On December 28th during the holiday period, Egopay suffered a hack that greatly impacted key merchants and partners. False values were made available in the merchants platform, when no actual value was transmitted in Egopay.

This hacker then proceeded to convert this fake value into irreversible currencies all within a one hour window. These merchants believed that this value was in their Egopay account, but unfortunately it was not. Upon discovery, at this point, Egopay immediately put restrictions in place and placed transactions from being automatically completed, to manual review to contain further damage and impact on our merchants. The Shopping Cart Interface (SCI) was also restricted. The impact amount was between 1M to 1.5M total for a handful of merchants.

We concluded, that this hack must have been perpetrated by someone from within who knew the inner workings and had privileged access, so we took immediate actions and suspended everyone that we suspected while this investigation was underway. Unfortunately, this resulted in our support services being delayed or non-existent. Support tickets were not being answered and our transaction interface was taken down to stop any further exploit. Considering the evidence on hand, Egopay was left with no choice but to take these drastic actions.

An investigation team was called in to help on December 30th, 2014. This is when things began to unravel. The team was repeatedly asking for certain accesses in order to do their job, but it was not forthcoming. Egopay reached out for help from its payment partners, including Astropay and Payza as well a few key merchants to gauge interest in helping remedy this situation. Egopay was looking for help to discover the truth of the hack, for funding or liquidity, as well as to help consult on how to resolve this situation.

The hack also exposed a gap in the cash reserves of Egopay. On January 5th, 2015 it was uncovered that the real owner of Egopay (Amir Aziz) who operated behind the scenes was embezzling money from the company for a period of time. We took immediate action to restrict all his accesses as well. Between January 5th and 16th, the remaining Egopay employees (Tadas & team) did not know who to trust anymore.

On January 16th 2015, the investigative team was finally granted full access to the servers and systems. On January 18th, 2015 Amir Aziz social engineered his way with the hosting provider to reset his accesses and grant him access again to the servers which he used in turn to delete his Egopay account from the system (we would assume to cover his scheme) and removed all other Administrative accesses.

Hola mis amigos!

As you know there is nothing I like to do more than to check out new websites and programs. Especially when I find that they are interesting and well-organized.

I don't think it will come across as news to you if I tell you that I'm kind of a control freak, right amigos? I like everything to have its own place, and I like it to be thought-out and pre-planned. I have noticed recently that I'm even more OCD about such things in the winter, for some reason. Luckily, our today's hero has managed to satisfy all those needs.

BITC1 is an investment fund that has just celebrated its 200 days online. Dealing with, as you may have guessed, cryptocurrency exchange markets as well as Forex, the company – according to the well out together website – is "a legally registered Private Limited Company which was founded at the end of 2013 at London" (under company no. 08763809).

Hola mis amigos,

it will not be the happiest or bubbliest of newsletters, I have to say. We're trying to get to the bottom of the EgoPay situation and hoping that it is not some big old LibertyReserve déjà vu.

People usually love their déjà whatevers, but trust me, amigos, you will not like this one. However, we did add two cool programs to our esteemed list, so be sure to check that out!

NEW PROGRAMS ADDED: MAJESTIC SWAN, CRYPTOSTRATEGY

Two program characters lead our way today: Majestic Swan and CryptoStrategy. Good names, interesting programs.

Let me start with something Epic, I mean, Majestic, that flies. With a glorious home page photo and domain name locked until 2014, Majestic Swan is sure making an impression. When you add to this the location, the Cayman Islands (BritCay House, 236 Eastern Avenue, George Town, Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands), and a put together website, this little bird tells us that it's all about the Forex: "as a fully legal company with over 4 years of experience in the trading business, we leverage our services on providing our clients with maximum returns on their investments". Its pretty website is secured with Comodo RSA Domain Validation Secure Server valid until December 2019.

As one may notice, the company seems to be all about the long-term commitment. Unfortunately, not much is known when it comes to the people running the program; all you get are stock-photo-looking pictures of the CEO, founders and managers. Advertised in a youtube clip as "the elite investors club", Majestic Swan offers the following plans for the long-term lovers: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced all "have no fixed length investment term, in other words you will be receiving daily interest payments for as long as you wish to stay with us".

For some time now there has been some speculation regarding a very popular payment system, namely EgoPay.

It started more or less a week ago on HYIP-related and very specialized fora and there has been no stop to messages, posts and articles regarding the issue.

What is ”the issue” everybody’s talking about? EgoPay regulars started complaining that funds were missing from their accounts. No small amounts of money either, one should add. What’s more, exchangers could not (and cannot) withdraw their funds from EgoPay — regardless of the payment method chosen — as they are ”frozen”. Despite several attempts to contact EgoPay directly via live chat or e-mails, no enquiries regarding this case were answered. One cannot be sure whether it is a coincidence or cone of silence since there has been no official statement issued by EgoPay.

Some call it a ”scheme”, some ”theft”, others ”misunderstanding”. Officially, Ego Pay calls it a ”system hack” in which money were ”temporarily frozen”. Unofficially, it has been said that the whole issue may stem from a disgruntled ex-employee (there are some major changes going on at egopay currently, which includes management changes) or that merchants received e-mails with ”fake transactions”. Another big player in the payment processor game, Payeer, has joined the discussion saying that EgoPay stole their money as well. Sources say that the money in question was no less than $200,000: