I’ll trade for you forex scam

"Never give someone your money directly if they say they’ll trade for you, and never give anyone your login details."

This is probably the most popular one out there. People posing as successful traders will offer to trade for you. All you have to do is open an account and give them access to trade for you, or alternatively give them money directly. Both are scams. And here is why. Firstly, in order to trade for someone else (give financial advice), you have to be registered as a financial service provider. Different countries will have different bodies that govern all financial services and not just forex trading. In every case, this is a long and difficult process, and it requires you to be constantly audited as well as various other requirements. Forex traders typically don’t do this because of programs like Copy Kat trading.

These “traders” will sell you the lifestyle. Show pictures of their cars and other symbols of wealth. Most often it is not their wealth, and when it is, it is stolen money from people who invested with them.

As for traders who say you should open your own account, but give them access. They are typically an IB with the brokerage you deal with. Which means they earn every time you trade. There is nothing wrong with an IB earning from your trades, provided they are actually your trades. But if the guy taking control of your forex account earns every time you trade, you’ll find your account taking reckless and very large trades. This is a very common forex scam.

Guaranteed profit robot forex scam

"If it sounds too good to be true it is. If the perfectly profitable algorithm existed, why would they sell it? Wouldn’t they make billions themselves?"

It feels like every few minutes there’s a new Holy Grail Robot out there. For the low low price of $$$ you could be earning millions a month. Or the more popular thing is where they publish it at a high value, but have a limited time offer for a much smaller amount. It’s true that a lot of large institutions will have their own algorithmic traders (robots) which help analyse the market. But these systems cost huge amounts to research and program, and they are updated constantly. They are also kept private because of their value, and if someone learned exactly how a particular robot worked they could write their own to take advantage of others.

But they show you insane profits, so how can it be a forex scam? Well, there are several ways. Fake reports are the most common of these. Some of them are very clever, they give you specific settings and when you do backtesting on Meta Trader yourself it shows positive results. But in reality, when you run it live on your account it fails. Or they use extremely risky strategies which can show huge profits for a short period of time, but those invariably end up wiping out your account in a day at some point.

Fake broker forex scam

"Just because a broker has a good site and a good name, doesn’t mean they are real. Confirm their advertised regulation yourself."

One of the boldest forex scams out there is to create an entirely fictional forex brokerage. They often have good looking websites, testimonials, social media presence and more. This just means that they have good web designers.

The best thing to do is look up who they are regulated with on their website. And then confirm directly with the authority that they do actually exist. Anyone could post an FSP number on their website, but only regulated brokers could get the regulatory body to confirm this.

Signal providers

This is a strange one because unfortunately there are some very good and legitimate signal providers. But most of them are just people who can’t actually trade and want to make money selling their signals. Often they subscribe to another signal group and just pass on what they receive. This doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that all your signals are old and are therefore less likely to work out. Forex is risky enough, don’t make it worse by using old second-hand information.

When selecting a signal provider, make sure they are precise with what they are offering. Very often these guys will be very vague, and they give out just enough signals to call themselves providers. The more established companies will have schedules and proper market analysis, instead of just simply “buy now” sort of signals.

What to look out for

There are many other forex scams around, and more constantly coming out. But there are a few things you can look out to cut out the majority of them. Too good to be true offers are too good to be true. Real traders do NOT accept funds directly from clients. There are much better ways for us to trade on behalf of clients, and it protects both the client and the trader. It is legal and regulated. Be vigilant of signal groups that only post closed trades as part of their marketing. It’s easy to run 10 accounts and only post results of the most successful one or two.