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Warning signs

Vendor warning signs

Treating everything as a red flag is its own failure mode: if an ugly website and a guaranteed return feel equally alarming, the signs that matter get lost among the ones that do not. These are graded, and most of them are not decisive.

Three are. Those three end the conversation regardless of how good everything else looks.

  1. 01A guaranteed, fixed or “risk-free” return

    decisive

    Nobody can guarantee a return in a market that moves. This holds for automated trading exactly as it holds everywhere else, and the softer forms count too — “consistent monthly income”, “passive income on autopilot”, “we cover your losses”. A vendor selling software should be selling the software's behaviour, not an outcome it cannot control.

  2. 02Pressure to decide now

    decisive

    Countdown timers, a price that rises tomorrow, a cohort closing tonight. Legitimate software is still for sale next week. Urgency exists specifically to prevent the checks on this page, and its presence tells you the seller would rather you did not perform them.

  3. 03You are asked to trade in someone else's account, or to send funds to the vendor

    decisive

    A strategy vendor sells software that connects to your own brokerage account. Money should never flow to the vendor beyond the price of the product. Being asked to deposit with a specific unfamiliar broker, to fund an account you do not control, or to send capital for someone to trade on your behalf is a fundamentally different arrangement from buying software, and carries fundamentally different risk.

  4. 04Results with no drawdown anywhere

    serious

    A profit figure without the worst peak-to-trough fall tells you the destination and hides the journey — and the journey decides whether a real person was still holding at the end. Its absence is not proof of dishonesty; plenty of vendors simply present badly. But it means you cannot evaluate the record, and you should treat it as absent rather than as good.

  5. 05Backtests presented as though they were executed trades

    serious

    A backtest is a strategy's performance against history it already knows, with assumed fills and modelled slippage. Legitimate vendors label it. A results page that mixes simulated and live records with nothing distinguishing them is making the record look better than it is, whether or not that was the intention.

  6. 06No company identity anywhere on the site

    serious

    No registered name, no jurisdiction, no address, and terms pages that are missing or copied. This is common among small legitimate operations too, which is why it sits here rather than at the top — but it determines whether you have any recourse at all, and that is worth knowing before rather than after.

  7. 07Testimonials that cannot be attributed to anyone

    worth noting

    First names, stock photography and screenshots with no verifiable source. Weak evidence rather than evidence of wrongdoing — most vendors' testimonials look like this because collecting attributable ones is genuinely hard. Read them as marketing, not as data, and weight them accordingly.

  8. 08Support goes quiet before purchase

    worth noting

    A slow pre-sales reply might be a small team. It is also the best available preview of what happens when your automation stops mid-session and you need someone. Not disqualifying on its own; genuinely informative when combined with anything above.

What none of this establishes

A vendor clearing every sign above is a vendor that presents itself well and answers questions. That is genuinely worth knowing, and it is not the same as the strategy being profitable. No amount of checking a business tells you whether its logic has an edge, and any page implying otherwise is overselling what a check can do.

The seven checks to run first

Questions

Does a bad-looking website mean a vendor is a scam?

No. Plenty of legitimate small software businesses have dated sites, and some frauds are beautifully designed. Presentation is weak evidence in both directions. The claims a vendor makes, and what they will tell you when asked directly, are much stronger signals than the design.

Which warning signs should end the conversation immediately?

Three: a guaranteed or risk-free return, pressure to decide before you can check anything, and any arrangement where money flows to the vendor or into an account you do not control. Each of those is decisive on its own, regardless of how good everything else looks.

Is a vendor with no published results automatically suspect?

No. Some vendors sell tools rather than performance and genuinely have nothing to publish. The problem is a vendor that markets on results and then omits drawdown, or shows records without saying which are backtests — that is selective, which is different from absent.

What if I have already paid and now have doubts?

Act on the refund window first, because it has a deadline. If you paid by card and the vendor will not respond, contact your card issuer about a chargeback. Change any credentials you shared, and be aware that if you report a loss publicly a recovery scam will usually find you shortly afterwards.