This is more than step by step guide for successful freelance business.

So you have spent few months studying various technologies – probably PHP/MySQL, CGI or Java – and now you want to put that in action. Or are you already working as a web developer for a company? This experience can help you, but it is not needed.

When I was starting as a freelance developer, I had zero professional experience. I was a prepress expert in an advertising company and in my free time was working on 2-3 open source projects with PHP. None of them was too complicated, neither I was too good in what I was doing – I only know I really wanted to be a freelancer.

The experience is not so important. The most important is your passion to do it and that you are ready to struggle for success as a freelance developer. Don’t expect the beginning to be easy – in fact the beginning is where most freelancers fail. The first projects will be hard to win, to do, and to get paid.

Are you ready to start?

Give it a try, it’s for free!

Moneybookers can provide automated payment processing for both deposits and pay-outs. For your information, the key benefits of accepting Moneybookers to your business are:
- Low Fees -> only 3.5% to receive funds
- No chargeback risk
- Exposure to our 2,000,000+ user base
- No set-up fee or monthly charge
- Local payment options in over 30 countries

The standard product is: Automated Payments Interface (API) Usually customers send money via Moneybookers by logging into their account at www.moneybookers.com and then using the “”Send Money”” option. However, merchants can atomize these kind of payments using Moneybookers’ gateway. Easy-to-use gateway interface enabling businesses and individuals to sell goods and services over the Internet safely and securely. Allows real-time communication between the merchant‘s system and Moneybookers‘ transaction servers. The customer makes the payment on Moneybookers’ secure web servers. He is automatically redirected back to the merchant’s web site once the payment is complete.

Full Integration – requires 1-2 IT man-days.
The Merchant Gateway can be fully integrated with your website in a few easy steps taking minutes to integrate with only a basic knowledge of HTML required. The Merchant Gateway is an industry standard SECURE (128 bit SSL) web page and does not require the use of CGI or ASP scripting on your web site.

Fees
All Merchant Gateway payments are free of charge for your customers, moneybookers levies a merchant fee of 3.5% on all transactions.

• When a 3-D Secure transaction has been made, the liability to repay a customer in a charge back situation passes from the vendor to the customers card issuing bank.
• Customers can shop on the site with more confidence.
• The incidence of fraudulent sales will reduce (cards will not be accepted without the 3-D secure password)
• There is the potential to negotiate lower transaction charges with the acquiring bank

Card type affected are:

Visa, Maestro, Mastercard, Solo, Switch

Time scale: all sites using the above cards need to be be 3-D Secure compliant by June 07 or these cards will not be accepted.

The payment gateway and e-commerce site implications are as follows. Each payment gateway, Protx, Worldpay, Secpay etc… will modify their servers to include an extra step where the cardholder is taken to a page on the card issuers website where they enrol (first time only) and are authorised (via insertion of a password). On successful authorisation the cardholder is then taken back to the payment gateway site and continues the payment transaction as before.

Website modifications are required and Bathcomms are able to do these for existing VirtueMart equipped shopping carts. It may be prudent to make some information on 3-D secure available to customers on the site too and we are assessing this. Note too that with the change in Switch to Maestro in June 2007, this logo should be deleted from sites.

On April 24, 2007, a Federal Grand Jury handed down an indictment charging e-gold Ltd., Gold & Silver Reserve, Inc., and the Directors of both companies with money laundering, operating an unlicensed money transmitter business, and conspiracies to commit both offenses.

Dr. Douglas Jackson, Chairman and Founder of e-gold, speaking on behalf of his fellow Directors and both companies vigorously denies the charges, taking particular exception to the allegations that either company ever turned a blind eye to payments for child pornography or for the sale of stolen identity and credit card information.

Dr. Jackson states, “With regard to child pornography, the government knows full well that their allegations are false, yet they highlight these irresponsible and purposely damaging statements in order to demonize e-gold in the eyes of the public. During the Inquisition, accusations of witchcraft and heresy were used to sanctify torture and seizures of property. In post 9-11 America, child porn and terrorism serve as the denunciations of choice. e-gold, however, as a matter of incontrovertible fact, is the most effective of all online payment systems in detecting and interdicting abuse of its system for child pornography related payments. e-gold Ltd. is a founding member of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) Financial Coalition to Eliminate Child Pornography. e-gold is the only member institution to demonstrate with hard, auditable data a dramatic reduction of such payments to virtually zero, while billions of child porn dollars continue to flow through other (heavily regulated) payment systems. [Most members, that is, all the banks and credit card associations are utterly unable to even provide an estimate of the volume of such payments processed by their systems. eBay's PayPal subsidiary, who may have the ability to make such a determination, has refused to do so and has indicated they destroy payment records after two years.] What is worse, until August 2005 when NCMEC courageously broke ranks with US law enforcement agencies and began directly notifying e-gold of criminal sites via the CyberTipline, component agencies of the US Department of Justice purposely concealed their knowledge of child pornography abuses from e-gold’s investigators, subordinating actual crime fighting to a policy agenda designed to dirty up e-gold.”

In December 2005, the Secret Service (USSS) deceived a Federal Magistrate judge with bogus testimony in order to obtain search and seizure warrants authorizing the government to seize the US bank accounts of Gold & Silver Reserve, Inc. The seizure, which netted the government about $ 0.8 million, was designed to put e-gold out of business without due process, since G&SR serves as the contractual Operator of the e-gold system. At a subsequent emergency hearing, the government made no effort to defend their (sealed) allegations of lurid criminality, falling back to a position that their action was warranted because of a licensure issue. At the hearing, G&SR described its ongoing dialog with the Department of Treasury, initiated by formal request of the company in Spring 2005, to determine a possible basis for regulating the company’s activities, since it was patently clear to competent authorities that G&SR’s exchange service was not encompassed within any existing regulatory rubric [subsequently re-confirmed by experts at the Federal Reserve]. The US Attorney for the District of Columbia, responsible for the prosecution, was completely unaware of this orderly proceeding, as well as Treasury reports issued the same week that acknowledged e-gold as an innovation not meeting definitions of a money services business or a money transmitter.

Since this time, the government has been confronted with overwhelming evidence that the USSS had made a horrible mistake in its attack on the e-gold system and its repeated defamatory claims in the media that e-gold is anonymous, untraceable, and inaccessible to US law enforcement. They have concealed the fact that Dr. Jackson had personally arranged to come to USSS headquarters to train the USSS cybercrime squad in December 2004 (along with agents of the UK’s National High Tech Crime Unit, and the Australian Federal Police) on advanced techniques, particularly in the area of efficient interaction with e-gold’s in-house investigative staff, but was prevented when senior USSS management learned of the initiative and forbade the training on the grounds of a policy declaring e-gold as their designated boogey man.

The Department of Justice has had to determine whether to continue to stand behind their component agency. Their decision to close ranks has directly resulted in a gross misallocation of resources, with the result that vicious criminals who might have been brought to justice remain at large. An example of this is the Shadowcrew investigation, hyped by the USSS as a major success in disrupting international credit card thieves. The USSS did not subpoena records from e-gold at any time in their investigation, or engage with e-gold’s superb in-house investigative staff, with the result that the sophisticated hierarchy of the ring was unmolested and probably strengthened while the USSS hauled in the low hanging fruit, “a dime a dozen and relatively easy to track down and pop“.

Similarly, there is compelling evidence that the international cartel of commercial vendors of child pornography continues to operate because the FBI Innocent Images Unit and Special Agents within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency have been forbidden to follow investigative protocols developed by Dr. Jackson, apparently for fear of further belying the party line that e-gold is itself a nefarious operation.

With regard to allegations of money laundering, Dr. Jackson notes “G&SR’s online exchange service, OmniPay, has for years followed stringent customer identification procedures and an absolute policy of only accepting money payments by bank wire. If bank wires aren’t already “clean” then what is? Furthermore, e-gold Ltd. can scarcely be construed as a money launderer since it does not accept money payments from anyone in any form and has never owned a single dollar, yen, euro or any other brand of legacy money. As far as the possibility of a criminal successfully obfuscating a money trail, e-gold is a closed system. The only way to obtain e-gold is by receiving a transfer from someone who already has some. e-gold is also the only payment system accessible by the public that maintains a permanent record of all transfers.”

On April 27, 2007, the government served seizure warrants on G&SR ordering it to freeze, liquidate and turn over to the government the operating e-gold accounts of G&SR and e-gold Ltd. The value seized, about $762 thousand worth of e-gold from e-gold Ltd. and about $736 thousand worth of e-gold from G&SR [on top of the $0.8 million seized from G&SR in 2005, and the approximately $1 million spent by G&SR so far in its defense] constitutes the bulk of the liquid assets of both companies. Perplexingly, a post-indictment restraining order states “Nothing in the provisions of this restraining order shall be construed as limiting the e-gold operation’s ability to use its existing funds to satisfy requests from its customers to exchange e-gold into national currency, or its ability to sell precious metals to accomplish the same once approval has been obtained.” Having taken virtually the entire operating funds of G&SR and e-gold Ltd., that is, the e-gold in both companies’ own e-gold accounts, it is unclear if the government has even a basic grasp of the operations it has been investigating for three years at a taxpayer expense in the millions.

The most remarkable element of the restraining order is that the US government deputizes e-gold with plenipotentiary powers to act as judge, jury and executioner against any account user e-gold itself has deemed to be a criminal: “It is further ordered that upon receipt of this order the defendants are required to freeze, that is, not conduct or allow any further transactions in e-gold accounts that the e-gold operation itself has identified as being used for criminal activity”. Although not accompanied by an outright letter of marque, this commission (the financial equivalent to double ought status?) would appear to be an acknowledgement that e-gold’s ‘Know Your Customer’ prowess far exceeds that of any regulated financial institution, who would be obliged to rely on court orders or other legal writs to determine if freezing an account is warranted.

Concurrent with this latest attempt to knock e-gold Ltd. and G&SR out of business and thereby effectively deny them due process, the government also attacked other prominent exchange services that deal in e-gold; IceGold, The Bullion Exchange, Gitgold, Denver Gold Exchange, AnyGoldNow, and Gold Pouch Express, plus a sophisticated and secure alternative payment system called “1MDC”. All of the listed exchange services also follow stringent Customer Identification Programs congruent with what would be required of a currency exchange business, if the law supported such a classification. Two of the services, IceGold and AnyGoldNow, are located in Europe and deal primarily with non-US customers. As a direct and immediate result of the seizures, these companies, all of who had built a reputation for honoring their obligations to customers in a timely fashion, have been disrupted, and, at least in the case of Gitgold, checks to customers issued in fulfillment of exchanges have bounced. This is a repeat of what happened to G&SR as a direct result of the 2005 seizure, when over 200 checks to customers bounced and refunds had to be sorted out with severely crippled liquidity and without a US bank account.

It must not be overlooked that the search warrant obtained by misrepresentations before a magistrate judge in 2005 resulted in the government helping themselves to the financial records of hundreds of thousands of American citizens [plus citizens of virtually every other country] who had not been accused of any wrongdoing. Since the initial raid, the prosecutor has caused the Grand Jury to order complete dumps of the e-gold data base on three additional occasions.

This case has nothing to do with criminal activity, at least not on the part of e-gold Ltd., G&SR, the named individuals or these other exchange services of high reputation. It is about a Department of Justice that is out of control, cognizant of having made a horrible mistake but determined at all costs to preserve its turf. In a meeting at the US Attorney’s office in Washington on December 29, 2006, a Chief Assistant US Attorney told us that the United States knew we weren’t “bad guys” and that the United States had no interest in sending any of us to prison or causing e-gold to go out of business. This was in virtually the same breath as proposing that the current defendants plead guilty to Federal felony charges.

The plain fact is that the repeated statements and actions of the government since 2001, especially the USSS, are directly responsible for crippling e-gold’s ability to market its service to mainstream businesses and consumers, slowing [but fortunately not stopping] e-gold’s continuous development of advanced anti-crime capabilities, subordinating US law enforcement’s cybercrime fighting efforts to the forlorn hope of destroying e-gold, driving market share to non-US based alternative payment systems and making the US law enforcement community the laughingstock of competent cybercrime fighting agencies worldwide because of its obstinate inability to back down from the USSS’s longstanding e-gold vendetta.

All inquiries should be directed to the law offices of:

http://www.fuerstlaw.com/

Well, a lot of us knew it was coming… With all the rumours flying around about EGold Ltd; Gold & Silver Reserve, Inc, people knew deep down that something must be happening. Today E-Gold’s Owners: Dr Douglas L. Jackson, Reid A. Jackson and Barry K. Downing have been indicted for money laundering and illegal money transmitting. However, this sounds a lot worse than it actually is. The definition of Indict is: (of a grand jury) to bring a formal accusation against, as a means of bringing to trial. So basically the government has made an accusation against e-gold which they feel confident enough with to make it ‘formal’. This is one of the many ways of forcing a trial.

In my opinion, the US government wouldn’t make any sort of formal accusation unless they had some ‘dirt’ that is good enough to hold up in court. Nowadays, making an formal accusation is risky on the terms that if your wrong, you will probably get sued (remember this is in the USA). Even though the government knows E-Gold and what goes on, they haven’t been able to bring the owners to a court of law yet due to a lack of substantial, credible evidence. It became clear that the US government was out to shutdown E-Gold when the FBI began their first raids in 2005. Since then the US Government has been forcing its way inside E-Gold’s doors and been constantly monitoring the flow of Gold between accounts and agents.

The fact that 24 seizure warrants and over 58 e-gold accounts were frozen is a big red warning sign for me. Considering the likes of 1mdc, Icegold and Omnipay (a minority of the largest E-Gold agents) are all now enjoying frozen accounts means something big has gone down. Most of the large exchangers have been shutdown and those that remain are facing bankruptcy. 1MDC are making wild claims about how ‘the end is near’ for all Digital Gold Currencies as you can imagine… Icegold have simply made a new E-Gold number and carried on business as normal and the others have either packed up or suspended exchanges.

The impacts of the big seizures will be huge. The immediate impact was a sudden selling of E-Gold. It could have been the next black Wednesday. Luckily for E-Gold most of its users are quite used to ‘accusations here and raids there’ so many users were not vastly shaken by the event and retained some confidence. The long term affects are much larger. Hundreds of thousands of debit cards are funded via e-gold and their exchangers. Due to the credit becoming void lawsuits may arise if the agents haven’t covered themselves in the terms and conditions. One of the hard truths is that E-gold will perhaps become unable to cover costs due to the huge plummet in business – people will view this event as instability in E-Gold and many have started out exchanging their gold. Those who have strong loyalties to E-Gold may be the ones that loose out big time if E-Gold suffers. With E-Gold’s main agents out the game as well, a huge amount of income will be lost in commissions.

The beginning of the end of E-Gold’s reign may have just kicked off. As mentioned in a previous post, the FBI, secret service and IRS have been collecting huge amounts of data as evidence against E-Gold. Now they feel comfortable enough to finally begin taking legal action.

Additional information : here