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Author: Andrew Daigle

What is Going On With the Paid Autosurf Programs Lately?

Copyright © 2008 East Tech LLC

To understand what this means, you need to understand the difference between free traffic exchanges and paid autosurf programs. These are two completely different services. A free traffic exchange allows webmasters to get lots of traffic to their websites free or at very low cost. Paid autosurf programs are designed to earn money by surfing paid advertisers websites.

There was a recent shakeup to the paid autosurf industry initiated by Stormpay, who is a payment processor much like PayPal. The only difference being Stormpay routinely took money for these programs, advertised them to their members through their Stormclix program, and then later froze all the accounts of these programs and then started methodically taking money from peoples accounts who were investing in them. How a payment processor can one day be promoting these companies to us and the next day freezing accounts and taking money was incomprehensible.

Now the FBI and the SEC are investigating these suspect paid autosurf programs and Stormpay. This has caused a huge rift in the paid autosurf industry and has forced many programs to either go out of business or change their policies to conform to the SEC standards. This could actually turn out to be a blessing since most programs were Ponzi or pyramid schemes to begin with. These latest developments have forced many of these programs to disappear earlier than they would have liked and potentially saved many investors a lot of money they would have lost otherwise.

So where does this leave the paid autosurf industry? As you can imagine, many will move offshore to continue business and get outside the reach of the SEC and others will conform to the new regulations to stay in business. As of this writing, many autosurf programs have changed to manual surf programs. That means instead of just clicking a surf button and walking away for 5 or 10 minutes, the surfer is actually required to view and manually click a link that moves on to the next website advertisement. This makes sense and in the end, will be more beneficial to the advertisers paying money to have their websites viewed by surfing members.

As for more programs moving their businesses offshore and out of the reach of U.S authorities like the FBI or SEC, I would not consider doing business with any of these programs. If they don’t have to answer to anyone, then why wouldn’t this be a perfect breading ground for scammers and thieves?

The bottom line is the paid surf industry is currently evolving. The days of the paid autosurf will be going away and the paid manual surf programs appear to be taking their place. This will be a big benefit to advertisers as well as the companies generating income from these advertising dollars. We will also see the insanely high return rates promised by these paid programs to come down to earth which will be a huge boom to this industry. Stay away from the programs that promise very high returns and are based out of the U.S. Chances are almost certain you will lose your money with these programs. Remember the old saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. Be smart with your money.

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