is for people to know “Arbitrage Companies Bad - avoid at all costs”. It isn’t completely true, but for the most part it is probably the easiest message to get out to the mass public in a useful way.

Their breif clip of someone from the ACCC talking about these scams as “just gambling” was very much like what they said in the first story they ran too. Again, I would like to highlight the fact that what these companies actually do with your money is virtually irrelevent - the scam is that they won’t pay it back as promised. They are Ponzi Scams, and they don’t actually do anything with your money - neither arbitrage, nor gambling.

Anyway, let this stand as YET ANOTHER warning to all of the people who regularly contact me wondering whether they should invest money in company X, Y or Z. Hopefully the answer will be blatently obvious by now…

Here is the ACA Clip:

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Risk Free Profit has disappeared - More money left owing.

Posted by Aegist on October 18th, 2008

This is a topic which I unfortunately have some history with. Risk Free Profit created the software SureBetPro and distributed it through an MLM network - quite clever really because it really took advantage of peoples desire to make easy money on several different levels at once.

It was through the MLM approach to distributing their software that I, and many other people were introduced to the concept of arbitrage trading. SureBetPro (SBP) was the first arbitrage software I ever used, and if it wasn’t for Risk Free Profit (RFP), this website wouldn’t exist. In the beginning I defended RFP against numerous people who claimed they were a scam - the fact was that I was using SBP actively, and making money using it. The price they charged for the software was reasonable; $140 a month; no multi-thousand dollar bills like some of the modern scams, and the software did pretty much what it claimed to do (not brilliantly, but functionally all the same). So based on the fact that they had a reasonable product, being cleverly marketed, it seemed reasonable that they should be a legitimate company. Why rip people off and risk retribution, legal retaliation, and/or prison time when you can make legitimate profits? Well turns out that even the most reasonable looking situations can still result in way too many people being scammed out of their cash.

RFP ran a member only trading pool where members could invest $600 - $1000 for a limited period of time. Everything about this trading pool sounded perfect. It made no unreasonable promises; your profits were not promised, they were based on actual results. The amount you could invest was limited to a reasonable amount so that everyone could have a fair go. The investment was restricted to a specific time frame; no long term compounding issues. And there was even an incentive for the company to offer this - in order to claim any trading pool profits, you had to be a full time member of RFP - ie, you had to keep making your $140 USD payments every month without fail. So the pool looked like a clever tool to ensure their member base never shrunk…

But I was wrong. After a little over a year of running the trading pool the first round of payments started to be made. And they were made successfully. People happily posted their profits at various online forums, doing the usual HYIP fan-boy thing by cheering for RFP and proclaiming their faith in the goodness of RFP etc etc. Having the exact effect every Ponzi scheme could ever hope for - creating the illusion that this company is reliable and safe to invest in. More people surely invested significantly more money into the trading pool. Numerous people paid out in the first round undoubtedly put more money in for another turn. And it wasn’t long after this that RFP suddenly started having ‘Problems…’ with their payouts.

The list of reasons were bloody interesting actually. I think the first excuse was that their bank account froze their funds because of the massive movement of money out of international bookmakers - it flagged money laundering concerns. The bank supposedly froze their funds, and RFP had no option but to wait for the banks to resolve their concerns. Apparently the bank would hold the funds for 6 months before releasing them again. Yeah right, as if Banks have the right to just take money from their customers and hold them for arbitrary periods of time, just because they want to. Apparently RFP could do nothing about it, and had to swallow it - I mean, the members who were owed money had to swallow it.

Some time after that 6 month period passed, still no pool pay outs. I think it was at about this time that the US passed the safe ports act, and Neteller found itself in trouble with the USA. It was being investigated by the FBI, and it did actually have a lot of its funds frozen. RFP jumped straight onto this band wagon and started claiming that this was the new reason they couldn’t make payouts now - their money was trapped in Neteller by the US government. There was nothing they could do about it! Everyone would just have to keep on waiting. No mention was made of the previous ‘money frozen in bank accounts’ excuse of course…

At this stage over a year had passed since they had stopped making any sort of payment from their members only trading pool, and I had, like most other people no doubt, completely lost interest. I had stopped using SureBetPro many many months before hand (it had lost any competitive edge it may have once held, and I found other software better and cheaper on the market), and so RFP was of no interest to me. I’m sure there were a few other headline worthy excuses for why their members own trading pool money couldn’t be paid to those members - I wouldn’t be surprised if the current standing excuse was because the bank they had the money frozen in has just collapsed under the credit crunch and all of the money has been lost!

So anyway, for all of this time SBP has continued to be on the alert service listing page because it has continued to provide an arbitrage alert service. The dodgy operations of RFP have given me cause to warn people away from RFP and SBP for a couple of years now, but the alert service has continued working regardless - just without any sign of improvement, upgrade, or clearing of old junk (the damn software still has a filter in it for pointbet and several other LONG deceased bookmakers).

In the last couple of months though, it seems RFP has finally left us for good. A couple of people have contacted me letting me know that they can’t get on the RFP website. If you follow the link from the alert services it takes you to a default Apache page, and this has been the case with every other SBP link i can find online. However, if you go to http://www.riskfreeprofit.com, the website does still seem to be there. Historically, you can only register with RFP through a referral. Maybe RFP have simply cut off all of the old referral links but are still operating, but I’m not willing to try to register to find out

Whatever the actual case though, this is a long winding sad story of people losing money to a greedy company - like so many other stories on the internet.

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