Not quite, but they certainly did take a huge blow last month thanks to Stormpay. Stormpay is a payment processor much like PayPal. The only difference being Stormpay routinely took money for these paid autosurf 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 unbelievable.

We all love the idea of working from home and making money online, and using these paid autosurf programs were a great way for many of us to achieve those goals. But some of these programs were offering very high returns and there was no way so many of them could sustain such high payouts without recruiting new members. By definition, this is a pyramid scheme or Ponzi and they are illegal.

Since this industry shakeup, the FBI and the SEC are now investigating these suspect paid autosurf programs and also Stormpay. This has caused much pain in the paid autosurf industry and has forced many programs to go out of business or change their business policies. This could actually turn out to be a good thing, since most programs were pyramid or Ponzi 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 companies offshore and out of the reach of U.S authorities like the SEC or FBI, I would recommend not doing business with any of these companies. If they don’t have to answer to anyone, then why wouldn’t they just pack up one day and steal your money?

It seems the paid surf industry is evolving and it looks like it’s for the better. 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. Keep 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. Be smart with your money and never invest in any program, online and off, with money you can’t afford to lose. We all want to make money online or work from home, but there’s no such thing as a sure thing. Please remember that.