Big Brother AOL

AOL is watching you.... They want you to help them in their noble quest to become richer by quietly and joyfully accepting a whack of spam from advertisers they are giving guaranteed delivery to YOUR email box to, all for a very tiny fee.

It has been with much interest that I've been following the debate over AOL et al. My advice to anyone who is worried about AOL and friends charging advertisers for delivery of commercial email to their members is this - if you want to get your email, don't use AOL or anyone with similar policies. 

 For a long time, now, good lead companies have been excluding certain ISPs - especially AOL, as it has been virtually impossible to send commercial messages to AOL customers for a LONG time. 

 AOL has become so bad that children sending birthday greetings to their aunties are having their email bounce, simply because AOL has blacklisted their local ISP or because several innocuous words in the body of their email, like, perhaps, "Hi," have triggered AOL's draconian spam filters. 

This new pay-to-mail system is NOT the death knoll for email marketing - it opens up a HUGE market to those who want to pay a small fee to guarantee delivery of their mail to practically half the market (yes, AOL is that huge). 

 Remember that it has been virtually impossible for several years now to send commercial email to AOL users. Now, for a small fee, it is guaranteed! 

 However, for AOL users, this means that their spam holiday is over. Now, while Aunty may still not receive that cute e-card from her little nephew, Aunty will DEFINITELY receive plenty of junk mail, AKA AOL-approved spam. 

 In my opinion, it's high time people stopped fighting AOL and others like them, and started looking for smaller, freer, more open and user-friendly services. 

 Scampay - the Saga Continues

I have never liked Stormpay, became a member only to make a handful of purchases that were not available any other way at the time, and held my nose every time I used them. 

 During the 12DP debacle, I did a lot of digging into their background and found them to be some of the shadiest characters to ever cloud the sunny shores of cyberspace. How they've been able to survive as long as they have proves that in the online world, at least, crooks and scammers are a lot harder to stop than in the real world. 

 Many have said, "I told you so," regarding 12DP, and rightly so. It was rather obvious from the beginning that they and others like them couldn't possibly legally create the kind of revenue necessary to pay the returns they offered. 

Yet Stormpay was happy to be the payment processor for these ponzi organizations, AND happy to certify them as trustworthy companies through their sister company, NetIBA. 

 Furthermore, they collected even more money by convincing Stormpay members who were involved in paid autosurfs to get certified themselves in order to pay far lower processing fees when they used Stormpay to pay and receive payment from the paid autosurfs. 

 As things heated up with 12DP, Stormpay told its members all manner of tall tales, attempting to paint themselves as the good guys, all the while sitting on a small fortune in collected fees from illegal companies they knowingly supported over the past several years. 

 Now, just when you thought that things might get back to normal with Stormpay as the dust settled and they got back to the business of being a "legitimate" payment processor, they've suddenly locked out even more of their paying customers by making it a requirement to do ALL your Stormpay business through Stormpay auctions. Read their announcement at https://www.stormpay.com/stormpay/handle_gen.php 

 What this means to all the legitimate businesses who have been using Stormpay for recurring subscriptions is that ALL their subscriptions via Stormpay have now been cancelled, leaving them with a greatly reduced or even non-existent cashflow even after following all the rules. 

 It is an absolutely disgusting way to treat hard-working, paying customers and a shame to the business world to think that they are peers in business. I personally hope they fall flat and crawl back under the same rock they crawled out from. 

Stormpay Innocent?  Ha!

While I suspected 12DP of being a ponzi from the beginning, and warned everyone to watch out, I have also dug into Stormpay's background and believe that while they were very likely acting on instructions from federal investigators, they were also cooperating to try to save their own skins. 

The owners have also been involved in a ponzi (Tymglobal) and are intelligent, educated individuals who knew full well what 12DP was doing and willingly cooperated and reaped the benefits of all the processing fees AND the NetIBA "certifications" that they sold to thousands of members INCLUDING 12DP and many other ponzi organizations. 

I have done my research and can confirm that Stormpay and NetIBA are owned by the same people. NetIBA is supposed to be a company that does a thorough background check and then certifies companies and individuals as being "legitimate and safe to do business with." 

They certified 12DP and MANY other Paid Autosurf and HYIP companies. That in itself puts them right up to their crooked little necks in this whole mess. 

Furthermore, their certification process for NetIBA is a complete joke and a scam on its own. I personally went through the process and can tell you, I could have been Santa Claus and still would have been certified!