How to: easy e-gold!

How do I open a new e-gold account?
Information about opening a new e-gold account is available by visiting the e-gold site. Once you agree to the terms of use, e-gold.com will assign you an account number and ask you to set up a password and provide other security information. Be sure to write down the account number and remember it. You may be asked for information about the account user (you or your business enterprise) as well. Follow the instructions on each page, and read all the terms carefully. Before long, you'll have a new e-gold account.

How do I buy e-gold?
Contact one of our specialists or visit our Buy page. Send us US dollars. As soon as we have good funds available we'll place e-gold in your account and e-mail you with the good news. You can contact us by e-mail, by telephone, or by mail. You can send us US dollars by bank draft, money order, or bank wire for our best rates. We charge a premium for personal or business checks.

How do I get e-gold without paying for it?
We recommend that you sell products and services to get e-gold. There are many tools for merchants to use, including a shopping cart interface described on the e-gold site. You can also use FastSCI to set up a purchase page on your web site.

Another way to get e-gold is to request donations or tips from readers or customers. If you have written a message to a discussion list, or sent a friend the answer to a problem, ask for some gold. Simply add a link such as http://101468.e-gold.com/ with your e-gold account number instead of ours. A similar tool is availabe from http://www.two-cents-worth.com/. These tools, such as FastSCI, clicktwocents, and two-cents-worth are all available because thousands of users have thought up new ways to make better use of e-gold.

You can also get e-gold from e-gold.com by having your friends, customers, vendors, or relatives set up new accounts. If they set up a new account with you as their sponsor, you'll receive payments from e-gold.com every time they spend gold or receive gold. Half the payment receive fee is split between the sponsor of the spendor and the sponsor of the receiver. The more new e-gold accounts you encourage people to set up, and the more they use e-gold, the faster you get free gold.

Another way to get some e-gold is to gamble at The Gold Casino.

How do I spend e-gold?
There are nearly a million e-gold account holders, so there are about a million answers. You can spend e-gold anywhere that it is accepted. About thirty thousand merchants currently accept e-gold, and so do many non-profit groups. We recommend you look for things to buy at GoldBarter.com. You can buy anything that Amazon.com sells with e-gold by visiting Proxystore.

You can visit a merchant's web page and use their shopping cart interface to access your e-gold account. Be sure before you spend! If you spend e-gold, it is very difficult to reverse the transfer. (You may have to get a court order to reverse a mistaken transfer, unless you know the people to whom you are spending the gold. So, be careful!) When you are sure you want to make a spend, you'll be transferred to a secure page on the e-gold site where you enter your password information (see below for details). Once you "confirm" the transfer, your gold is in their hands.

You can also spend directly to an individual or business which has an e-gold account but no web page shopping cart. Simply log into your e-gold account. Click on the icon marked "spend." You'll be asked to enter the number of the e-gold account to which you want to make the transfer, the amount you want to transfer as expressed by weight of gold or in your favorite currency, and the type of metal you want to transfer (gold, silver, platinum, palladium). Once the form is correctly filled out, hit the "preview" button onscreen to see what the transfer should look like. If you don't have enough metal to make the transfer, e-gold.com will warn you of this difficulty. If you do have enough gold, the details of the transfer will show up on the preview screen. Review them! When you are very sure the details are just what you want, confirm the transfer by clicking on "confirm."

How do I check my account history?
The first step is to log into your e-gold account. A quick way to reach the log-in screen for e-gold is to type the URL https://use.e-gold.com/ or click the link at left. This link takes you to the log-in screen for e-gold account holders.

Once you've logged in, you want to visit the history page. There is an icon that looks like a sheet of paper at the top of your account access screen which says "history." Click on it.

You'll be taken to another screen that asks what information you want to review. This "history inquiry" page asks you what time period you want to examine. It defaults to the current day's activity. If you want to see the whole year's activity (often that takes up several pages, depending on how many transactions you have), set the start date to 1 January 2002. Set the end date to today's date.

Next, on that same screen, you need to choose what type of events you want to review. Do you want to just review payments received from other users? Great. That's already checked for you. Click on "okay" and you should see all the payments for the time period you chose. Do you want to see all events? There is a button to "select all" options, and it checks everything for you. Or pick and choose for yourself.

You can also select a specific batch number, or see all the events pertaining to another e-gold account, by typing the information you're seeking into the relevant box on this inquiry page. A batch number is the identifying number associated with a particular event, such as a spend. When you spend e-gold to someone else, you'll be shown a batch number generated by e-gold.com once you've confirmed the spend. Batch numbers can be used to identify specific inquiries on the history page. Just copy it into the relevant text box on the form, or type the batch number into place.

Once you've asked the e-gold server for the data you seek, click on "okay" and you should see it onscreen. Give it a few seconds to load the page. Also, notice that there is a "next page" button which displays if the data you've requested fills more than one screen. Before you get upset that information is missing, be sure to look for "next page."

There are a bunch of different types of transaction which may appear in your history. For example, incentive payments are payments e-gold.com makes to you if you've sponsored someone else to create an e-gold account. This new account is called a "progeny" of your account. You get incentive payments every time that progeny account spends or receives e-gold.

Things that bring e-gold into your account appear at left - such as payments received, bailment events, and so forth. The exception is incentive fees at the bottom of the right hand column. Things that move e-gold out of your account, such as storage or spend fees, transfers you've made, and redemptions appear at right.

At this point, you may wonder about bailment and redemption. Unless you have a 400 ounce bar of gold, or 400 ounces of gold (recently about $137,600 worth; the dollar price varies daily) in your e-gold account, you probably aren't going to need to worry about these events. However, briefly, bailment is when someone takes a bar of gold to the e-gold Special Purpose Bullion Trust and your account is credited. Redemption is when you turn in e-gold and request a physical bar of metal be delivered to you. There are fees for both types of events.

How do I sell e-gold?
Simply spend it to 101468 or go to our Sell page visit here and spend the e-gold to us. E-mail us with the batch information and let us know how you'd like to be paid. We can arrange payment in another gold currency, we can send you actual gold or silver, we can wire money to your bank account, we can send you money by Western Union, we can send money by MoneyGram, we can send you a check or a money order. If you are near one of our affiliates, we can even get you cash. If you'd like a rate quote before you spend, contact us. We can send your payment by regular mail, by express delivery service, and by other means, all of which affect the cost to you.

How do I download data from my account?
You can get a comma separated variable file with the information from your account history by clicking on the relevant link in the history page. The data.csv file will be saved to your computer - just follow the screens and give the data file a name you'll remember.

Once you have downloaded the data, you can import it into Microsoft® Excel or Quicken® or another accounting program you like. We recommend that you download separate events into separate files to avoid confusion.

For example, download all the payments received (revenues) into one file. Download all the spends (payments made, or expenses) into another file. After you import these files into a spreadsheet program or an accounting program, you can work with the data pretty easily - add it all up, calculate percentages or averages, figure out your profit.

How do I prevent loss from theft or fraud?
One of the great features of e-gold is that spending e-gold is irrevocable without the intervention of a court order. That's great, because it means that the merchant is confident he has been paid. In return, he can often provide a lower price to you for his product or service. A difficulty arises, though, if you aren't sure you should trust the merchant. Another difficulty arises if your account access information is compromised. You can take steps to prevent losses from theft or fraud. It's a good idea.

First, be sure before you spend. Be sure you want to spend gold to this person's account, be sure they are trustworthy, and be sure you'll get what you pay for. How? Ask for referrals from the merchant, check the fraud databases online (see below), ask other e-gold users if they've dealt with the merchant before, and start small. If you aren't sure you can trust the other party, buy something for a few dollars you can afford to lose. If it doesn't show up, that's better than if you bought the most expensive things available.

Second, safeguard your account information. We recommend that you never type your password into the e-gold log-in screen. Why? Because typing may expose your password to a keystroke logging virus or trojan. Certainly, if your computer is protected by a good antivirus program, you can avoid many keystroke loggers. However, e-gold.com provides tools you can use to avoid this problem. For example, there is the virtual keyboard. To the right of the password field on the login screen is the icon "SRK." We think this stands for "substitute real-time keyboard." It allows you to enter your password by clicking icons on screen rather than using your keyboard. The SRK is composed of several screens you access by clicking on the icons such as "123" to access numbers and punctuation, "ABC" to access capital letters, and "abc" to see the lowercase letters.

We also recommend that you never share your account password with anyone else. Seems obvious, but you may not be aware you are sharing your password. Avoid writing it down. Many people carry a notebook or write passwords near the computer they use most often. That can be handy for you, but when it involves your bank account or your e-gold account, it can cost you.

If you have trouble remembering your password, change it. We recommend that your password be a long combination of words and numbers that has meaning to you. For example, your password could be "oh2liveonsugarmountain4ever" or some other term. Once you've created a good long password which includes numbers, use it several times. Log in and logout repeatedly, until you are comfortable that you've memorized the password. Another aid to memory is to fill an entire page with the password in writing or typing - then delete that file or destroy the paper.

Don't use short passwords. Don't use a password that is just a word found in the dictionary. Thieves, or criminal hackers as they are sometimes called, may try to guess at a short password, or set up a program to test every combination of three, four, or five characters. These same programs may be used to test every word in a dictionary. So use a long password which contains letters and numbers.

Don't have your computer remember your password, either. Software which lets your computer's web browser remember passwords for you may store the passwords in an easily compromised file. Be more careful.

Avoid passwords that are easily guessed, such as birthdays, names of your children or pets, and the like. You really don't want someone else to walk away with your gold. You can use these easily remembered things to inspire a good password, such as "my1stchildisnamedLisa2ndisJohn" or the like. Passwords are case sensitive, so if you capitalize, be sure to enter the capital letters.

Do not ever trust someone to send you a link to the e-gold log-in screen. If you receive an e-mail message or see a message posted to a discussion list which pretends to be from e-gold.com and asks you to log into your account - don't do it! These messages are a trap. A fraudulent message has been going around for months, and when you use its log-in form or if you go to one of the links it offers, you'll lose all the gold in your account. The criminal will capture your log-in information and empty your account very soon. We strongly urge you to always type use.e-gold.com in your browser window - even your bookmarks may have been altered by a criminal or virus.

If you aren't sure how to check that a link is taking you to the actual e-gold site, and not one of the fraud sites (such as e-qold.com, note the Q instead of G) then don't click that link!

Don't enter your e-gold account password unless you see that the URL starts https://e-gold.com/ and the security icon for your browser is displayed. The https means a secure transfer, and is distinct from just http. The security icon for your browser is probably a gold padlock displayed near the bottom of the screen. If the location window doesn't show that you're at the e-gold site, and if the gold padlock doesn't display, don't type your password - your account may be compromised if you do.

If you suspect a message may be intended to deceive you, or to steal gold from your e-gold account, forward it to the due diligence unit at e-gold. Their e-mail address is ddu@e-gold.com. Be sure to include all the headers from the original e-mail message, as these can be useful in tracking the criminals.