A lot of you when you start investment will be for sure worried about how safe are your investments. In this article I would like to explain to you how to detect an investment scam, mainly focusing on your common sense and analysis skills.
To illustrate this information, I would like to share you a real use-case from my own experience, when I basically:
- Invested in a scam platform
- Detected it was highly likely a potential scam
- Excited the platform before other and came out with a positive investment result
All of this is based on common sense. And this is what I would like you to learn today.
About my starting investment
The goal of Bluetrading.com is that it’s an automatic portfolio manager. It means that you put money in the platform account and it is automatically investment. The platform invests in 3 high risk and high volatility investment categories: cryptocurrency, commodities, and currencies.
Their selling points where mainly about high return performances of +19% per month with a track record of 3 years. I left my money invested for 18 days and then exited and withdrew successfully my money with a +9% after those 18 days.
What seemed wrong before investing
I will list you a non-exhaustive list of things that seemed wrong when I was analyzing and trying to decide if investing in BT:
- They asked a consistent starting investment of 3’000 EUR
- The average monthly returns were incredibly high with rates of +19% (during 3 years)
- Truspilot.com had +50 great review with a positive comment, but all of them were dated in 2018 while the platform opened in 2015 according to the above performance table
- The company had offices in Japan and a bank account in another country (I don-t remember which one)
- The bank account information changed while I was investing
- The process of deposit and identity verification where messy and unclear
- The platform wasn’t recognized and approved by a regulatory financial certifier
So before investing as you can see, there were already a lot of red flags.
What seemed wrong while investing
I then started investing in the platform and started to monitor my investment on a daily basis. Here are some facts that attracted my attention pretty fast:
- When I tried to withdraw the first time, they where asking me if they can send the money by BTC even I asked a wire transfer (which company would ask you if it is ok to change the process that you asked for)
- When I received the money they had made an error in the amount, the 8 in 3’382 had become a 3 for 3’332 (maybe it was a real mistake).
At the same time, I started analyzing my investment. During 18 days I analyzed daily my investment and the return that I could get from it. You can see the result of the analysis in the table below. The conclusion is that during the investment period of 18 days I had:
- 31 investment
- 15 of them had impossible results / 50% of them (see in red lines in the table)
Since the results where inconsistent, I decided to withdraw all my money (without my additional return) and to see if it works. And it worked!
Finally, the last information that made me stop willing to take additional risks was that BT did a promotion for the month of December. They said that investors would receive a 10% additional bonus of their money invested during the month of December.
I tough about the fact that this should be a way to attract a lot of people and their money before crushing down everything.
So for all those reasons I finally decided to withdraw all my left return, and never touch this platform again.
What you need to learn when investing for me are 2 main points:
- Invest with your guts and don’t be blind. If you think and analyze, trust data and facts, don’t believe in magic
- Super high return don’t exist. Expect return from 2% to 20% ROI per year, the rest is magic.
Conclusion
I was happy to get back my money after having followed my guts and my analysis result. I then decided to invest this amount in a less risky but still interessting investment category, Crowdfunding. This type of invesments allow you to have a return of on average of up to 12-14%.
You can see more advices on Crowdfunding investments through this page.
