The inevitable P.T.C. (Paid To Click) scams camouflaged in the most unscrupulous manner which prevents or deters most victims from pursuing them as in the case of www.mixbux.com cloaked behind www.domainsbyproxy.com in Arizona who are then legally entitled to Register www.mixbux.com under their umbrella without disclosing who the actual owners of the site are, unless subpoenaed by law to do so.
This is all done on the pretext of preventing their customers/clients from being flooded with unwanted and unsolicited emails etc., while they the customer/client may happily go about their nefarious business scamming the general public on the internet.Why anybody in this day and age would require such services with the sophisticated software currently available is questionable.
However giving credence (but not a lot)to the services they are supposedly and legitimately providing to the industry, they then must accept a certain amount of responsibility including accountability when complaints are made regarding their clients/customers.
The plausibility or deny ability in their defense may have been acceptable if it were not for the response I received when contacting them (www.domainsbyproxy.com) regarding their client/customer www.mixbux.com requesting they now take issue with the complaint, fell far short of what one would have expected.Instead I was referred to contact the Domain Server or hosting site which turns out to be WSVIRTUAL.COM.BR which are also not contactable.
It is also most probably the individual amounts involved which prevents victims from seeking redress. However conservatively guessing from the statistics displayed on the mixbux.com site (if they are to believed), collectively could be in the region of $100's thousand, with a membership of 56,000 + on average of say $5/-. The maths speak for themselves.
My personal word of caution when considering or contemplating joining any P.T.C. site would be first check them out by Google the name on, (a) Google search engine. (b) check out the registration details at www.godaddy.com. (c) Check the website to see if they have an active forum and what the other members are posting on there.
These are no guarantees that it will be a legitimate site but at least you will have satisfied yourself that you have done a reasonable amount of homework. There are a lot of good websites out there that will provide you with good information and also recommend other reliable sources of information such as a few on the links below.
Unfortunately the world wide web is what it is but perhaps in some small way we can help clean it up by unmasking the criminal elements that inevitably crawl under the radar.
Again this is only my opinion but I am sure there are thousands out there with as yet untold stories and complaints. Statistic's report that only about 5% of internet crimes are reported each year.
https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov
http://www.econsumer.gov/english
http://www.fbi.gov/majcases/fraud/internetschemes.htm
