New Information about Spedia

Remarkably, the Spedia website is still up and running. One of the original set of paid to surf programs, Spedia promised to pay its members up to $0.70 per hour for surfing online while running its online advertising "SpediaBar" software. In the boom time era of paid to surf sites Spedia's rates were comparatively high, and when the first wave of payments were made the site grew and grew.

The success was short-lived. Spedia was one of the first programs boycotted by GPTBoycott after this site opened in 2001. As the Spedia Boycott Page details:

"Their SpediaBar software is notorious for incorrectly recording earnings, and even if members are able to reach the $30 payout minimum they have no chance of receiving this money. Members are not being paid, the site is not being updated, and the support staff refuse to respond to e-mails. It is self-evident that this site belongs on our Boycott List!"

Some new information has come to light regarding the owners of the Spedia website.

A company called Sysmaster Corporation, a company which counts Boeing, Sony, Hitachi, KPMG and Dreamworks Pictures among its clients, is directly related to the Spedia scam.

There is a clear body of evidence to support this fact, including a post in our discussion forum stating that Spedia is controlled by someone with a sysmaster.com e-mail address, and the fact that both the Spedia and SysMaster sites are operated within the same netblock.

The Technical Contact WHOIS listing for spedia.com lists Kirk Iliev as the appropriate contact - a name noted to be the Director of Operations of Sysmaster at their own website (see here).

Moreover, the online CVs of at least two people state that they were employed by Sysmaster or a parent company of it a number of years ago to work on the Spedia website, including Alex Ivanov and Konstantin Ivanov Kosev.

Mr. Kosev also worked for Himel Technology LLC prior to working for Sysmaster. This is especially interesting since both the spedia.com and spedia.net domain names are controlled by somebody with e-mail address mart@himel.com, according to their WHOIS records.

I am sure that of the thousands of people who have been scammed by Spedia, there will be many who would wish to contact those responsible for the site. To that end, I am sure that the information above should prove useful.

The above information is posted with thanks to Ivan Leo, who posted much of it at his blog before making GPTBoycott aware of it. This blog post will be copied to the Spedia Boycott Page for reference.