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BOOK YOUR FREE STRATEGY SESSION NOW >>The world of trading is constantly evolving and, with it, the scams that malicious people come up with to get their hands on our hard-earned savings.
In this video, Andrea Unger discusses the most common trading scam currently...
The one that is most often offered via phone, email, and social media... and the one that, unfortunately, many traders have already fallen victim to.
Watch the video now and learn how to recognize and avoid it!
You will discover:
-The 5 key steps involved in today's most popular trading scam
-The 2 most common tricks used by scammers to get more and more money out of you
-The secret to avoiding falling for this and other trading scams
Enjoy watching!
Introduction
Trading scams. Let me describe one of the most popular around there. So. Hi. I'm Andrea Unger. I am the four-time Trading World Champion, and as such, I receive many emails, and many of these emails are also about people tricked by some scammers out there.
And in many cases, there is a common scheme in these scams. So I'll try to describe this so that maybe you can avoid being the next victim of these scammers, even though I already did it in some other interviews. But I think it's always useful to talk about this so that people avoid being scammed.
So the scam is articulated in different steps.
Step 1: Getting in Touch
Step one, you normally get in touch with the scammer. It doesn't matter how. Maybe you will receive an email or normally you receive a phone call from these people. And they are very kind, and they may ask you if you know something about trading or things like that. So that you hear "trading". You might have been familiar with this somehow, or you might have heard about this and you think, "Oh, this is my occasion to be part of this world, which is mysterious to me."
Step 2: The Approach
Step two, you send money to open an account with these people because they convinced you and they convinced you maybe to start with a small amount of money. Let's say you send $250, which is normally what they ask to start with. You say, "Oh, wait, 250 is not a small amount." It's not in general. I mean, $250 are valuable, but it's small considering trading. So if you want to approach trading seriously, if you want to do it in a proper professional way, you need something around at least $20,000. So $250 are obviously too small an amount to do this in a proper way. But okay. You send this because they told you to do so, and you are happy to start.
Step 3: Strat Trading
Step three, you start trading, and you do so with the support of a tutor or somebody, a coach or somebody, from this company. And this guy is normally extremely kind, extremely nice. He or she becomes a friend of yours because he also cares about your personal life. So there is empathy with these people here, and you really feel that these are nice people and you trust them.
This is very important because trusting them, you never could think they are scamming you, or at least you think that that specific guy or girl, he or she is okay, maybe there are scammers somewhere, but not this specific guy. So you start trading and you make profits. Based on the advice of your coach, you make profits. You see huge profits in your account. These are mostly fake profit. Maybe there are even fake trades. Of course, you're certainly not trading for real. You think you are, but you are not. It might be a demo account, but most likely there are not even real trades in demo.
There show trades that could exist. I mean, you don't double check if the gains you are witnessing are for real. You don't double check if that specific trade entering here, exiting there, would have taken place in real life. You don't, because you just see and think about your gains, virtual gains. Again you think you are making money. So you make a lot of money, your account grows.
Step 4: Asking for Money
Step four, you want to take the money, say, "Oh, I made money, I'm happy, low, let me take a part of it and enjoy this money." And here is where step four normally ends with... Once it was the disappearance of the company, of the coach, of everybody. But in this scheme, this would not have been very profitable for them because it would make them only the $250 you sent at the beginning. So normally in this phase, they say, "Fine, of course you can withdraw your money. But look, you made so and so much and to send this money, to close the account or to let you withdraw this money, you first have to pay taxes for the capital gain that you made. And we can take care of this. So please send us so and so much for the taxes and we will take care of it and then we will be able to transfer the money to you."
So the first objection obviously is, "Okay, fine, but why should I send you money for the taxes? You can just take it from my account. There is so much money there, so take a part of it, pay the taxes and send me the remaining." Now, if you say this, they start explaining you a number of legal, financial, bureaucratic reasons why they can't do so. Normally they say, "We can't touch that money because it's yours, it has to come from a separate account and blah, blah, blah."
Many reasons, again reasons that you don't double check because you just want the money in your pocket. And normally you end up wiring them the sums they requested to pay the taxes for. And then at this stage, they disappear. So they made all the money that they asked you to pay for the taxes.
Now, just a quick note. If you make gains in a specific year, you will be paying taxes for these gains in the coming year. So if you gain money in 2023, in 2024 you will declare those gains and pay the due taxes in your country. You yourself, for sure nobody will pay for you in the same year, in the very same year you are making money once you want to close the account. You can close the account, you can withdraw the money, and the coming year you will be in charge of declaring all these movements and then pay the due taxes.
Of course, if you are not experienced with this world, you believe what they are telling you and you send the money and this money disappears. There is another part which was used before and there were positions open in your account with gains and losses. And these scammers were at a certain stage focusing on the gains and claiming that you could withdraw the money if you unlocked the losses. Things that are not real of course, but they were telling you things, things to confuse you and to unlock those losses.
They were asking you to pay some money instead of the taxes in this case. So in that case you would have sent money in addition to the $250 to unlock the losses and get the wins in your pockets, and that additional amount you sent would have been their gain from the scam. So in that case probably the taxes story would not have taken place and they would have run before.
Later on, this part is no longer used to my knowledge, at least based on the emails I receive. And they directly go to the taxes phase where you send money to pay the taxes. This is phase four, how it ends.
Step 5: The End
Then normally, as of today, you might experience even a phase, step five. In this step five, this happens time later. I mean, you might now think that you will never recover your money and you have stopped thinking about that. You receive a phone call from a lawyer of a company, normally in London, london sounds good, and this lawyer claims that they have been entitled in getting the money back from these scammers and they found your name in the list of the scammed people.
So they ask you to participate to this class action, things like that, in order to get your money back. And you again believe that a dream that became a nightmare now turns back in becoming again a dream and getting you the money. Obviously this lawyer, or this company of lawyers, asks for some money to do what they have to do, and you will be sending them the money.
Clearly these lawyers don't exist, not those lawyers at least, the company in London they claim to be doesn't exist. And they are the very same scammers that scammed you the first time, or at least close relatives to those scammers. So in any case, this is the step five where you're sending extra money to these guys and again you are losing this money. End of the story. They tricked you, they trapped you and they stole your money.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
What do you have to be aware of that? The promises that they made so that you got into their trap, were about easy money, where about really excessive expectations of gains. Everybody promising too much money to be potentially made is potentially a scammer.
So I mean, what is normal, normal money? If I talk you about 20% per year, it's already good, believe me. 30% is exceptional, the very best can think about 30% a year. So everybody promising more than that is either in good faith but doesn't have all the knowledge that he or she is supposed to have to make what they are promising, or is a scammer.
Obviously there might be years where you make more money than this 20-30%, 80%, 100%, 672%, as I did in 2008 but that was a competition, so obviously a different kind of approaching risk and so on. But it's a year. It cannot be the average annual return. That is crazy. And it's crazy not because I'm telling you but because if you look at the records of the best managers, full manager in Wall Street, you see what they achieve and you will see that they achieve numbers in this area, 20%, 30% in some cases, but certainly nobody got average annual returns much higher than that.
So clearly when somebody promises that just to let you think about becoming rich, it's somebody who potentially is a scammer or a dreamer, but in any case, the result is the same for you because you will be going to probably lose your money. So that's it. I mean, not very good news, but at least I hope that what I told you in this recording helps you to avoid being scammed in case you stumble across these guys and they call you on the phone.
I can tell you they also called me in some cases. Sometimes I spend some time having fun with them, just tricking them with strange questions. But some other times I don't have time to waste and I just send them to hell. It's not a good word, but I do. So I mean, I cut the phone call from the very start.
That's it guys. I hope this helps again. And remember, you are not getting rich from today to tomorrow with some secret trick. You need engagement, commitment, study and a method. This is what you need to face the markets. No magic tricks out there. A method, a method is what you need. Ciao from Andrea Unger.
We'll help you map out a plan to fix the problems in your trading and get you to the next level. Answer a few questions on our application and then choose a time that works for you.
BOOK YOUR FREE STRATEGY SESSION NOW >>Andrea Unger here and I help retail traders to improve their trading, scientifically. I went from being a cog in the machine in a multinational company to the only 4-Time World Trading Champion in a little more than 10 years.
I've been a professional trader since 2001 and in 2008 I became World Champion using just 4 automated trading systems.
In 2015 I founded Unger Academy, where I teach my method of developing effecting trading strategies: a scientific, replicable and universal method, based on numbers and statistics, not hunches, which led me and my students to become Champions again and again.
Now I'm here to help you learn how to develop your own strategies, autonomously. This channel will help you improve your trading, know the markets better, and apply the scientific method to financial markets.
Becoming a trader is harder than you think, but if you have passion, will, and sufficient capital, you'll learn how to code and develop effective strategies, manage risk, and diversify a portfolio of trading systems to greatly improve your chances of becoming successful.
