It all started when I noticed that PayPal tried to deduct my monthly subscription to Keyword Academy multiple times, whereby two of the transactions got through. So I e-mailed Mark & Court using the e-mail address stated in the PayPal details.

Their response was pretty fast, i.e. within the same day I sent my query. The last e-mail I received from either of them is this:

Trusting that action was to be taken, I waited. Since then, I had not logged into the Keyword Academy members site, being busy and all.

So I was surprised when PayPal sent me an auto-notification saying that my subscription was cancelled due to insufficient funds (boy, was I glad I was using a debit card!). This meant that not only was PayPal still trying to deduct my balance, but Mark and Court didn’t actually look into solving my problem.

Now, I realize that the deduction were PayPal’s error in the first place. But even after a week since my request for refund of one of my payments, there was none coming from either of the guys at Keyword Academy.

I waited still. I finally received an e-mail from them.

Too bad it was an autoresponder! Nothing about the subscription problem was mentioned. I replied to that e-mail, and sent a couple more over the next few days.

By the way, before any of you cry “scam” over this, let me be frank with you and say that nothing about this program is a scam — they’re very legit and give good information about how to build your site right to make money. However, their response so far leaves little to be desired.

What the heck is going on, people (and in people I mean Court and Mark specifically)? Did my e-mail fell into your Spam folder? How long does it take to refund a measly $33? Reply already!

Is my frustration obvious enough for ya?

Some deals are too good to be true, and yet we still fall for them. Take, for instance, Zangdo.com. To make money and get your instant USD25 from them, all you have to do is to install their supposedly spyware- and adware-free Zangdo Buddy software. They even put in a link to SafeVendor to make their claim that Zangdo Buddy is spyware-free. Nice, I thought, so I went on ahead and installed it.

So imagine my frustration when, as soon as my installation was done, I opened up my default Firefox browser and find that all the AdSense ads I see in any web site I see were transformed to adverts by iTotalFind.com. At first I thought that all the blogs were hijacked, but I soon found out that I only see this happening through my Firefox browser and not my IE (Zangdo.com automatically opens up my default browser as soon as I was done installing). Not only that, even though I installed a popup blocker, every time I use Firefox and double-click on a web site or click on a link, a pop-up still appears and opens up iGoogle of all places.

Luckily, Castle Corps has a wiki on how to remove spywares and malwares, and so I followed the step-by-step instructions on how to remove them. I installed HijackThis, Spybot Search & Destroy, CCleaner and AVG Anti-Spyware (all very good and very free) to remove the iTotalFind problem as well as any other hidden malwares. I even re-installed Firefox just to be sure.

When I opened back Firefox, the problem was still there. I almost surrendered and was close to submitting my HijackThis log, when I saw two peculiar entries in the log, both with an IP address starting with 64, and has Google AdSense URL string attached to both of the log entries. I selected these two and got HijackThis to fix them. I reopened my Firefox and surfed some AdSense-filled blogs, and gave out a sigh of relief that my predicament was over.

All this happened yesterday in the span of 3 hours. HijackThis is the bomb!