Scams and Blacklists
Scams are unfortunately all too common in the area of binary options. Scams can come in many forms – unscrupulous brokers and reviews, or rigging robots and other auto trading services. That’s why we feel it necessary to create this blacklist and list all known fraudulent and dishonest techniques in one place. We also go through the steps you can take to identify a potential scam and how to deal with the situation if you’ve already been a victim. If you know or suspect something is a scam, and we’re missing it on our blacklist, please let us know and we’ll look into it!
Why are scam stories common?
When a new financial instrument or form of business emerges, a whole range of businesses get involved. It is a fact of life that some of those product providers are going to be more trustworthy than others. This is certainly true of binary options. It is, after all, an accessible and popular way for individuals to trade the markets. What’s more, at least in their early days, binary options trading platforms tended to operate under the radar of regulators and from any country on the internet – so it’s hardly surprising that unscrupulous operators seek to take advantage. Thanks to better regulation, a strong online trader community and honest reviews, it is now much easier to tell a scam from a legitimate broker. But as with any international online marketplace, there are still some shady outfits out there that will leave you wanting for less. So what are the red flags to watch out for? Here are the points to consider as you go about choosing your binary broker.
Is binary options a scam?
The term “scam” covers a wide range of behavior, from providing misleading information to entice you to vanishing account balances — and even unscrupulous trading advice. Similarly, a particular broker may not technically commit fraud in its dealings; It is just that the service provided on the platform (such as highly unreliable uptime or failure to reimburse funds on time) means that this is a broker that should really be avoided.
In all these cases, the problem is not with binary options as a concept, it is with the broker.
Before you talk about doing your homework for a particular platform. User reviews can be helpful (if they are genuine), but always treat such reviews with skepticism – and never make decisions based on testimonials published on a broker’s website. Even trader forums can be problematic – look closely and you’ll often find that the forum is an offshoot of a particular broker’s website. Independent, thorough and comparative reviews are the surest way to ‘scam-check’ a broker. Ideally, focus on review sites that encourage real-life users to contact and report problems with particular brokers, so make sure what you’re reading is up to date. Is.
trusted brokers in india
Below is an always up to date list of our top 3 trusted brokers. You can find a list of all the brokers we recommend here.
| Broker | regulated | minimum deposit | Payment | Bonus | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
Binary.com |  |
$ 5 | 90% | »go to | ||
 |
high Low | $ 50 USD / $ 10 AUD | 200% | $50 CASBACK | »go to | ||
 |
IQ Option | $ 10 | 91% * | »go to |
General risk warning: your capital is at risk
* Amount is credited to the account in case of successful investment
Regulation
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) now regulates binary options. They have already made a list of unauthorized firms. While they are not calling them scams, they are making it clear that these firms are breaking the law by doing business with UK visitors – so they are best avoided.
In contrast, the United States and other European Union countries regard binary options as financial products. Depending on where they are based, many platforms will, therefore, be subject to oversight from a regulatory body. Examples include the CFTC in the US and the CySec in Cyprus. A platform’s regulatory status can be a highly valuable trust-indicator for traders looking to avoid scams. This signifies that the broker has to adhere to certain minimum standards when it comes to service and transparency.
Marketing “Too Good To Be True”
Taken in isolation, the task of placing a trade should be a straightforward one; And in fact, the usability of a platform becomes a huge selling point for brokers. Although this aspect of binary options is “easy”, it is somewhat different to claim that profits are guaranteed. Realizing profits through regular trading requires knowledge of market behavior, the ability to read market conditions, and an understanding of strategy. If the risks are minimized – or outright false claims are made (“with 95% success of trades”), these are false assurances. This is a sign that the broker may be falling short of scrutiny in other important areas and the platform should be given a wide berth.
Terms and conditions
Transparency is essential. Read the small print, and beware of unnecessarily complicated procedures, especially for refunds. The terms regarding your initial deposit can be another source of contention; For example, if you are denied a deposit up to a certain number of trades – your money is tied to the platform from the moment it is handed over. This deposit retention is often part of the broader term ‘bonus’. CySec has sought to ban these types of conditions by prohibiting the use of ‘deposit match’ bonuses. Non-Sykes brands are still free to use them, so T&C’s should always be checked.
cold calling
These fall into two categories. The first is where you are called out of the blue and invited to sign up on a particular platform. The second is when you are already tied to the platform and you receive a call (or email) from a “senior broker” who points you in the direction of particular trades. Reputable brokers do not need to cold call. Considering “cold calls” can also include emails – unsolicited approaches of any kind should be considered “cold” contact and treated with extreme suspicion.
channel sales
You should always be clear with whom you are dealing. In some cases, you may visit what appears to be a genuine broker’s site, click a link to sign up only to be redirected to a broker. Alternatively a trading “service” may stipulate that you only use their recommended broker. These “funnel” sites are sometimes used as a front by brokers with a bad reputation, or are working with them to defraud visitors (often using the deceptive marketing mentioned above). A good broker will be upfront about its credentials from the very beginning.
managed accounts
It’s one thing for a broker that lets you work out your own strategies using data and analysis tools (in fact, it’s one of the signs of a great platform). It is quite another for a broker who also provides trading advice. After all, with ‘over the counter’ binary options brokers, you are betting against the house; If ‘home’ is making business decisions for you, it is hardly likely that those decisions will be in your best interests. This form of “upsidering” is often the most lucrative for the broker, and usually results in the most losses for traders. When encouraged by the “Account Manager”, traders are advised to deposit and trade beyond their means. Large accounts will be wiped out on the spot within hours. The “advice” goes against any sound money management, and vastly increases the risk. Always take responsibility for your own trades. Never allow a broker to make trading decisions for you.
price manipulation
There should be a fair and transparent benchmark against which the broker sets its prices. The benchmark should be what is happening in the real world; ie market prices in real time. If the broker reserves the right to set its own prices, you can expect those figures to be skewed against you; In other words, a loaded deck.
Scam brokers and not recommended operator
The brokers listed below have generated a lot of complaints directly and on the forum. Disputes vary from soliciting and encouraging traders to trade, to non-payment of withdrawals and price manipulation. There is little recourse for traders to raise disputes with unregulated brokers, so it is generally advised that you look for trusted binary options brokers – regulated in your own country where possible. “Scam” has been widely used as a term that refers to any form of poor service, but it should be noted that many of these brokers have done nothing unscrupulous or illegal, but Has attracted higher than normal levels of complaints. If in doubt, trade elsewhere. There are many honest brokers out there.
- bunk de binary
- Beeoptions
- www.binaryinternational.com
- brokeragecapital.com
- bull option
- OptionsRally
- option- world
- Safe24Option
- TraderXp
- vault option
- NYStockOptions.com
Instagram and Facebook
Beware of scams running on social media. Again, binaries are not a get rich quick scheme. There are tons of accounts out there promising to trade on your behalf and turn $2k into $8k in a week. If these claims were true, the people behind them would not need to run ads or sign people – they would simply be trading themselves.
Screenshots of successful trades are exceptionally easy to obtain – even really. But these operators are unlikely to bother trading – once you send them money, it’s gone and you won’t hear from them again (unless they think they can get you to deposit more). can do). Always choose your own broker, and always take responsibility for your own trades – don’t let someone else trade on your behalf. If you don’t understand binary options, or you don’t have the time to trade – don’t trade at all. These scams often prey on people who lack experience.
what to do if you’re nervous
Do you think you have become a victim of a binary options scam? Read on to find out what you can do if you’ve been scammed. There are many ways to help make sure you don’t fall victim to a scam, but the reality is that even if you follow all of those tips, there are still chances that you will fall victim to a scam. If this happens, what do you do? Do you sit back and take it? Do you quit trading? No, you need to stand tall and see for yourself. Trading is good, it is profitable and one can have a life in which you do not have to go to a job and punch a clock. You cannot let the actions of a broker, signal service, robot or guru steer you away from that path. This article is a look at what you can do if you think you’ve been scammed. It is likely that once an issue arises you will not be able to receive your profit, it is possible to get your initial deposit back, but it may take some work.
MyChargeBack.com is a firm specializing in helping victims of binary options fraud. They help claimants explain the incident to the bank or credit card company so they fully understand what happened. Some banks are ignorant of binary trading and are not ready to listen to claims. MyChargeBack helps in this situation. They have a solid track record of recovering genuine claims.
If you are not looking for third party help yet, here are some steps:
- document everything. The very first thing is to make a record of everything you can. This includes the broker’s, or SSP’s, terms and conditions, copies of any emails/Skype/live-chats, confirmation of your deposits with them, turnover requirements for bonuses, and your trading history. No matter what you do next, this information will be essential to achieving satisfaction. What you do next will depend on the type of scam you’ve fallen victim to.
- try to withdraw. Broker won’t let me withdraw. Contact the broker and try to find out why they won’t let you withdraw. The most common reason is that you haven’t sent in the correct ID documentation, something required by international law, and it’s easy to fix. The next most pressing reason why withdrawals are not allowed is due to bonus terms and turnover requirements. If you do not meet the conditions, you will not be allowed any withdrawals, which is why you want to keep track of all your trading volumes and turnovers. If you didn’t accept the bonus in the first place, your documents will help you to prove it. A good broker will try to resolve your issues, a shady one will give you the run-around.
- Heard your voice Brokers keep giving me run-aways. If your broker is giving you the run-away and won’t address your issues then the next best avenue for satisfaction is to let the community know what’s going on. After all, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. You can do this by posting complaints, with details, in forums like here on BinaryReactions.net. When you do this let the broker know and send them a link. They may not care, a sign of a shady broker, but when it comes to reliable brokers they will want to solve your problems to avoid a bad analogy. When posting complaints give as much detail as possible, simply saying a broker scammed you is not enough, evidence of fraud gets results.
- Contact their payment provider. The broker won’t help, now what? At this point the chances that you have been scammed, and not just the victim of miscommunication, are quite high. If you cannot get satisfaction from the broker then you have to take more drastic measures. If you deposit with a credit card, this may mean calling the card company and requesting a charge-back. Let them know that the initial charge was fraudulent and that the company in question is not returning your contact requests for best results. The Times of Israel reported that the victim of the fraud was able to get a full refund of his deposit after contacting the financial institution that processed the broker’s payment. They withhold payment until the broker satisfies the claims.
- Contact the regulator. Time to call in the big guns. The great thing about expanding binary options regulation is that there is an option for many traders who think they have been scammed, you can contact the regulator. In some cases this can be a challenge as many brokers are located off-shore and are hidden behind companies and virtual offices so be sure to do your homework. If the broker is regulated, contact the agency that oversees them, if they are not, contact the agency that oversees financial regulation in your country. If the broker is regulated, they will have to address yours, in order to remain compliant, to the satisfaction of all parties. If they are not at least regulated, you can at least be assured that they will have a hard time bothering their countrymen any more. At best cooperation between regulators can result in brokers getting shut down for fraud.
- be persistent. Shady brokers like to hire people who are good at deflecting questions and complaints, not accepting what they are telling you. It may take time but eventually you will speak to the right person, or persons, and your matter will be addressed. What is most likely to happen is that the combination of your contact requests, forum complaints and allegations with the regulators will add up to one thing, the broker giving you your money back to avoid a huge hassle.
How to Spot a Trading Strategy Scam
The Internet is filled with advertisements, articles, companies and individuals trying to provide you with the next big business strategy that will make you rich overnight. Give it a break my friend, here are tips to help you spot the scam.
A System or Just a Strategy?
First and foremost, trading strategies are not really going to help you become a better trader. What you really need is a complete system. When you create a trading plan it should cover how you will enter the markets, exit the markets and how you will manage your money. You also need to tell in what market condition you do all these things. It is a system, it tells you everything you need to know about how you will trade. A strategy on the other hand only tells you when to enter and how to exit, and it cannot tell you under what conditions it works best or worst. It cannot provide guidance on position size or whether you can trade multiple assets at the same time – issues that are very important to address. In other words, a strategy may be missing pieces of information you need to be successful. We need a complete trading system… but marketers are smart, so they can easily call the product they are selling a “system” to make it sound more complete. But what? Here are several things to watch out for that may rule you out the product is probably a waste of money:
boxing system
A boxed system is one in which you have no idea how the strategy works – it is an opaque “black box”. For example, the product may simply be a series of indicators or a service that tells you when to trade, but not why. It is not going to make you a better trader, because you do not know what is happening behind the scenes. You may be left with nothing if a product or signal service ceases to operate. Even if you have made money with the product/service, you will have to start again from scratch. Make sure if you buy something it explains how it works, so that ultimately you don’t have to rely on the product/service.
extremely high win rate
Is it possible to have a 90% win rate? Of course, it is still possible to lose money even with a 90% win rate. Figures are easily combined to fabricate partial truths or falsehoods. Another popular tactic is the saying “Made $500 in a day!” So what? It doesn’t really tell you anything. Making $500 isn’t that grand if he was in a $1,000,000 account. And if they lose $3000 on day one, make only $500 today and brag about it rather than paltry. read between the lines. What is not being said? There are several bits of information you need to understand performance: account size (capital), percentage return, amount risked on each trade, amount of profit per trade, win/loss ratio, biggest winner, biggest loser, Average winner, average loser, number trades duration and on which the strategy was tested/profitable.
There are also some other metrics that might help, but if you ask the company for these bits of information, and they can’t or won’t give them to you, be suspicious. You can usually get an idea of what the weaknesses and tendencies of a system are by looking at the above statistics. One of the main things is that the strategy should be tested over a long period of time, and in all market conditions including up-trend, down trend, range, volatile and Sed conditions. It is not necessary to be profitable in each of these environments, but it should have at least been traded through all of them so that you know the system is profitable overall. Often marketers will only publish results for periods where the strategy did very well. But it doesn’t give you a real idea of how the strategy or system works in the long term.
There is something else related to statistics that you need to consider. If a system is profitable, it is based on the result on all trades. If you buy products or services, are you going to trade them all? This is the issue many traders face when subscribing to a signal service and not trading all signals. If you do not trade all signals, your individual results may differ dramatically from the typical results of the service.
one direction only
Avoid a system that only trades in one direction, eg only buys assets but does not sell them short. Markets rise and fall, you want to participate in both trends.
no trial period
- You should be able to test a product and cancel without a fuss if a service isn’t for you. Usually a quick trading forum search on Google will reveal what others have had about a product or service. No lawsuit, no deal. Trust no one, test things for yourself. If they won’t let you, be careful.
Final Word on Scam Identification
A product or service should not make you dependent on it. This should show you behind the scenes so that you can eventually trade on your own. Good products will always have customers because there are people who don’t want to do the work themselves, and there are always new merchants. There’s no reason to make every client completely dependent. Be careful with the statistics that have been thrown out. Ask yourself what the statistics aren’t telling you. Furthermore, if the statistics they provide are valid, you will need to trade all signals in order to take profit and get the service’s specific results. Remember of course, past performance is not indicative of future results. As such it pays to do some homework, and make sure the strategy/system/service/product is based on a long history, and has proven itself profitable over all types of market conditions. Test a product/system/service before you buy it. If they won’t let you try, be suspicious.
Case Study – JV Affiliate Marketers
In this section we will look at how you can avoid getting scammed by Binary Options JV affiliate marketers. It’s not that hard, but you need to let go of your emotions and examine things logically, as many scammers use emotional lure/fear tactics to get your money. Once you understand this you can save yourself time and money with these unscrupulous dollies. Some scams are simply comical in how stupid they are, while others can be very well done luring you in with real people/systems/reviews that you get later as accurate as you can get your $ 0 looking at the balance thinking “Where did my money go!?”.
As you will see in many scam videos, all you have to do is “NOT DEPOSIT” and these scams will no longer work. So next time you see videos that are of similar nature, just know that they are supporting scam systems/marketers. Understand if they require a deposit they blow by night and even if they are not endorsing the scammers by the nature of requiring you to deposit with a new broker. So just refused to submit and they left. No more of the same stories and promises and to get you to sign-up to their “free” systems/bots…they are not free you have to deposit and they pay on those deposits… So remember limited time / fast money / can’t lose! / Just the money in your account = Don’t do it!
In this image above you can see that the scam has multiple systems connected to each other on the same server. These JV marketers have tons of these turnkey scams because they are so low maintenance. The reason you see a lot of them after a few weeks of the new story line being off and boring is that they’ll start production on another one and keep it all fresh and new and that way their old scams Complaints about outbreaks will be shared with others. If they keep it fresh they avoid the fact that most newbies jump from one scam to another, one of these will work, which none of them do because trading is a learned skill/job. .. Then, understand their stories and how they work, and don’t submit.
Case Study – Scams on Social Media
Social media is a “perfect” platform for scammers and can be even more insidious and convincing, and unlike JV marketers these people will talk directly to you, but only up to a point. They will un-friend you in a heartbeat once they figure out that they can’t get over you or that you no longer have value to them. One by one they are all your money, so keep an eye on them as you deposit or sign-up for amazing benefits and opportunities that will leave you with empty pockets. Videos used with both “The Green Room” and “FB Wealth Group” will appear as merchants/friends while they are really just out to get your money through signup or even That you are trying to pay them directly.
Also – if you mention anything MLM (Multi Level Marketing) related to them, they are trained to woo you, so run the other way. These people do not play around and will tell you whatever is necessary to get you to sign-up and invest. Here is a 45 minute long interview with a man who was scammed by both “The Green Room” and “FB Wealth Group”. We’ve named it The Binary Options Horror Story because that is exactly what it is in all its details. If you are new to binary options read on, and fully absorb the above warning signs to see how they scammed people out of their money so this doesn’t happen to you. Note how they work directly with brokers, which means they can be directly involved as well.
