VirtaPay Scam
VirtaPay is one of the more subtle scams because there is no one thing with their site that you can point to that demonstrates clearly that it is a scam. It is only when you look at a whole range of different aspects of how their site works that it becomes more obvious that it is a scam.
VirtaPay started some time ago using a different name - "PayBox Montenegro". At that time they were offering people the opportunity to sign up for what they claimed would be a future payment system to compete with Paypal. To give people the incentive to sign up to test their early code they were offering a payment into your PayBox account just for signing up and further payments for staying active. The idea would be that this money would allow you to make purchases through their system once they set up that part of the processing and so test their system for them without using your own money in a system that was still being tested.
The first clue to this being a scam is that they didn't close off memberships once they had a specific number of testers and continued to increase everyone's balances. A genuine site only needs so many people to test it and giving people real money to test with only makes sense when you have a limited number of testers. As they continued to accept new signups and add more money to the accounts of those who had already signed up, it became more and more obvious that the "money" being given out wasn't as real as the site implied.
Once this became too obvious the site made a statement to the effect that the money wasn't real but was instead virtual money that would only have a real value once it was used to purchase something through their system. It was at this time they changed their name to VirtaPay.
Now it is perfectly possible to have a virtual payment system that isn't a scam. BarterCard is one such virtual currency system that is definitely NOT a scam. The evidence gradually built up though that this isn't the case with VirtaPay.
While none of the following by itself is sufficient to show that VirtaPay is a scam, the combination of all of the following makes it extremely unlikely that it isn't a scam.
- They have continued to add more and more of the virtual currency to everyone's account and so the value of that virtual currency has gone steadily downward. Where originally their virtual dollars might have been considered to be equivalent value in their system to say US dollars, the additional virtual dollars issued since they started means that you would now have to discount their value to less than one thousandth of that - say $1000 VirtaPay dollars is perhaps equal to one US dollar (and probably a lot less by the time you read this).
- They have started building a system to allow buying ans selling twice now. The first one worked better than the second but was scapped and they started over.
- Their terms for use of each of these test payment systems has been that only electronic goods can be sold and yet with neither of the two systems have they ever built the extra part to the system that allows electronic goods to be securely handled. In each case they have only built the part of the system that would be needed for processing of physical goods.
- By allowing far too many people into their test system they collected all the scammers from elsewhere and so they ended up where 99% of the products offered for sale are all scams themselves and with the way their system works it would be pure luck to find the genuine product to test with.
- They used the fact that they allowed all the scammers to join as justification for making two further changes that make their system totally unusable for any legitimate purpose. First they imposed an upper limit on the price of any goods being sold to $25 VirtaPay dollars - that's about two cents or less in real money. Then they changed their signin process so that only people with verified FaceBook accounts can sign in. Now to verify a FaceBook account you need to give FaceBook either your mobile phone number or credit card number. FaceBook doesn't consider anyone who doesn't have either of these to be a real person. This first off means that all the real people who FaceBook claims don't exist were immediately locked out of their VirtaPay account. In addition anyone who doesn't want FaceBook broadcasting their phone num ber and credit card details to the world will also have refused to input those values (given FaceBook's total disregard for people's privacy when it suits them to disregard it) and so anyone who wants to keep those personal details private will also have been locked out.
- There's no way to contact the ownersto report any problems - at least nowhere easy to find. Their blog does keep mentioning customer feedback so that gives the impression that there is a way to contact them
If you are one of the few unfortunate legitimate users of VirtaPay who wasn't locked out of their account by their latest changes you are at even greater risk of being scammed now through VirtaPay than ever before because almost all of people who might have used the system as a legitimate trading system have now been locked out and most of those who still have access will be trying to scam the few real people who are left. That is if VirtaPay doesn't end up closing down very quickly due to the fact that with only scammers in their system there will be no one to get scammed.
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