PayBox.me Has Finished It's Re-branding, It's Now VirtaPay
As they have been saying on their blog for a couple weeks now, PayBox has finally finished the change to it's new name "VirtaPay". Click this link for more articles about what they were doing before they were VirtaPay.com. As I and many other savvy MLMer's noticed when PayBox was first went live in September of last year, the name PayBox was already a trademark of another company. The other company called Sybase is a large international and multi-billion dollar publicly traded company and many marketers, myself included, speculated that PayBox would have to change its name or face lawsuits. Now we have VirtaPay, a name which doesn't seem to conflict with established trademarks. There are a lot of VirtuaPay websites, credit cards and payment systems, so remember there's no u in the new name, it's just VirtaPay. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that the new similarity was intentional.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, here are several articles about whether VirtaPay.com and other internet marketing scams. So now, six months after they opened where does that leave us with VirtaPay's progress? First, members have been voting on debit card designs since late last year. No word yet on any winners and I haven't heard of anyone being issued a debit card. According to VirtaPay it is still a closed system and their currency can only be exchanged in person to person transactions between members. VirtaPay states that they still have to open up the system in order for the virtual currency to be spent at online merchants.
The question on everyone's mind is when will the currency be spendable? It may take a long time, if ever, for VirtaPay currency to have any value. On their roadmap VirtaPay says that once the re-branding is complete they will take steps to make the currency exchangeable for digital goods. I'm assuming they mean things like e-books, scripts, software etc,. However, I have also read that VirtaPay would like to have 2-5 million users before online merchants would "take the currency seriously" (I'm paraphrasing a little). The latest numbers I saw were estimates saying they had about 300,000. So it is possible that they will never reach the 2 million member target.
A lot of marketers keep asking how a free to join website could be a scam. The word "scam" means a lot of different things to different people. VirtaPay (at least at the moment) WILL NOT steal your money. But they do make money off of you in other ways. When you sign up they do put your email on their mailing list, which internet marketers know has a lot of value to them. I was told by some other members that there are recommending several other marketing programs, of which I'm sure VirtaPay receives referral commissions from. You are also asked to subscribe to their blog. In addition, up until about the beginning of 2011, they had Google adsense on the site and asked members to log in everyday to complete tasks while they were also gaining revenue from those members clicking on advertisements. Whether you think its a scam or not, their terms of service that you agree to when you sign up guarantees that VirtaPay is not doing anything illegal. It also makes it so the VirtaPay currency never has to have any value and they can just keep getting revenue from their user base without delivering the actual payment system they boast about.
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