e-gold has gone haywire

I have been using e-gold for about 5 years now and the journey has been quite good until recent times. These days, using e-gold has become more of a nightmare than anything else.

e-gold is quite popular among regular Internet users in some African countries. I am sure of Nigeria, Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. Why? A few years ago, there were no means of paying online for these group of people since no local banks issued international credit/debit cards and many saw e-gold as an alternative online payment method since they could use e-gold from their country, without any bureaucratic hindrance. Things are changing however.

e-gold is becoming unpopular with many users in recent times for a few reasons but the main reason that concerns me most is their IP blocking exercise. Users attempting to access e-gold’s website might either get a timeout error from their web browser, to get the message below after login:

————————————————————————-
Error(s) detected:

Access denied

The IP you are using to access the e-gold website (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx)* appears to be either an open proxy or otherwise exploited. You will not be permitted to access e-gold services from this IP while this condition continues.

Your first order of business to restore access should be to make sure that you are computing securely. Please read and implement e-gold’s Security Recommendations.

After you have resolved any security issues, including virus removal, it may take a day or two for your access to be re-enabled.

My problem with e-gold Ltd is that many innocent people are adversely affected by this. Yesterday for example, I spent around 2 hours looking for an appropriate proxy IP address that will work fine with e-gold. The proxy had to pass the following criteria:

1. It had to work on port 3128 (or it won’t work on my PC’s Internet connection)
2. It had to support SSL (or I won’t be able to login to e-gold)
3. It had to be off the IP blacklist of e-gold

Getting an IP that meets all these is difficult enough – sometimes the proxy server is down and one has to start the proxy search process, all over again! What more? One does not know the owners of these proxies and safety cannot be guaranteed.

My Internet connection is via a fixed wireless technology and so my IP address is shared and static. Now, I cannot possibly be responsible for everything that happens via this IP even though I had taken time to remove it from all spam databases.

I have exchanged several mails with e-gold’s customer service this week but the problem remains. e-gold’s website keeps timing out each time I try to access it and this is making business really difficult for me!

What has been your experience with using e-gold in recent times? Share your experience and how you went around the problems.

*IP hidden for security reasons.