FranziskaSchulz
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I have not been scammed yet and the main reason is not to trust fake people and to check reliable review websites and also check brokers by my self.
MattK
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How do you check brokers? What sites do you use?
ThaddeusFinch
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It's crucial for new traders to educate themselves on common fraudulent practices, like unrealistic returns promises, signal seller scams, and brokers that aren't reputable.
MattK
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Same question: How do you check brokers? What sites do you use?
Traders must cultivate awareness in forex trading to avoid scams. Understanding market dynamics, regulatory frameworks, and risk management is crucial. Scams often lure with promises of unrealistic returns or unregulated platforms. Vigilance, due diligence, and reliance on reputable brokers are essential to safeguard investments and navigate the complex forex landscape.
Forex gets a bad name for scams, especially those run by brokers based in small countries with weak regulation, possibly helped in those places by corrupt politics and judiciary.
Maybe forex is not worse than any other business run in for example Vanuatu. Let's suppose you want to import some product from Vanuatu to your country, let's say 500 T-shirts. Some firm in Vanuatu which you know nothing about says they can provide the T-shirts, just send them $5000 and the T-shirts will be on their way. Would you be surprised if they didn't arrive? Perhaps the problem isn't really a forex problem.
Maybe forex is not worse than any other business run in for example Vanuatu. Let's suppose you want to import some product from Vanuatu to your country, let's say 500 T-shirts. Some firm in Vanuatu which you know nothing about says they can provide the T-shirts, just send them $5000 and the T-shirts will be on their way. Would you be surprised if they didn't arrive? Perhaps the problem isn't really a forex problem.
NeverStopLearning
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I can only confirm that I've been there for 3 years and haven't been scammed once. Prop firms are clearly visible, look at the website, legal notice and, above all, where they are registered and under what supervision. All of these review websites are mostly bought, so I would always be careful, look at the CEO to see if he is presented publicly, and especially you can see it in the prices for the accounts. Instant accounts for 1-2k are not realistic for large accounts, for example.
MattK
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You provide a solid approach
ThaddeusFinch
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I look for user reviews and feedback
MattK
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On which platforms do you usually look for user reviews and feedback? It seems to me that Trustpilot is one of the only reliable sources these days.
Zerologic
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How to minimize scam forex one of the way is before choosing the broker must do deep research about broker regulation, reputation, review users, etc. ECN brokers are usually considered the best trading environment because offer a tight spread and connect to the interbank market directly
ThaddeusFinch
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Forex Peace Army and TrustPilot! I dont trust any where else because most of them are paid to advertise and stuff
Rufus_Leakey
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Trustpilot???
https://dontrust-pilot.com/
Is Trustpilot Trustworthy?
BY HVEM SOMHELST
A DISGRUNTLED BUT HONEST FORMER TRUSTPILOT EMPLOYEE
No one can argue that review sites do not serve a much-needed purpose. By providing consumers with the opportunity to share their real experiences with merchants online, they can benefit purchasers and merchants alike. The former can make better decisions about what to buy and where to buy it. The latter become privy to feedback that they might otherwise not receive and resolve outstanding issues, improve their products and services and better serve the public.
Of course, that’s assuming the review site chooses to act in a non-partial manner. Regrettably, not all of them do.
The most widely known review site is undoubtedly Trustpilot.
“Trustpilot was founded in 2007 with a vision to create an independent currency of trust,” it declares on its website. “We're a digital platform that brings businesses and consumers together to foster trust and inspire collaboration. We're free to use, open to everybody, and built on transparency.”[1]
And indeed, its statistics – accurate as of December 31, 2021 – are impressive. It hosts more than 167 million reviews concerning about 714,000 merchants. Founded and headquartered in Copenhagen, Trustpilot’s 850 employees also work out of London, New York, Denver, Vilnius, Berlin, Melbourne, Edinburgh, Milan, and Amsterdam.
But can Trustpilot be trusted? To answer that question, it is first necessary to understand its business model.
Review sites generate income by contracting out to merchants varying degrees of input over the page on which consumers may post their reviews. “Any business can use our services for free to collect and respond to reviews,” Trustpilot states,[2] and 87% of all merchants with Trustpilot pages do.[3] “The only difference between free and paid businesses using Trustpilot is that paid businesses can use extra features such as our marketing assets or more detailed review insights.” [4]
Trustpilot offers businesses four different plans at graduating prices. Each allows the merchant to upload its own profile, issue increasing amounts of invites to clients to post reviews and a variety of other benefits ranging from widgets to personalization options. The most expensive plan, designed for major enterprises, also provides a dedicated account manager.Trustpilot offers businesses four different plans at graduating prices. Each allows the merchant to upload its own profile, issue increasing amounts of invites to clients to post reviews and a variety of other benefits ranging from widgets to personalization options. The most expensive plan, designed for major enterprises, also provides a dedicated account manager.
For their part, reviewers have the option to assign the merchant between one and five stars. The more five-star reviews received (and conversely, the fewer reviews received that are less than five stars) the higher the merchant’s “TrustScore” will be. Instinctively, it would be logical to assume that the primary reason why a merchant would want to invest money in Trustpilot would be to take advantage of the opportunity to generate a wave of positive reviews by sending invites to those clients it presumes would respond effusively. So yes, the allure of increasing positive reviews is certainly a major consideration.[5]
Of course, it would also be instinctive to presume that merchants that are attentive to their clients and provide excellent goods or services would naturally attract a steady flow of positive reviews and very few, if any, lousy ones. So, what would the added value really be if the merchant could generate positive reviews by signing up for a business plan?
To answer that question, it is first necessary to understand Trustpilot’s review rules, or more specifically, their loopholes.
LOOPHOLES IN THE REVIEW RULES
- Loophole Number 1: Trustpilot does not require the reviewer to have ever actually bought goods or services from the merchant. It allows anyone who merely claims to have had a “service experience” to post a review. Trustpilot, moreover, considers a simple phone call or even an impersonal email inquiry as a service experience. That, of course, encourages scammers and unethical competitors to call or email the merchant only to qualify and then submit their phony reviews, even though their contact was made entirely under false pretenses.
- Loophole Number 2: Those who claim to have had a service experience with the merchant do not have to identify themselves before they post their reviews. An alias and anonymous e-mail address are sufficient. That is seen by scammers and unethical competitors as yet another green light to post fake reviews. After all, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
- Loophole Number 3: Trustpilot places the onus on the merchant to prove that the reviewer did not have a service experience after the review goes live. That handicaps the merchant because the information it holds in its customer relationship management (CRM) system is crucial in determining the level of interaction a reviewer may or may not have had with the company. But due to privacy concerns, that information cannot be shared with an outside source without the prior permission of the reviewer, whose identity, in any event, is completely bogus if the review is spam. Moreover, the process the merchant has to follow takes a minimum of three days and may continue for weeks on end. In the meanwhile, the fake review remains online. A review that is purposely designed by a scammer or unethical competitor to damage a merchant’s reputation will indeed accomplish that goal while Trustpilot dithers what to do.
- Loophole Number 4: There are only five reasons why Trustpilot will agree to remove a review. It must contain harmful or illegal content, personal information, advertising or promotional information, or if it is not based on a genuine experience or was mistakenly posted on the wrong merchant’s page. Anyone can flag a review for further investigation by Trustpilot’s “Content Integrity Team,” but only the merchant can cite the last reason.[6] Libel per se is not one of those five reasons. Therefore, scammers and unethical competitors have carte blanche to lie as much as they want.
- Loophole Number 5: The Content Integrity Team is insulated from merchants. Its members do not use their last names. They cannot be contacted directly. So when they get it wrong there is virtually nothing the merchant can do to appeal the decision. In the meanwhile, crafty scammers and competitors pay attention to which fake reviews are removed and which are not until they find the proper balance that enables their fake posts to squeeze through the parameters and avoid removal.
- Loophole Number 6: Merchants whose Trustpilot pages have been inundated by fake reviews can actually be penalized for tagging them. Trustpilot’s Orwellian guidelines state that a merchant can be sanctioned for “misuse of reporting tools” by rapidly tagging them, since that “would indicate that the reviews are not being properly considered or assessed.” Should merchants really have to hesitate before tagging an obviously fake review that, for example, contains a case number that doesn’t exist in their CRMs or claims that the merchant provided a service that it doesn’t offer?
PLAYING BOTH SIDES OF THE FENCE
Scammers are adept at finding and manipulating loopholes, and that is why they are attracted to Trustpilot.
In its 2022 “Transparency Report,” Trustpilot notes that 100% of the reviews submitted are screened by its automated fake detection software,” which “identifies unusual patterns, based on multiple data points, such as IP addresses, user identifiers, device characteristics, location data and timestamps.” A total of 2,722,255 reviews, or 5.8% of the total posted in 2021, were removed for being fake. Of those, 1,846,564 were removed by Trustpilot’s “automatic detection software,” an increase of 19% from the previous year.[7] The remainder were tagged by merchants, and to a lesser extent by the public. But the number of fake reviews is growing at an almost Malthusian rate.
That being the case, there is one obvious question that begs to be asked: Why is it that Trustpilot does not plug up its loopholes? After all, the fake reviews are not caused by Trustpilot’s algorithm but by the defects in its policies.
The answer is that it is not in Trustpilot’s interest to plug up its loopholes. Quite to the contrary, its loopholes help sustain its business model, which is viable only as long as a flow of negative reviews – be they justified or not – continues unabated. The added value that merchants perceive they have obtained by signing up with Trustpilot is the sense of empowerment that comes from being able to generate positive reviews by invitation and compensate, even if in a small way, for Trustpilot’s porous guidelines that encourage scammers and unethical competitors to post fake reviews, and its insouciance in taking the one action that would be most likely to stem the tide.
In essence, then, Trustpilot is playing both sides of the fence. On the one hand, it claims to be vigilant about miscreants abusing its own rules. But on the other hand, it benefits by enabling them to pass through their loopholes, knowing that the abundance of fake reviews and the ease at which they are successfully posted are its most effective incentive in convincing merchants to sign up for their costly business accounts.
This is not just manipulative. It is a form of extortion. Merchants that willingly submit to it, however, will soon find out that the inducement of generating positive reviews by invitation is not all that attractive either, since Trustpilot’s algorithm also can remove them too.
Trustpilot claims that its algorithm is programmed to remove reviews by legitimate customers if the merchant asks customers to write them, if they are submitted in exchange for “incentives like discounts, monetary rewards, loyalty points, gifts, coupons, referral bonuses, and the like,” if the reviewer has a conflict of interest, if the reviews are “collected on company premises” or using the merchant’s communications equipment, or if the request to the customer is not composed in a “fair, neutral or biased” manner. All of that sounds reasonable, but “fair, neutral or biased” can also be a matter of one’s own subjective interpretation, and Trustpilot’s Content
Integrity Team does not dialog with merchants to determine if its own subjective interpretation may actually be skewed.
Moreover, Trustpilot’s enforcement of its deletion policy is inconsistent. Consider, for example, the seminal experience of a British investor who, in an interview with BBC One television, stated that he “lost £20,000 after investing with a company which had positive reviews on Trustpilot” even though the company was on a watchlist of firms operating without proper licensing and supervision published by the British financial regulator. The man posted a negative review on the unlicensed firm’s Trustpilot page, but Trustpilot deleted it after the firm tagged it.[8]
CONCLUSION: SHOULD CONSUMERS TRUST TRUSTPILOT?
If the subject is a small local business like a pharmacy, hair stylist or laundromat, consumers can assume that the reviews they will find on Trustpilot are most likely to be valid. But if the business serves customers across the nation or overseas, the odds are much greater that scammers and unethical competitors will have targeted it with fake reviews in order to sully its reputation, lower its TrustScore and divert potential customers to their own websites. Consumers seeking accurate information about such companies, therefore, cannot rely on Trustpilot reviews at all. And that is not just due to the reasons discussed above. It also turns out that fake Trustpilot reviews can actually be bought online. In bulk. Yes, it’s absurd, it’s corrupt, but it’s absolutely true.
The production and posting of fake online reviews is actually a bustling cottage industry that operates unabashedly out in the open.[9] Some of the more industrious fake review providers even have LinkedIN profiles, upload their own promotional videos to YouTube, maintain a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit, among other platforms, and even issue press releases.[10] You can find their business information on ZoomInfo[11] and find an extensive discussion on Quora on how to buy Trustpilot reviews too.[12]
And these cynical fake review wholesalers will sell their wares to anyone. In 2018, BBC 5 Live Investigates, a top consumer-oriented radio program in Britain, revealed that it tested Trustpilot by buying a phony five-star review. Trustpilot flunked the test. The review was successfully posted.[13]
But don’t just take our own word. Do your own research. Start with the comments consumers have posted about Trustpilot on other online review sites such as Sitejabber[14] and Reviews.io[15]
(yes, they are competitors, but you can rest assured that review sites do not post fake reviews on other review sites, since that would ruin their own businesses).
Ultimately, however, Trustpilot’s big losers are not the merchants it extorts, those who refuse to pay ransom and those whose reputations are affected by its porous loopholes. The big losers are the consumers who think that they can rely on Trustpilot as a reliable source for unbiased information when, in fact, they cannot.
[1]https://www.trustpilot.com/about
[2]https://support.trustpilot.com/hc/en-us/articles/9207005143314-Can-businesses-pay-to-remove-bad-reviews-
[3]https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-7549909/Can-trust-Trustpilots-reviews-firms-dont-pay-it.html
[4]“Can businesses pay to remove bad reviews?” op cit.
[5]https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/estate-agents-and-banks-gaming-feedback-website-trustpilot-jxjxjt02x
[6]https://uk.legal.trustpilot.com/for-everyone/action-we-take
[7]https://cdn.trustpilot.net/trustsite-consumersite/trustpilot-transparency-report-2022.pdf
[8]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3SkLXs4RK24Lzx0sPYXVRpg/trustpilot
[9]https://www.householdmoneysaving.com/is-trustpilot-reliable/
[10]https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/buy-trustpilot-reviews-2023-05-18, for example
[11]https://www.zoominfo.com/c/buy-trustpilot-reviews/539739777
[12]https://www.quora.com/How-can-you-buy-Trustpilot-reviews-1
[13]https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43907695
[14]https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/trustpilot.com
[15]https://www.reviews.io/company-reviews/store/trustpilot
IlIlIlIlI
Senior member
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5 Best sites to Buy Trustpillot Reviews (Cheap)
I tested over 32 websites that provide reviews and found the ten best places to buy Trustpilot reviews. Let's check out the list!
www.jeffbullas.com
Buy Trustpilot Reviews From $14.50 | 100% Safe & Real
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sidesmedia.com
etc.
Just for explaining trustpilot better:
www.forexpeacearmy.eu was a scam page which is closed now and available for sale. Got so many positive reviews at trustpilot
This is the real rating at trustpilot for the real https://www.forexpeacearmy.com/ - probably a lot ot it was written by frustrated scammers
https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.forexpeacearmy.com
