Warning Signs

As most of you in the PTC industry know, sites disappear at an alarming rate. Most sites disappear after only 2 to 3 months. Today we are going to look at three fairly large sites that have disappeared or gone off-line recently to see if we can discover some warning signs that would help us evaluate other sites that may be in trouble.

Lets first start off with CrewBux.com. This was a very large and honest site for a long time. However, about 2 months ago they stopped paying their members. At first, the payments were pushed back, then back again and again. Finally the site just stopped making payments to almost all of their members. They continued to have post about a few members being paid; however, most members were NOT getting paid. Reviews of their forum showed that members were complaining about payments and no support. So, the warning sign here is if a site is pushing its payment time back then they are not bringing in enough funds to cover the members payment requests. In addition, check a sites forum, if members are complaining that they are not being paid, BEWARE!

For the second site, we will take a brief look at Clickin.me. This site came online around late July 08 and had tons of ads all over the industry. They grew at a great rate and where up to 60,000 members in roughly 2 months. At first they paid everyone quickly. However, at about the 2 month point, they came up with wire transfer payments instead of using the industry standard of paypal or alertpay. This required members to submit their bank account information which most people did not feel comfortable with. A clear sign that they were trying to get people to just cancel their accounts. In addition, the length of time to set up the wire transfer was quoted as from 4 to 16 weeks. Another clear method of stalling payments. During this time, the sites stats for payments sent did not go up by any noticeable amount. Then in Sept. they disappeared. The warning sign here is that if a site comes up with some strange payment method or with a lengthly set up time, beware!

Last of all let's look at 07bux.net. This was another large site that clearly went scam. At first, this site went off line and then came back with a new script. They told everyone that they could not upgrade the old database into the new script, so everyone lost their earnings, referrals, and accounts. They just riped people off. Several sites have tried this approach lately, for example clickptc.us used this method of scamming people only a month ago. This is a clear sign that the site is riping you off and is in trouble. Thankfully, the members on 07bux sent in tons of disputes to Alertpay. Alertpay has since blocked their account. They lost their account with paypal a few months ago for the same reason, members complained that they were not getting what they paid for. This has made it very hard for 07bux to operate; so, the site is currently down. There are two warning signs here, the site losing the right to use either paypal or alertpay and trying the new script scam.

If any site you are working with shows any of these warning signs, you should not invest in that site until you are sure they are legit.

Warning signs:
1. Pushing payments back
2. New strange payment methods or lengthly setup times.
3. Losing Paypal or Alertpay
4. New script so you need to start a new account because we can not use the old database.