How to Spot a Scam Forex Product

Though the foreign exchange market has no central regulatory authority, it no doubt has the biggest market cap on the planet. Believe it or not. An amount about $4 trillion is traded daily. Now this is a lot of money! For this reason, thousands of people, smart, dumb, greedy, helpful, kind, legitimate and crooks have all flung to this particular niche. But why? They all want a piece of that big cake. And they all do get some (the clever dudes), or lose some (the naive ones). I haven’t lost even a cent to a con man in this forex business ever before since I started trading about five years ago. I am not saying I am not prone to someone outsmarting me (even though it’s not possible at this present moment, not in forex) but back then, I didn’t even have a dime when I started. So what was there to scam me of? Nothing.

I had heard about trading from friends, did some searches online and found out people were really making a living trading currencies. In those early days that I didn’t know a thing about trading, I dedicated all my time to learning the trade (no pun intended). And after many years of living off trading currencies I have come to realise there are more swindlers in this market than there are legitimate guys. I have gathered nine of those signs that could help you spot if a forex product is a rip-off. The characteristics  that I’m going to mention below aren’t necessary sure signs that a product is a scam, but if you see them, just know it’s a warning and verify further or ask more questions before you dip your hands into your hard-earned cash to feed some crook somewhere.

Scam Sign #1: The Famous JavaScript Page Leave Event
Some fancy words words here. JavaScript is of no interest to us but the point is, I am not sure if you have seen this before: You visit some page, you click the close button of that page or you try to move the mouse pointer away from the browser and you’re greeted with a pop-up that asks “Are you sure you want to leave the page?” (or something along those lines), then reloads some other page to present you an opt-in box to enter your name or offer you a discount… Sounds familiar? OK. You got it. Red light! Run!
Sellers of bogus products are always desperate for you to give them your money. They will pursue you and try every possible means so you hand them your money. There’s not much they can do to try to force you to buy their crap. They only way is to try ways to sort of, convince you to buy. If the product is good enough, they should sell themselves.

If you see this sign from the page of some product, just get off and never come back. Chances are  that it’s nothing worth spending your cash on.

Scam Sign #2: Overly Marketed Product
Marketing is an obvious thing to do for a new product. Most product owners do it. It’s essential to make sales and get paid back for the work done building the product. But exaggerating the marketing efforts of products are 7 chances out of 10 that the product is crap. Products need some marketing to get introduced to the market. But if you happen to see ads of the same products all over the place, with supposedly real testimonial texts and recordings, just stay away. It’s probably the product owner who has paid actors and people to go on forums and other sites to pretend they have used the product and make uninformed newbies give them their money. A good forex product may be known, but you won’t find deliberate efforts of it being promoted.

Scam Sign #3: Avoidance of Trusted Payment Methods
This might not always be the case I must say. But lots of scam forex products dislike payment methods like PayPal and Skrill for example. The sellers are afraid of charge-backs. Most of them will prefer BitCoin or Western Union because then, once you pay, there’s no way of getting your money back. They funny thing is when they use these payment methods, they add a big “Money-Back Guarantee” when they know clearly that you won’t ever set eyes on your money again. These guarantees are there just to blind you. Aside all these, some sellers might use payment methods like PayPal after all because PayPal favours sellers most of the times when the product sold is a digital one. But if you fail to find a legitimate payment method on the page of some forex product, just use your common sense and look out for more warnings to be sure the product is genuine. Otherwise go spend your cash in a strip club instead if you have enough to lose.

Scam Sign #4: Bogus Affiliate Networks
I am not really sure about now. But about two years ago affiliate network sites like ClickBank used to have lots of crappy products on there. Things have changed, now they have cleared a lot of fake forex products from the marketplace. It’s cleaner now but there still are some fake products on there though. Nowadays all these garbage products are dumped on sites like Clicksure and other affiliate networks that are based outside of the USA. If you’re buying a product through some affiliate network, take a moment to check the credibility of that affiliate network if you don’t find any reason to believe the forex product you are buying might be a scam.

Scam Sign #5: Polished Text, Highly Professional Videos
If a normal forex product that costs $47 or $197 is making Apple-quality videos, with very neatly dressed actors and carefully curated text, trust me, you aren’t buying anything good in most cases. Lots of forex product sellers use actors. There are sites to find such actors and script writers so things look very very professional in a way that you’d almost have no doubt the product is a sham. In some of these videos, if you look carefully you’d realised that even the background that the actor is standing in is staged using a green screen. Or in most cases, if you track their eye movements, you can be sure they are reading stuff from a teleprompter. These are little things you can watch out for to find if a person giving a testimonial or selling a product is fake. You look out for these tips, you find them, get confirmation with other tips listed here, you close the page of the seller, and save your money for something worthy.

Scam Sign #6: Showing Off Stuff They Dream of Themselves
You have in no doubt seen how sellers show off with how much they have supposedly earned from the work of say a forex robot that they are trying to sell to you. The big question to ask yourself is. If that product made that enough money to enjoy the life they are showing you in their pictures, what is your $197 going to add to that? Shouldn’t they be concentrating more on their product to making themselves more cash? That’s because that junk they are selling is making nothing! They want your money and that’s why you should be suspicious and not fall to their gimmicks. Anyone can just google some nice vacation images and paste them on their site and say they are enjoying a good life, so buy that product that’s making them live like they way they wish things really were. Run and never look back.

Scam Sign #7: Photoshopping Proof of “Gains”
I know enough Photoshop to edit some statements from MT4 to make it look I have earned some big money with my forex product robot (which I don’t have by the way) to convince you to buy some crappy product that I created. Even if I didn’t know how to use Photoshop, I could go to fiverr.com to pay someone $5 to do it for me. This is exactly what scammers do. If you see some pictures of statements of profits, don’t fall for it right away. There are investor passwords that these product sellers could share at no cost. Demand for a password instead to log in and make sure the account and the profits are real. Also check the authenticity of the broker on whose platform the supposed profits have been made. Some brokers are crooks themselves and do fake real account for sellers. This way they also get clients they can swindle money from with re-quotes, etc.

Scam Sign #8: Exaggerated Promises
This one should be quite obvious. Just a couple of hours ago I saw some forex expert advisor that had made 10607% net profit. Seriously? The product in question costs $149. I got nothing more to say here.

Scam Sign #9: # Of Copies Left
So there actually is a limit on the number of copies of a digital product to be sold? I didn’t know that. I believe you’re way smarter than this. When a forex product, that is digital has some number of copies left, just know that they are just trying to create a sense of urgency so you dip your hand faster in your wallet. Why should they want to limit the number of their product especially if it’s digital? Shouldn’t they be willing to sell more and more of it? To get more money? Everyone wants more cash right? But no, bogus forex product won’t do that. Knowing you probably won’t think about this, they try hard to make you feel the product will run out in no time so you have to act quick. Just buy the product, come back after few weeks and you’ll see the number of copies left is actually the same, or more, whichever the case, there’ll still be enough left to dupe other traders. This should be the biggest sign for you to stay away from these tricks.

I wouldn’t like to hear you’ve been scammed after you’ve made your way through this post. I painstakingly wrote this to save fellow newbie traders from losing money. I didn’t lose any money, so why should someone get parted away with his money by the bad guys in the business? I am looking forward to your thoughts and contributions that you can share in the comments. I will be happy to read them and will reply if I have to. In the mean time stay blessed and smart.