Well CompactSurfing is shutting down until summer time. The main thing you need to know about this update is that you will maybe be paid if you are not in profit yet. That is, of course, if operating costs don’t take all their extra e-gold. Operating costs? They could’ve at least come up with a little better excuse. I have bolded the part that pertains to payouts as it is a very long update.
Dear Compact Surfing Members,
I hope you will read this update closely, and consider
all that I say here carefully, with the understanding
that the Compact Network will be implementing further
changes in the coming weeks, but we are here to stay
for the long term as I have promised from the
beginning.As of today, Friday, June 16, 2006, Compact Surfing
upgrades will be disabled. Allow me to clarify our
reasons for doing this, and our plans for the coming
weeks ahead:1. The price of gold per ounce, as all of you know,
has dropped significantly in the past several weeks.
Because of this, the Egold funds in reserves that I
had to maintain for the operation of CS diminished in
value tremendously on a daily/weekly basis. There has
been a 15 to 20% drop in the value of gold in the past
several weeks, from above $700 an ounce in May to
around $570 as I write this. What this means is
that
most upgrade values that were sent to CS and held
online in order to provide the old trademark “fast
payouts” dropped in $$$ value while waiting to be paid
out. This has been occurring for weeks now. We
persisted, believing there would be a turn around with
the gold markets, that things would average out, but
to date, this has not happened.We’ve reevaluated the situation, and have decided now
to stop taking upgrades until such time as the gold
markets stabilize, we hope by mid-summer. We feel
this is best for both the company and our members
financially. Members have faced the same situation CS
has when their payments arrive to their accounts and
drop in value within hours…what took several days to
build in profits has sometimes been diminished within
hours, sitting in members Egold accounts. In
accordance with this decision, the ability to upgrade
to CS accounts will be disabled today.For those
who do not understand why drastic drops in
Egold might affect the reserves of a program designed
like CS, here’s why. The 3 cashout requests per month
combined with the processing of requests every day of
the week, and 48 hour “fast payment” meant we had to
keep a majority of Network funds in reserve in Egold
rather than offline. 48 hours was not long enough to
move funds through exchangers online for payments or
offline for protection of capital, especially on
weekends when banks are closed. This is why, in our
last newsletter, we established the 7-business day
timeframe as being more realistic and manageable for
the future of CS, however, since that last update, we
have considered the situation further.2. On June 9th, we processed nearly $500,000 USD in
cashout requests. I continued to use the remaining
funds left to pay as many requests as I could, and you can view a screenshot of all
payments sent here:
http://compactsurfing.com/first1.PNG
http://compactsurfing.com/second2.PNG
http://compactsurfing.com/third3.PNG
3660 payments were sent the last 2 days and each single sent was paid.Moving Forward: We are going to do refunds for
members with pending requests, put the program on hold
and relaunch in the summer, when hopefully the gold
markets have stabilized and by which time I will have had
time to implement Compactpay with features available and
debit cards. All funds in my possession
less operation costs will be used for refunds. In
the coming weeks, the support staff will assist me in
this work. Members in profit will not receive
refunds. Those members not in profit will be returned
a percentage of their initial upgrade purchase
dependant upon the total available for distribution.
Earnings and referral commissions will be
deducted
from your pendings in our calculations. Please be
advised that I am doing this despite the fact that our
terms have always stipulated that upgrade purchases
are non-refundable.3. All Compactpay members with funds in CP, please rest
assured that your funds are secure. I will announce
next week the procedure for how returns of
whatever you funded into your Compactpay accounts will
be executed. After the funds have been removed from
the system, during the next few weeks, the database
for Compact Pay will be inaccessible to members as my
programmers and I work to implement features which I
have not had the chance to dedicate time to. Please
be patient and I will update further regarding this in
the coming weeks. For those members who have made
recent Bank Wire Fundings, I cannot address those
until next week when the bank is open so please be
patient with this as well.With that said, the
following actions will be taken in the
coming weeks. The Compact Network will be relaunched at the
end of August/early September and I have decided for now
that the following three sites will be the focus of my
time and resources: Compact Surfing, Compact Lottery,
and Compact PayA. Compact Surfing
1. Expect a new layout and design to the site. The site
will offer 14% daily for 9 days on your upgrade
purchases tentatively. Upgrade units will be $10 USD
each and the maximum member balance with active
upgrades will be $10,000 USD. Payout Timeframe:
Upgrades will become pending in your Cashout History
automatically upon expiration. They will be processed
within 7 business days following date of expiration. No
more having to request cashout. This setup is
perfectly clear on when members will be paid. In
addition, I will know exactly what is needed ready in
my online payment processor accounts each week
to
process payouts. As such, I can store the majority of
funds offline accordingly so that we are no longer at
the mercy of gold price fluctuations.2. Compact forum will still be in place; possibly
changed to vbulletin format as I have received
feedback requesting this from members.3. More details to be announced when available.
B. Compact Lottery
1. Expect a new layout and design to the site
2. No more purchasing tickets from cash balance; you
will be able to purchase directly from Egold and
tentatively Compactpay as well. Winners will be paid
within 5 business days following announcement of
weekly lucky numbers.3. Cash prizes will be greater in amount, though the
number of winners will be less than the past track record
to allow for ease of management in distributing payment of
prizes. The amounts for Weekly prizes will be announced on
the site as well. Distribution of rewards still to
be determined
by the administrator.C. Compact Pay
1. I will work in the coming weeks to develop
relationships with exchangers to bring on board to
offer funding/withdrawal options for Compact Pay that they
will handle individually and efficiently.3. I welcome any member suggestions with regards to
implementing debit cards. Compact Debit Cards are
still planned, but due to the current situation, and
recent comments made by members regarding their wishes
for certain cards, I have cancelled our previous order
for cards. For those of you who prefer Cardoneplus
over Virtual Money, and vice versa, please contact
Nvus with your reasoning and he will forward me
details and I will make a final decision in the coming
weeks: cn_nvus@yahoo.com4. The Shopping
Cart Interface will be made available
and upgrades/cashouts through CS via CompactPay will be
available as well to coincide with relaunch of CS.Expect further announcements from me in the coming
days. The Compact Network is here to stay and we are
not going anywhere, I assure you all. After 3 months
of hard work and dedication I will not give up and I
ask that you do not give up on me now either. We have
faced obstacles beyond our control in the past several
weeks, but the above plan of action will allow us to
return, stronger than ever. Thank you all for your
continued support.Sincerely Yours,
Luuk Hendriks
Altus Financial Services Inc.
Popularity: 2% [?]
15 Responses to “And another one bites the dust…”
- 1 Pingback on Jun 19th, 2006 at 10:40 am

Well I interpreted Jude’s update 2 weeks ago as a warning to leave CS. Jude mentioned something about going on vacation
Fortunately Luuk paid me 2 days after and I took out the principal and put the profits back in. I also noticed a change in Luuk’s behavior around the same time. Previously active on the forums at least 1 hr each day he suddenly dissapeared. 
yes, i wrote here last week regarding the RED FLAG that seems to appears out of no where.
Now I’m waiting and hopefully they DO refund me.
looks like a lot of people got burned on this one. Nice that they strung people along for the past two weeks with BS lies
well, i guess im not at all surprise that CS only last 3 mths!! i’ve warned a few people about joining CS when i first look at it back in March. My gut instinct right from the start tells me it’s one of those elaborate setup SCAM by a group of clever people.
it reminds me alot of another AS last yr based in europe which has an elaborate setup even proof of trading activites & co. registration & it scammed even the most cautious DD ever done on them. It was a BIG SCAM last year.
what r the tell-tales signs if u might ask? too many advertisements everywhere to gain new members, the whole network setup was too good to be true to FOOL even the professionals here. less ROI makes everyone believable that it’s going 2 last long & so forth.
i hope people do get refunds if they mean what they say but i highly doubt it.
I do believe the refunds will come, though I saw CS was pretty flagged down with the gold price.
There should be a lot of funds still hanging around in their account, the only thing you’ll have to worry about is the integrity of CS, whether the refunds will be in.
Sigh, all the crap coming from the surfs.
CS could still save the situation if they wanted to although customers would have to suffer a dollar loss.
Here is what they could do and should do in the future if they still wanted to use gold based ecurrencies. Instead of accepting the gold’s value in USD into the customer’s CS account they should only accept the “amount of grams” paid in, and then only pay out in gram’s.
Example: A customer pay’s in 1 gram of gold when he upgrades, when his upgrade expires he is paid 1.13 grams of gold back into his gold currency account. There is no conversion of the value of the gold into USD within the CS program.
The E-gold account of CS still retains now, or should still retain, the same amount of grams of gold that they had before the fall in gold prices. If they now told their customer’s that they would now make payments based only on the amount of grams that they received I think customers would still bitch but would accept the CS program payment conversion. Hell, right now I would be very happy to get paid back the amount of grams I put into their program if they would do so, however I will not hold my breath.
Any Autosurf program that is using E-gold and accepts payments of dollars from E-gold accounts or other gold currencies such as E-Bullion could easily suffer the same type of losses in the future. Gold prices are always and will always change and they can change quickly without giving any advance warning. That is the nature of the commodity markets as any commodity trader will tell you.
Do you think funds of CS is available in their new site?
I have been paid 5 times, but my pending amount is more than my profit.
Can I be refund?
Scott,
Great idea! Buy/sell gold in grams. I wonder if e-gold is reading this?
Well said Scott. But in this case I’m not sure what stand does Luuk wants to take, and if he’s honest, maybe suggestions should go to his mailbox, I havent’ seen him online on my IM for many days in fact.
No good.
Not looking good on the refunds. I have put together a bit of material and I am saying that it is looking like a scam. I think that the funds were transferred out over 3,660 micro transactions which took place over 2 days. I have not come across anyone that received anything from them since the 16th. I checked those screenshots and they were identical. First1.png and Second2.png. Mistake, probably but it does not support their claim.
Secondly, the amount that is left in their E-Gold in the last screenshot link on the site. This is supposed to be proof that they have got nothing left, come on… People were pumping funds into them while the price of gold was decreasing, they did not lose 20% or 30% they would have lost a bit, but there was enough new money to make up for that. Furthermore, gold prices rose for such a good period of time that they were in operation, they would have made some pretty big gains early into the piece.
I am putting my 10 cents in and crying SCAM SCAM SCAM… If there is a reason you have not seen him online, it could be that he has taken the money and run.
3,660 micro transactions? How did you actually get to that my friend? No, I’m not a CS supporter.
Jude,
I did send the suggestion to them yesterday about using only gold grams but having checked my email MsgTag program I can see that they have not yet opened my email message.
AlertPayPro has started up a new program which looks interesting:
http://www.autosurfs.biz/index.php/?ref=302
Just gave them some of my money.
Enjoy your blog, keep up the good work!
The 3660 micro-transactions theory stems from the screenshots that they showed as proof. It shows that 3660 payments were made in the last two days of operation. If you look on the top of the e-gold history snapshot. What I am saying is there is no proof that there was any substantial amount paid out. We see a page of about 20 transactions, none of them over $80. The second page of screenshot is the same thing, exactly. The third screenshot is an account that shows about $179 remaining…
What does it prove, only that there is only $179 remaining in that account now. Those payments could have been micro-transactions and it would appear the same.
It would seems they have already bitten the dust like what hyinquire says, and I think there won’t be a revival for CompactSurfing in this case.