I’m willing to bet that you’ve been told before, but I’m going to say it again– Research before you invest in anything. Doing a small amount of research before any investment will save you money in the long run and can save you a lot of heartache. This is especially true with high-yield investment programs.
I am going to accumulate some good techniques and information that should really help new investors, and I hope will provide at least a bit of new information for the veterans out there.
So, lets say you have found a program that you want to invest in. Before you jump in and send your hard-earned money I suggest you dig in and try to figure out everything you can about the investment. Unfortunately, there are a lot of scam investments out there that you need to avoid. The question is how do you determine which investments have potential to make money and which ones are just out to steal your money? Where do you start?
The best place to start is by doing a thorough search of the investment web site. First check out the main page for any information the site gives about the company. After reading everything the on the main page you should check out the FAQ and/or the About Us sections.
Many scam HYIP sites have a generic “copy & paste” FAQ section. Most have typos and may even reference an investment plan name that is NOT the name of the HYIP. This is a clear indication that the HYIP is not a safe site to invest money into and is 99.9% likely to be a scam.
After checking the FAQ/About Us section you should check out each of the other pages to determine if there are any inconsistencies you can find. My rule of thumb is if there are blatant errors in the English language or inaccurate information, don’t invest.
After checking out the program’s website the first tool you should utilize in your research is the Whois search.
#1.) Do a Whois search on the investment program’s domain.
I recommend using DomainTools to perform your search. This site has all sorts of searches and tools, however for our purposes we’ll be using it to perform a Whois search and to ping for an IP address. More about pinging in my next research article.
Type in the domain name, and click search. As an example I’ll go step-by-step and check out www.cnn.com.
Registrant:
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Domain Name Manager
One CNN Center 13N
Atlanta, GA 30303
US
Email:
Registrar Name….: CORPORATE DOMAINS, INC.
Registrar Whois…: whois.corporatedomains.com
Registrar Homepage: www.cscprotectsbrands.com
Domain Name: cnn.com
Created on…………..: Wed, Sep 22, 1993
Expires on…………..: Fri, Sep 21, 2018
Record last updated on..: Thu, Nov 18, 2010
Administrative Contact:
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Domain Name Manager
One CNN Center 13N
Atlanta, GA 30303
US
Phone: +1.4048275000
Email:
Technical Contact:
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
TBS Server Operations
One CNN Center 13N
Atlanta, GA 30303
US
Phone: +1.4048275000
Email:
DNS Servers:
ns5.timewarner.net
ns3.timewarner.net
ns1.timewarner.ne
Now, you’ll notice the Whois search doesn’t tell you a whole lot.
For an example of a site without privacy protection here’s a look at DomainTools.com’s Whois results:
As you can see, not everyone’s Whois results info will look the same, but if they’re unprotected they’ll tell you the:
- Registrant’s name
- Email address
- Physical mailing address
- Phone Number
Unless you are lucky and the investment program doesn’t have privacy protection, this search really only provides you with a couple useful tid-bits of information:
- it lets you know who the domain is registered with. As you can see in the above Whois, cnn.com is registered with Turner Broadcasting
- it gives you the name of the privacy protection company.
- sometimes it gives you the domain’s creation and expiration dates.
- it lists the URL of the name servers the site is hosted under.
In the example of www.cnn.com the company providing privacy protection is WhoisGuard. You may wonder why this is useful information, and in most cases it isn’t. However, if I lost a large sum of money investing in a program and was trying to get it back I might try contacting the privacy company. Who knows, the person behind the phone may mess up and give you information if you’re persuasive enough.
Anyway, the expiration date is a useful bit of information to have if it’s provided.
If the domain’s registered for more than one year it is an indication that the program may be around for some time. If it’s only for one year or the Whois search doesn’t display an expiration date, you may want to be wary about reinvesting multiple times in the program or even investing at all.
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