John M.

There's a few really cool people you can talk to, but the conversations don't last long. Until you get to the few cool people, you have to look at a bunch of pervs whacking off, porn spam and bored kids insulting you.

If you are over 30, you will not be welcomed there.

Having always been skeptical of cryptocurrency, I listened to one of my friends who told me, "Just try it and wait for the long term. You might be surprised in a few years, or have a lot of regret if you don't." He recommended CoinBase.

I decided to throw $250 into Ripple (XRP). Why not? I've lost more money in a day at the racetrack or in Las Vegas, so I opened up an account to give it a try.

My identity was verified, I gave them my bank account information for automatic payments AND my bank even acknowledged that I agreed to share my information with them in an email.

So, I bought 770 XRP for 31 cents each, and got confirmation. Over the weekend, I watched XRP go from 31 cents to 54 cents. Hey, I made $177 on "paper" from a $250 investment. Pretty cool, right?

I logged on to my coinbase account the following Monday, expecting to see my balance over $400, only to find out that my "recent purchase of digital assets has failed" and that if I did not pay they would automatically recover the funds in five days. OK, I'll settle, right? I clicked "Make Payment" and they said that it was successful. Why now, and not on Friday? They used the same banking information!

Then, on my recent transactions, it showed that I had just transferred $250 of XRP. To where? I thought I paid for the transaction that I made the previous Friday? So now, XRP had gone up in value almost 75% in four days and my account that should have more than $400 in it, now has $176 in it. So, where did all this money go?

To login to your account, they text you a confirmation number, but if there is an "issue" with your account, they don't tell you - no text, no email. You just get a big surprise the next time you login.

I did supposedly get $10 in Bitcoin for verifying my ID. Let's see how easy it is to get my money out of this scam company.

STAY AWAY!

They market this site as a way to quickly talk to women who are local. It is free to sign up, but you pay to respond to each message that is sent, by buying tokens. Each message will cost about $1, depending on how many you purchase. You are given enough tokens when you sign up to respond to two messages. Every message after that will cost you, and I can see that it will add up quickly if you fall for their scam.

The moment you set up your profile, you will be inundated with messages from supposedly local people. The womens' profile pictures, for the most part, are pretty ugly, which I guess lends some type of legitimacy to it. The messages are pretty generic, short and many "women" use the exact same lines. They are either bots or ran by employees or contractors who probably get a percentage each time you respond.

If you read their "General Terms and Conditions," in item 11, section E., it clearly states "Appspartner uses professional animators and operators for the entertainment of the Users, who are not identified separately in the system. This Service is provided in the highest quality. Real meetings are not possible with these operators. Users can only send them messages within the portal."

There you go! The site is for entertainment purposes only! You will never meet or talk to anyone real, by their own admission!

Having been both a Yelper and business owner, I will have to say that Yelp uses the most random and arbitrarily biased algorithm to screen out "fake" reviews. I stopped writing reviews because mine would just disappear into the bit bucket, making an occasional appearance on the surface before disappearing again. My reviews were well thought out and real, but somehow yelp said they were fake?

As a business owner, every single review of my business is in the bit bucket. They were all written by my customers, who I know. But somehow they are fake? Also, their advertising is a big waste of money. You can't even pick keywords, you just need to fork over vast sums of money and trust them. Ha! Don't!

OK, I had issues with paying. My bank flagged the transaction as fraud, so I had to call them up. NewEgg customer service responded to a text in an hour. They must be busy, but they are responsive. I would definitely order again from them.

I have run Adwords campaigns in the past with success, but something has happened in the last couple of years or so.

First off, don't waste your time with Adwords Express. You can't pick your own keywords, you can only turn off keywords that the system has picked for you that don't apply. The problem is, the system keeps picking new keywords, but you can't turn them off before someone has clicked through and dinged your bill.

I ran a campaign for a motorcycle repair shop using regular Adwords. I limited the ad hours to when the shop was open, limited the ad display to the city and immediately surrounding areas, and did a call only and search only campaign. The keywords were very specific - "Harley Repair," "Harley Service." The daily budget was set at $30.

No matter what, by the end of the month, Google had figured out how to bill us to the maximum of our budget. We did not get that many calls either, but in a city of half a million people, we were billed for that many click throughs. Something is wrong now with Adwords and how their algorithm works now.

Adwords should really be investigated for fraud. STAY FAR AWAY!

I am an avid, experienced, cold water SCUBA diver with a taste for "off the beaten path" diving adventures. I've dove all over Southern California, Albania and Poland and when I heard that YPT tours offered SCUBA diving in Vladivostok and North Korea, I knew that was the trip for me.

On September 24,2016 I made an initial deposit to reserve my spot for my SCUBA diving trip of a life time. I was assured that North Korea is safe and that the people are warm and friendly, even for American citizens.

To go diving in Russia, I needed to be PADI certified. I have been a NAUI certified diver for 12 years and have over 500 cold water dives. That didn't matter, and even PADI was mystified because PADI considers all non-professional certifications equivalent. Nope - I needed to be PADI certified, and on recommendation of PADI, I paid $175 to be an "Enriched Air Diver," which exceeded their requirements of at least PADI Open Water certified.

So now I can dive in Russia and North Korea!

Getting a Russian Visa was also a jump through hoops! I bought a letter of invitation ($50) from YPT, and they re-wrote it for free when the visa service flagged that the letter was for single entry, as opposed to double entry. I specifically told YPT that I was going on the DPRK SCUBA diving trip. No problem there, they made good on it.

I paid the balance due on June 2nd, 2017 - I was all set to go. I paid for my airfare, booked hotels before and after the tour and met several local people online who would fill the void between the tour ending and my flying home.

This was going to be a SCUBA diving trip of a lifetime! To my close friends, I even bragged that I was going SCUBA diving in North Korea and Russia.

Thirteen days before I was suppose to leave, I was emailed stating that "We have reassessed our decision to bring American travelers into North Korea and have decided we will no longer be coordinating tours for American visitors to the DPRK, starting immediately. This means that we will have to cancel your booking for the upcoming SCUBA diving tour to North Korea."

I actually begged for an exception - NO - I could have actually been an asset to this trip because of my diving experience - NO! They just banned me because of my national origin.

YPT still says that the DPRK is safe, they will just no longer take US citizens. So, it is not a safety issue.

They did not cancel the trip, they just banned me for being an American citizen.

No travel laws changed, it was completely arbitrarily punitive to me. Four other tour groups will still allow US citizens in to the DPRK - Uri Tours, Lupine Travel, Secret Compass and Koryo Tours.

Maybe I'll forget about SCUBA diving in the DPRK, and go beer tasting or bike riding?

As far as YPT, they cheated me out of a trip. Yeah, sorry, I'm American, but they did nothing to warm relations by banning me from their trip.

I have a YouTube channel, but I want people to believe that I'm more popular than the 15 subscribers that I have, so I decided to buy 500 subscribers for $10, to be delivered within 24 to 48 hours.

Nothing happened. They just took my money. I emailed them for a refund and haven't heard back.

The only thing this site is good at is ranking really high on Google search terms, but they do not deliver and do not communicate. SCAM! BEWARE!

If you want to find a friend to correspond with and give hope to, this is a good place. Don't get caught up in their drama, though. I prefer to write males on death row or who are doing life without parole. That way, I don't have to worry about them ever getting out, and they know I'm just a pen pal and not looking for romance.

I was getting $200 a month from Google Adwords, until they threw me off for no reason - at least no reason that was explained to me. So, I had to look for another revenue source.

I've been running media.net ads for over a year and I think I may be up to $2 in revenue. I forgot when they even cut checks. At least I haven't lost any money, just time.

This site was set up so paranormal wackos could find each other and date. I'm not one, but was curious as to what kind of people are on this site.

I signed up and created an account just to browse profiles for free. I didn't put one picture up and left my profile completely blank. I started receiving a few emails almost immediately that so-and-so was interested in me and has sent me a message. So I clicked on "read message" and it takes me to a page where I have to sign up and pay money to read the messages.

Maybe this review is just premature because I haven't really been burned by this site, but it just reeks of the typical scam dating sites. Why would anyone send a message to someone with no picture and nothing in their profile? It probably is a company generated bot sending messages to me to try and entice me into a paid membership. And once I pay to read my messages, the person's profile no longer exists, and new messages stop coming. This has happened to me on other sites, and this site shows the same scam pattern. Beware!

Two stars, because I didn't sign up and get burned.

I think maybe 30% of the female profiles are real. The rest are just scammers and fake profiles that pof.com puts up to make it look more like a 50-50 male to female ratio.

Their basic membership is (or at least was) completely free - which makes it OK. However, after contacting about 250 women and not receiving one response, I became a little disappointed. I guess that's where the paid upgrade comes in for some reason.

I have better luck meeting women in bars and the grocery store. Pof.com was a waste of time for me. But if you're young and good looking, you may have a chance at success.

Half the women' profiles are fake, another 25% are scammers and it gets really frustrating very quickly when nobody seems interested in you. The six month guarantee is not a money back guarantee, but a guarantee for six more months of pounding sand. Be careful! If you do not follow their guarantee guidelines, it will be void and you will be automatically billed again.

They have a very good marketing campaign, but don't be fooled. Chances are you will just be another victim.

A friend did take me to one of their "Stir" events. Interesting to actually see the real people of Match.com in person. Nobody says a word until people get drunk, then they act like fools, the women leave and so does everyone else.

I'm either the most undesirable guy on Earth, or Eharmony is just a scam.

It's very expensive, you are unable to browse profiles, so you're stuck trudging through the few matches that they give you. The problem is, if the other person isn't a paid member, they are unable to write you back.

Just like the rest of these online dating sites, they have a slick marketing campaign but their product falls so low that it could be considered a borderline scam.

A cool blog about a seasoned SCUBA diver and his dives, travels and other cool adventures. It needs to be updated more often, but I guess it's the best he can do while holding down a regular job.