Basic Due Diligence: Unravel scams by searching the Net

by Tony Clifton

No Due Diligence can prove you at 100% that a HYIP is legitime. We have seen all kind of scams - with real address, proofs of trading, registered companies and everything. However there are some simple steps which can help you discover the "cheaper" scams or at least can raise your attentionn to a program which have attracted your interest. Let us see what they are:

- Whois lookup
Probably the simplest, yet effective way to check if there is something fishy in a program. Go to Whois.net, type the domain name of the HYIP and see the outputed info. A lot of times you will find that the domain name is registered with an anonymous service like KatzGlobal. This is never a good sign, because it means the owner hides their identity, but does not prove the program is a scam - many honest persons prefer to protect their privacy. However, if there is detailed Whois info you can check if the country, phone, names and company match what the HYIP owner claims. If it does not, that certainly means they are lying you.
There is a more important step here - often the domain is registered to a company ran by the same person. You can find the site of that company, other sites etc. Often you will find out another scams ran by the same company/person. Then you will know to stay away.

- link: search
Go to Google and type link: domainname.com (where domainname.com is the actual domain name of the program you wantto check). This will show you what sites link to this program. Often you may find it in various blacklist, or advertised by unfair service or just discussed as scam.
You can extend your search by using links: domainname.com, site: domainname.com or just domainname.com. An easy way to check for scam report is to type scam + "program name" (where "program name" is the actual program name or domain) and see the results returned.
Also, don't forget Google is not the only search engine. Perform similar searches with MSN and Yahoo.

- PING and TraceRoute
These are more technical and useful only when there is already suspect in relation between the target program and known scam. With ping (you can run ping by opening command prompt on your PC and typing ping: domainname.com) you can retrieve the program IP. You can check if it match the IP of the supposingly related scam (or at least the digits before the last "." are the same). Remember however, that even the same IPs do not prove the programs are ran by the same owner - they could just use shared namebased hosting. But such discovering should definitely raise your attention. TraceRoute (run it by typing tracert: domainname.com) works in similar way, but not only reveals the IP - it shows t

he path to it.

- e-gold account search
Most HYIPs use e-gold as investing method. Go to your favourite search engine and type the e-gold account number. Sometimes you will find scam warnings about the account or blacklists containing it. Sometimes you will just find another sites using it and thus you can check another ventures ran by the same person. Sometimes you will find nothing of course :-)

- email search
You can find out a lot about someone by putting their email address in a search engine. Next time when you are checking a HYIP, do it. You can discover their other sites using it, mailing lists, forum discussions and many more. If the program lists more than one address, check them all.

Enough for this time. These methods are basic, but yet very powerful. Spend more time researching than money investing.

Published at Nov, 29 '05 ; read 569 times;

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