Pharaoh's Financial Blog

SCAM * HYIP * PONZI BUSTER

Two FPA members fell victim to the scam at Legend Trader Limited, a managed forex accounts service based in Hong Kong.

Three years ago in September of 2008, I wrote an article on Wealth Protection. It was a general overview of how to keep your money as safe as possible in the uncertain economic times during the banking crisis of 2008. I’m saddened to report that the world economy and the world of forex doesn’t seem to have settled down and looks even more dangerous than it was back in 2008. Let’s check up and see how things are going.

Certain questions about how to interpret and trade the Daily Trading Signals come up over and over again in FPA’s forums. I’ve answered a lot of these at various times, but never put all the questions and answers in one place before.

Managed forex accounts present a decent opportunity for those who don’t have the time to learn how to trade forex or enough time to actually trade their own forex account to still make some profits from the forex market. They also open up investors to the triple threat of scam, incompetence, and bad brokers.

I really like helping out the FPA’s investigators from time to time. They all try their best to help traders. When a company won’t cooperate in the face of evidence that money is owed to a trader, they file a report with the full Scam Investigations Committee and a Scam Confirmation is issued. They try hard to not label companies as scams, but some companies seem determined to gain that label.

I’ve given advice on how to reduce your chances of getting scammed buying forex products, I also told you a method for picking a forex broker that meets your needs, I’ve given you advice on how to avoid losing everything to bad account management, and even warned you how improper risk management can wipe out your account even if you have a successful trading system. One thing I never talked about was what to do to protect your money if you become a very successful and wealthy forex trader.

With the collapse of Bernard Madoff’s 50 billion dollar investment fund, Ponzi schemes are very much in the news. Recently, the FPA investigated CRE Capitol Corporation and the TradeLite HYIP, both of which turned out to be Ponzi schemes. I’ve covered some of this before in my article about managed forex, but since so many people have lost so much money to both classic Ponzi schemes and HYIPS, I thought this style of scam deserved a more in-depth analysis.

Crown Forex should be one of the best brokers out there. It has a large customer base and is supposed to have a lot of money in the bank. Unlike a lot of “semi-Swiss” brokers that just have a virtual Swiss office, Crown has a real office in Switzerland and is a member of ARIF.

Most recently, I wrote about how to avoid getting scammed while buying forex products. Finding a good forex broker is even more important.

Back when the FPA was new, there was one unique bit of Felix’s philosophy that really struck me. What caught my attention was that he talked about always donating 10% of his trading profits to a worthy cause. He said that when he did this, new opportunities opened up, and when he didn’t do this, good opportunities were few and far between. This helped to resolve a deep ethical dilemma I have had with the whole concept of forex trading.