This my personal experience.  Last year before christmas, I joined an investment / HYIP kind of program.  It was called goldPunk.  Actually they need considerable amount of money to celebrate christmas.  They succeeded cheating people into investing at least US$10.00 each.  The scheme was simple, you invest 10, you get 12.50 after a few days.  You can really track down your investment but just about christmas eve, your money and goldPunk were gone-zap! Vanished.

The other scheme I joined was mycash2u.  No selling, no sponsoring - how wonderful.  I invested US$20 and the webmaster reminded us to come back regularly to check if our investment had bring us some lucrative income.  True enough, after a few weeks of coming back to the page, the website was gone, zap!

Still not enough of being had, I joined another HYIP which looks cool.  It says investment for Pro, WOW!!! Invested US$10 and after 14 days you can expect to gain 125% earning after about 24 hours.  Beside that the site deposited US$50 in your account and it will give you 20% every 2 weeks free earning.  The problem - when I wanted to withdraw my earning, the status is kept as "pending" ever since (14 Feb 2007).  When I tried to contact the admin or webmaster - nada, zero response, just like you are sending your query to planet mars. By the way, the website is i-techinvest.

So, friends.  If you have any info on these sites - the owner, the location and any information at all please give me a tickle.  Please remind other online friend too.  I am still considering i-techinvest at the moment unless the site goes ZAAAPP too.