If you lost money with binary options, you could get scammed a second time by a recovery room.
Lost money
A lot of people make their first contact with binary options through a scam. Our entire website is dedicated to scam reviews and we have already reviewed about 500 of them. And there are more.
The binary options industry is abused probably like no other. There are networks of fake review websites that support and endorse these scams, so for a person with no experience in trading it is very difficult to find the right path.
The result is that a lot of people are getting scammed and they are losing money. Scam artists promise them an income, but in reality they take their money and lose it.
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end here, because scammers are targeting their victims repetitively via so called recovery rooms.
Recovery rooms dangers
First let us explain what a recovery room is. We’ll quote the Belgian regulator FSMA for that:
“As regards recovery rooms, the FSMA reminds readers that this practice consists of contacting victims of an earlier fraud, unsolicited and often by telephone, to offer assistance in recovering the losses incurred or to buy up shares they had previously acquired from companies operating unlawfully. These offers are, however, always subject to paying fees up front, and despite the promises of those making these offers, the fees charged never result in victims being able to recover the sums lost. The fees paid for this purpose are thus lost as well.”
So you see, scammers contact people who lost money with binary options and they promise them that they will recover their funds. But in reality they will take an upfront fee and do nothing, which means a second loss for the victim.
This article is inspired by one of our readers who said that she was contacted this way by Tmoption. Tmoption is an unregulated and anonymous broker, meanwhile the domain name Tmoptiom.com is registered in Nigeria.
And this is just one example. We get a lot of spam comments from people who promise that they will help you recover money that you lost with binary options. Most of the time these comments come from scammers that run recovery rooms. So beware!
How to protect yourself
There is a basic rule valid for binary options in general: If somebody promises you money, but asks for your deposit/payment first, you can be pretty sure that it is a scam. It is valid not only for trading systems, but also for recovery rooms.
Be very careful, because recovery rooms use a lot of dirty tricks. For example they will say that they already recovered your money, they will even let you log into a private area, where you will see your balance, but it will be fake! No real money. Then they will ask you to pay a fee or make a deposit in order to be able to withdraw your balance, but if you do it, you will of course get nothing back.
The vast majority of offers in this field is a scam. There are a few law firms that do work with victims of binary options scams, but they are registered companies with a certain reputation that you can verify with related authorities. And unfortunately these law firms are not cheap.
They often set up a fee schedule that can mean that you will pay more than you lost. And they can’t guarantee the result. So even these legal firms have to be considered very carefully, so that you don’t lose even more money.
The right path
If you got scammed, the right thing to do is to contact authorities in your country to see if they can help you. The national financial regulator and the police will tell you what you can do. If you deposited money through a credit card, see also with your bank if they can make a chargeback.
You can also ask authorities for advice about any recovery service or offer that you run into, they can help you evaluate if it is a legit opportunity to get your money back or not.
And finally don’t search for any automated programs or signal services that will make you money with binary options for free or for a few bucks per month. Use common sense, would a truly profitable service that can make you thousands of dollars or more per month be free or would it cost tens or a few hundreds dollars? Of course not!
Truly profitable trading robots are not available in the public domain. Funds and banks invest huge sums of money to create profitable algorithms and they don’t want to lose their competitive advantage by revealing how they work.
So let us repeat, if somebody promises you money with binary options, but asks for your deposit first, run away!
You can make money in trading binary options or any other investment tool, but the path to profits is relatively long and hard. You have to test and learn until you build a profitable strategy. You can try and do that on a demo account.
Don’t quit the demo until you can trade with consistent profits. If you can’t be profitable on the demo, you won’t be profitable on a real account either. This is how trading really works. Profits are not free, there is some work required, like in any other field of human activity.