“LucaAdmin, 23.07.2007
Our website and email systems
have been accessed by an
unauthorized person or persons
again and we are in the
process of securing all
vulnerabilities
In addition to this, we feel
that our e-gold and e-bullion
account payment systems may
have also been compromised and
we are in the process of
securing our access to both
accounts. Until we are
completely certain that we
have secure access to our
accounts we will be holding
payments for today until we
have verified this.

For the first time in nearly a year that I’ve been with Lucafund its not looking very good. However there is nothing to do but to wait and hope its a temporary hitch and will be resolved.

tiger persaud

There were also a few who had their e-gold account blocked (by e-gold it seems) and Lucafund offered to to pay them into another account of their choice.

For all those interested, there is actually a forum for Lucafund. Just follow the link below and go to the last page to read the latest…

http://www.hyipranks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=258

You can post all your queries there. Rant, rave or just lurk. Have it your way.

So many people are going into profit here. It’s almost unreal.

Greg

I just posted and voted above on several monitors and wanted to put it here, too.

I don’t thing it needs more words, anyway just to say that after been paid, now for more an year, regularly and weekly by LucaFund, only 2, may be 3 times, payments were delayed but always promptly explained by LucaFund. And paid. From all Hyips, and be sure dozens and some of the so-called “5 stars” or “premium”, I invested 1 year ago, LucaFund is the only that still paying me …

…above should have read “quiet” instead of “quite”.

Must learn to type more slowly!

Worlds of thanks to you for your advice and help. I will write to you at your email address, give me a few hours since I have hop off in a little while.

Now to everyone, here is the latest regarding the Lucafund situation, right off their website.

————————————-
News and Announcements

Tuesday June 26th, 2007 (20:25 GMT) - NEW INFORMATION - We have discovered through today’s inquiries to e-gold and our webhost and emails from several members that whomever has compromised our e-gold spend page has apparently gone as far as making payments for a few weeks from account 3906174 (which all of you know we have a separate payments account from which we make payments). We are assuming this has been done to get people to make more spends to that account. We have also discovered that the e-gold account was originally named “Tunndro’s Gold” and later switched to “LucaFund.net” which can be done at any time to whatever name one chooses. We have yet to discover email breaches except for the possibility of “cloning” our email address. We have seen one claim on a message board of someone stating they received a confirmation email from us saying… “we received your spend to account 3906174 and you will receive payment Monday”… firstly, we have NEVER stated our receiving account (3900292) in reply to ANY email requesting confirmation of spends, and we always give the specific date on which first payment will be received rather than just saying “Monday”. We have suspicions of this posting and currently have individuals determining the location of the IP address from which that post was made. We are still in the process of discovering who the owner of account 3906174 is and how the breach was achieved, and unfortunately we can do nothing about your spends made to that account. You will have to contact e-gold in reference to reclaiming funds from account# 3906174 as it is not our account. In addition (for those of you who seem to believe we are responsible), our website states that we are not responsible for hackers (Rules page) and also states OUR receiving account number (FAQ page). We will be establishing a new receiving account shortly and will notify everyone as soon as it has been done. -Admin

Tuesday June 26th, 2007 (17:40 GMT) - We are still in the process of investigating the events over the past couple weeks regarding our website and e-gold spend page being compromised. Here is what we know so far:

Apparently there have been several spends to e-gold account 3906174 which is NOT OURS due to a compromise of our website through processes called “phishing” and “cloning”, and there have even been payments made from that account for the spends received to it. Firstly, everyone who has been with us for a while knows that our accepting account# has been 3900292 for several months and we have made payments from a separate account 4382118 for months as well. We do not make payments from our receiving account and have not for quite some time. We have temporarily stopped accepting e-gold spends to our receiving account 3900292 and have changed our payments account to 4545397 (for security reasons) from which we made payments to e-gold for Monday June 25th (all on time). WE DO NOT OWN E-GOLD ACCOUNT 3906174. Anyone can establish an e-gold account under whatever name they choose and we are currently in the process of trying to find out from e-gold where that account was opened from (IP address). Secondly, everyone who has been with us for some time KNOWS that if we change our e-gold account# as we have done a couple of times over the past year and a half WE NOTIFY EVERYONE VIA EMAIL.

In addition, our email address (admin@lucafund.net) has been “cloned” through a process called “phishing” of which we have obtained evidence. We have received email from admin@lucafund.net over the past few days which we did not send to ourselves. At this point our belief is that someone has accessed our site and email through the “html” code on the site and our server and we are updating it to “chmod” (those of you who are computer techs should understand this - we are traders, not computer techs so we are trying to relate what information our techies our giving us the best we can). During this process, our e-gold spend page was apparently cloned as well and clicks were redirected to a page looking like ours only with different a spend account and interface, which again was not ours.

Those of you who have apparently made spends to e-gold account 3906174 have unfortunately made spends to an account which is not ours and therefore we can do nothing about it, even though it was due to a compromise of our website and email.

We will notify everyone as soon as we know more and have our site secure to accept e-gold again. We have been flooded with emails, so everyone please be patient as we try to respond to all of them as well as resolve this issue over the next few days. -Admin

————————————-

There you go. They may be telling the truth here, but we shall see. Obviously now no one is going to make any new investment or reinvest for a while. Like myself, I will only let my current investments run for at least a few months. That means there will be no money coming in to Lucafund for some time.

However if they continue to pay every week like clockwork as they have been doing for more than a year and a half, even if they have no new money coming into their account, then Lucafund must be the real deal, like they have been telling us all along. Then I will take my hat off to them.

For now I will play the waiting game.

Somehow I have this gut feeling, a strong sense of confidence that we are into something really good here. Let’s hope that when the dust settles and the storm clouds have blown away, it is all sunshine as far as the eye can see.

“Live long and prosper!”

Regards and God bless to all,
Greg

PS
Falcon, you have been awfully quite, let’s hear your 2 cents.

Check out EarnByLoaning and Life Holdings. There are excellent articles about them at this blog (just do a search) and good threads of information at NoBS Network Forum.

In addition, I know of another opportunity, which is high yield, but not in the HYIP arena. Just shoot me an email.

JMO,
Sharon

You read the announcements at the Lucafund “Announcements” page.

This issue seems to only affect e-gold users and we cannot even make a spend now. e-bullion users seems to have no problem yet. However, even e-bullion requires two separate batches of payment now, but you can still make a spend.

At another forum I have posted that hopefully this is just an inside job of someone from inside Lucafund trying to make a quick buck behind the backs of the main guys, siphoning funds to a separate personal e-gold account.

Let us just pray that it is just that. Other than that we are in for a rough time.

All of you know me as a strong proponent of Lucafund, but there are times we have to face and accept the facts as they are laid on the table before us.

Well life has to go on regardless of the situation surrounding us especially when there is nothing we can do to change it. So we may as well go out with a smile and be happy always. Another night has passed for me and it is a new day now. I am just thankful to God that He has rewarded me with another day to my life.

Regards,
Greg

Thanks for all your advice and I will definitely heed them and take the steps you have mentioned.

No, I have not recouped my seed money yet since I have only been in Lucafund for a little more than two months. With a payout of 6 percent a week it takes 17 weeks or a little more than 4 months to recover your capital, but I have been reinvesting every week to make my invested capital grow. I do top up regularly whenever I have that extra money to spend. I started with only $100 but now it has grown to more than 1K.

From this week on I will stop reinvesting but instead begin to collect my weekly payouts and hope that I will get back as much of my money as I can in the next few months or until I stopped getting paid.

Before I first invested in Lucafund, I spent several months monitoring them until I was convinced that they are reliable. Of course I never truly believe the “payment for life” promise, but I just hoped that they were truly honest with a legit real world investments and not a ponzi. After nearly two years of paying like clockwork without fail, and this was regardless of whether their website was up or down, I felt sure that Lucafund may just be a real deal among the elusive 1% real HYIP in a world full of scammers and cheats.

I have in fact been involved in HYIP for many years, right back to the time when the term HYIP was not as commonly known as it is today. I remember calling them “High Yield” programs or HYP.

Six or seven years ago I was even asked by a major international bank whether I could get any group to come up with $100 million of clean money to invest with them. They offered 300% return per annum plus a return of the capital. Of course no one I knew dared to put that much money/faith in any investment program, even if it was from a bank. Of course the other stumbling block was the “clean” status with an accountable record dating back five years.

Since last year I have also invested in several of the current crop of HYIP schemes now found every where on the internet. Of course I lost money on them. This is a whole new game, requiring a whole new set of strategies. I guess I am learning fast, albeit the very hard way.

As of now, there is nothing much more I can do regarding Lucafund, but just wait and hope for the money to be paid into my e-gold automatically every Monday or Tuesday. At least I got paid today. Let’s see about next week and week after and for the next 4 months…

Thanks,
Greg

PS: Is there truly a real High Yield Investment Program out there? Other than with banks which require such huge capitals?

I can only surmise from your last post that you are new to the HYIP world. Having a “hacker” change an e-gold number in a HYIP program is not new. Sometimes it really is a hacker and sometimes it is the program administration themselves. Why would an administrator change the e-gold number and blame it on a hacker? Because it is the beginning of a series of excuses to close the fund down and run with the money.

I’m not saying that the Lucafund admin were the ones that changed the e-gold number or not. We don’t know for sure. There are hackers out there. However, having a real hacker is not as common as the excuse is.

Whether or not there was a real hacker doesn’t matter, your funds are still gone. It is extremely unlikely that Lucafund will even offer to replace the funds. They will say that there is no way they could know how much you deposited. Offering to send them screen prints of your deposit doesn’t help, because screen prints can be easily faked.

Here are some lessons for you:
1. Always check the e-gold number before hitting the confirmation button. If it is different, do not confirm it. Check with the administration first.

2. A “promise to pay us for life” is a lie. No one can promise that. It is hype. In fact, if you check their TOS you’ll see that there is no guarantee to pay you at all. Speaking of lies, program administrators lie regularly. Do not believe everything they say.

3. Do not blame e-gold. Administrators have a duty to protect their website, especially the spend section and the member data. Place the blame where it should be… with the program administration.

4. Do not put so much faith in a ponzi. It will fail eventually. There is a list of common excuses and having a hacker tops the list. It is probably the most common excuse. It is right up there with DDOS attacks.

5. Never deposit into a program that is having any kind of problem whatsoever. Wait until they running smoothly or they close. Don’t think about the money you’ll be losing during the problem time. Think about the money that you’ll be saving when they close.

I’d advise you and everyone else in Lucafund to get your money out as soon as possible. It may be too late already. We’ll have to see how Lucafund responds. The most common response is that there will be a delay as they “work on securing the site.” Next the “hacker” will strike a couple of more times, hitting the e-gold numbers of members. More delays. News of problems due to no money coming in, which will cause “payment problems.” And finally the closing. Sometimes it is done quickly, but usually it is drawn out for several months in order to continue to get more deposits.

This isn’t a “promise” of what will happen. It’s just that we’ve seen it all too often before. I bet every HYIP veteran out there can name 20 programs that the end all started with “we’ve been hacked.” I hope for your sake that I’m wrong. But, you’ve already taken out your seed money and some profits, right?

JMO,
Sharon

Those of us who have been making spends to invest/re-invest at Lucafund should be familiar with the Lucafund e-gold account of 3900292. Last Saturday, as usual, when I made re-investments spends for myself, my wife and my daughter, I noticed that Lucafund had a new e-gold account number of 3906174. However I trusted that Lucafund may have decided to use another e-gold account to ease their work load and went ahead to make multiple spends. This, as it turned out, was a big mistake!

This morning, I, along with every investor of Lucafund, received two emails from Lucafund to tell us that their website has been compromised. Apparently some hacker has changed the Lucafund e-gold spend account number from 3900292 to 3906174. This means that all who have made spends to Lucafund after Wednesday 20th June 2007, have just made some weasel of a thief a very rich little rodent.

Lucafund has made a pledge to get to the bottom of this robbery, but catching this felon who can be anywhere hidden in a dark crack on this planet, and protected behind a veil of anonymity, is nigh impossible.

The problem I think lies with e-gold. It is all to easy to open an account with them. All you need is a working email address. You do not even need to verify your identity. This makes e-gold a perfect front for felons to to do their trade. So now how do we catch Mr. 3906174? For all we know, he may even be a she, or somewhere in between, which make this lowlife an “it”, which is more likely the case! So I guess we can say sayonara to our hard earned cash for the week.

Now we come to the question of accountability and liability. We all love Lucafund, and I for one do not want to see them in trouble. My total loss for the week is about $450, small sum and I am quite willing to write that amount off, no big deal. I am not going to press for Lucafund to top up my investments by that much. Of course $450 should be a small sum for Lucafund too, but multiply that by say 1000 investors, then things start to get really serious.

I would like to say this to all “Please do not push Lucafund to be liable for our losses”. Let us not kill the goose that lays our golden eggs. We bear our losses for now, but our long term rewards will more than cover for this little glitch.

Show Lucafund our support and stand by them in this difficult time. Afterall didn’t Lucafund promised to pay us for life? So let us all ensure that Lucafund live to a ripe old age and not have its life cut short by a little common thief.

Greg M