Our friend Peter has looked at a possible investment as their friend Keith said her invested and made lots of money from it. Let’s let Peter know our views here at Share Trading Guru.
Few points we would consider when looking objectively at this as we don’t want to call it out for being a scam without some evidence or circumstantial even as most scams aren’t able to be proven as a scam till after the fact.
- First of all when we do a quick google of the URL pinprotrade.com we read all sites that speak about pinprotrade. Obviously 90% of online reviews are fake. But sometimes when you get lots of bad reviews you have to consider that maybe they are real. This is due to people being more inclined to leave a review after having a bad experience than a good experience. Let’s have a quick look at the RTG trading site.
www.pinprotrade.com /pinnacle = www.rtgtrading.com???
We think they are currently active under the name: www.pinprotrade.com /pinnacle
I received an aggressive phonecall out of the blue and received an email with link to www.pinprotrade.com, but I landed at www.rtgtrading.com.
So basically pinprotrade is RTG. You can read a few of those reviews from here. https://www.forexpeacearmy.com/forex-reviews/12381/www.rtgtrading.com
RTG from memory operated in 2016 but then was closed down. Probably due to bad reviews / authorities. Now in 2017 they have opened pinprotrade. You can also use wayback machine to see when these domains (sites) were operated on. Another trick you can do is check the alexa rank of the domain forexpeacearmy to make sure the site has a nice low rank. That says that the site is popular. A rank of about 50k is good. If the site had a rank of 1 million or more then the site could be called a fake site designed to just bag pinprotrade in order to sell their own product. This is much harder to do with popular sites. https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/forexpeacearmy.com
After reading all those reviews We don’t know how anyone could even consider giving these guys money.
But let’s move on.
- How much money did your friend put in? How much has he pulled out and is actually now cleared into his bank account? Basically, we are saying this is how Ponzi schemes work.
- We have looked at the 2x pdf files they sent you. We see on page 42 right at the bottom of the file it says the words ‘performance history’. Then just has a privacy policy after that. Most investments give performance results. Even if totally fake and made up. We are surprised these guys haven’t done a fakey as most of these scams do.
- So for your $10k what do they give you? A brokerage platform? Do they make all trades? Do you have a report of Keith’s trades? Can you audit those trades to see if they were really placed?
- A simple google of the address at the bottom of each pdf page shows that 147 companies are located here. What that means is that it is a virtual office. That is usually alarming but not totally in this day and age.
- Have you been able to find Tom Johnson’s Facebook, Instagram (often used as not personalized and can be better faked) or LinkedIn profiles online? Have you seen a picture of him? Once you get a picture you can reverse image search to find him or when he got the picture from google. Usually this is why generic names are chosen by scammers. Assuming this is a scam.
- What is it that pinprotrade gets out of you ‘investing’? Most funds want a % fee for entry or ongoing. But if this is just a brokerage account then we assume they just get brokerage commission?
- If you really want to learn to trade we can help you by following one of the real traders listed on our site.
- If you want money, work out what skills you have, and learn to serve people. Help them in whatever way you can.
Final point would be.. Don’t let people sell you scams based on ‘getting out of your comfort zone’. That’s just a fancy saying people use to try and influence you when obviously your reservations would be warranted.
We am happy to review any ideas you have and give our views. We love and have a fascination of how scams work but hate when we see people fall for them.
One of the best converting scams running currently is the shark tank bitcoin one which you can find shown here. This ad copy has been used over and over with many other famous financial guru’s images and names used. David Koch is another well know name used in this scam in Australia.