Founded over 20 years ago, YouTube now has over 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watch over 1 billion hours of videos each day. It has become one of the biggest sources of information for retail traders and investors, and it is not surprising that this platform is really important for a wide range of scammers pushing financial scams, including binary options scams.
A lot of the successful financial scam content on YouTube is quite advanced and can for instance be dressed up as educational material, authentic trader reports, or even inspirational success stories tailor-made to appeal to specific target groups, e.g. stay-at-home moms or individuals who worry about their retirement. A well-lit video, a confident speaker, and a few screenshots of “proof” can be enough to convince viewers that a particular binary options broker, trading system, or signal service is worth trying.
The YouTube platform’s algorithm promotes content that looks popular or generates engagement, even if it’s misleading or outright fraudulent. This creates a dangerous feedback loop where eye-catching and engagement-generating scam videos are more likely to show up in an individual´s feed than a correct by less attention-grabbing educational video about trading basics.
Examples of Common Types of Scam Content
A majority of the binary options scam videos on YouTube fall into a few predictable formats. Below, we will take a look at three of them.
The Inspirational Lifestyle Video
A very popular format among scammers it the lifestyle video, where the main character in the clip show off their wonderful life aned claims they achieved financial freedom through a specific binary options broker, auto-trading bot, or similar. These videos are less about education and more about selling a fantasy. They can for instance featuring rented luxury cars, fake trading dashboards, and stacks of cash.
Some videos aim to be pretty general and cast a wide net, while others are made with a specific target audience in mind. While a more general video may feature the classic trifecta of exotic cars, luxury travel, and stacks of cash, a more niche video can for instance specifically target mothers who dream about finding a new stream of income that would enable them to quit their jobs and spend more time with their small children.
Strategy Reveal Video
The strategy reveal video is often titled something like “Guaranteed Profitable Strategy for Binary Options”. These videos typically explain a basic RSI or moving average strategy, while also featuring a link to a recommended broker. Typically, the broker is either real but regulated in a very lax jurisdiction, or just a fake broker site created to bring in first deposits and vanish. In many cases, the content creator uses vague or recycled trading theory to add a layer of credibility to what is essentially an advertisement for a scam. A core idea is to make the viewer feel smart and knowledgeable. You have stumbled upon a “guaranteed profitable strategy”, you now know much more than the average trader, and it is up to you to take advantage of this great opportunity.
Signal Service Review Video
A lot of trading scams, including binary option scams, revolve around signal services, and you may encounter videos where the content creator claims to be testing and reviewing signal services in an unbiased way, but is actually paid to promote a particular signal service provider.
A signal service provider is someone (an individual or an entity) that will send you recommendations or alerts that you can use to open and close positions. A typical message will include a recommendation for a particular asset or product (e.g. EUR/USD or NYSE:AAPL), a trade direction (go long or go short), an entry point, and an exit point. The information can be used for direct trading, or for buying derivatives such as binary options or CFDs.
In signal service review videos, it is not uncommon for content creators to claim they are showing live trading results, when in reality, the videos feature fabricated wins or edited results. The goal is to drive signups and payments to a specific fraudulent signal service provider, from which the content creator earns a commission.
Some signal service providers and scammy videos on YouTube will make wild claims about guaranteed profits, but do not be mistaken – no one will reimburse you when you lose money using a signal service.
Signal service providers can deliver signals in various ways, e.g. via email, through well-known messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram, directly to your phone number, or by using proprietary apps. Remember that downloading and installing an unknown app on your device will open you up to a hole new range of frauds. It is not longer “only” about losing the money you paid for the service and the money you risked on the trades.
Some scammy signal service providers offer automated copy trading services where you allow them to take control over your trading account and trade on your behalf. Naturally, this will also spell disaster.
Fake Comments and Social Proof
You might feel that a YouTube video about binary options must be legit because it has so many thumbs up and positive comments in the comment section, but this type of “social proof” is often manufactured and a part of the con.
Many comments are fake, posted by bots or paid accounts, praising the platform or asking questions that help build the illusion of a real community. This form of social proof is there to help convince new viewers that others are succeeding with the same broker or strategy, pushing them to try it themselves.
When real viewers leave negative feedback or ask difficult questions, they often find their comments deleted or buried by an avalanche of spam comments. YouTube’s limited oversight allows these scams to persist far longer than they should.
The Role of Affiliate Marketing
Most binary options scams on YouTube are driven by affiliate marketing. Brokers and signal service providers offer payouts to anyone who refers a new depositing user. This system incentives creators to promote platforms regardless of legitimacy, because their earnings are tied directly to getting people to sign up and deposit. Their earnings are not tied to you actually becoming a profitable trader.
The affiliate links are often placed within descriptions or comment sections. Once a user clicks, creates and account, and makes a deposit, the content creator gets paid.
Why YouTube Doesn’t Stop It
While YouTube does remove at least some scam content when reported, its algorithm isn’t equipped to detect financial fraud unless it’s explicitly flagged. Even reported scam content can remain online for months, generating thousands of views and tricking countless users, before it is removed. The lack of proactive moderation, combined with the difficulty of quickly identifying financial scams, makes the platform a breeding ground for binary options fraud.
It should also be noted that YouTube is not a charity. They are a business and they profit when they can show adds. From this point of view, even a binary options scam video is good to have on the platform, provided that it generates add revenue. YouTube is a subsidiary of Google, which is part of Alphabet Inc., a publicly traded company. Decisions are made with share holder profits in mind.
How to Spot and Avoid These Scams
If a video claims guaranteed profits, fast money, or uses lifestyle imagery to sell a trading system, it’s likely a scam. Videos that push you toward a specific broker or signal provider without discussing regulation and risks are almost always operating with affiliate incentives. Real trading education rarely makes bold claims. It’s dry, careful, and focuses on risks and risk-management as much as the possibility of profits. Any content that glosses over risk or makes trading seem low-risk and effortless should be treated with a big heap of skepticism.
Licensed Binary Options Brokers
Most of the stricter financial authorities around the world, the ones known to actually enforce strong trader protection rules, have banned brokers from offering binary options to retail traders (non-professional traders). If you go through the process of becoming a verified professional trader, you can still find binary option brokers who operated with a license from one of these stricter financial authorities. For retail traders (everyone who has not become classified as a professional trader), finding a reputable binary options broker is much trickier, since all retail binary options brokers, both the sketchy ones and the trustworthy ones, are based in lax jurisdictions such as the Seychelles, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Vanuatu. It has become considerably more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff for retail binary options.
Why Regulation is Important
In the financial trading space, a broker´s regulation is an important factor to consider for traders. Pretty much anyone can put up a website, shoot a few promotional videos, and claim to be a licensed broker. Verifying that claim before registering and depositing money is important, since you want to know who you are actually dealing with.
Where a broker is based and if it has a license from a financial authority will determine your route for recourse if an issue arises between you and the broker. Let´s say you sign up with a binary options broker based in Farawayistan and operating without a financial services license. Then, the broker suddenly freeze your account from withdrawals, claiming you broker some vague rule hidden deep down in the fine print. After repeated attempts to resolve the issue by contacting customer service, you realize that they are no longer responding to your calls, emails and chat attempts. Now, where do you turn? To the legal system in Farawayistan, which is renowned for being exceedingly lax when it comes to trader protection? Where the broker does not even have an office, just a mailbox? Where privacy laws serve to protect the identity of the business owners? Will you try to navigate this nightmare from afar, even though you don´t even speak the local language of Farawayistan, and the legal system is known to be both opaque and corrupt? Will your retain an expensive lawyer with international experience to help you get your $500 back? Probably not. Just like thousands of other victims, you will suck it up, write an angry review in an online forum, post a few comments on YouTube that are promptly removed, and never see your money again.
This is why it matters a lot where a broker is based, if it has a financial service license, and if the issuer of that license is known to be both willing and capable of protecting you. Many countries around the world where retail binary options are still legal do not have the same level of retail trader protection that you might be used to from the United States, Canada, or the European Union. They operate on a caveat emptor (buyer beware) foundation, which means they will allow you to do your own mistakes. Pick a sketchy broker, engage in high-risk trading, take on 1:1000 leverage for crypto speculation – but do not come crying to the legal system of Farawayistan when your broker treats you like shit.
YouTube is filled with affiliate-driven content that push viewers into the arms of binary option brokers based in jurisdictions where trader protection is weak to non-existent. Some of these brokers have been in the business for a long time and are actually quite trustworthy (by binary option broker standards), while others are outright scams. Before trusting any platform, especially one hyped in a “success” video, do your own checks.
Lying Liars Who Lie Can Lie About Anything – Even Their License
Above, we have talked a bit about why regulation matters, and why retail binary options brokers tend to be based in jurisdictions that take a laissez faire approach to broker-trader relations. Now, you might be watching a YouTube video and stumble upon a retail binary options broker that proudly display a license emblem from one of the stricter financial authorities, such as these:
- The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) – United Kingdom
- The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) – United States
- The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) – Australia
- Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) – Cyprus, EU
This might sound like great news, but the problem is that a fraudster can lie about anything, including being licensed. Instead of going through the process of actually becoming licensed by one of the financial authorities that still permit and regulate retail binary options, the fraudster can just copy a logo or emblem and make up a fake license number. Some more advanced scammers will operate under a name that is similar to a well-established broker and simply display that license information. You think your are signing up with eToro (eToro Europe Ltd) and will enjoy the protection of a CySEC license, the Cypriot legal system, and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). In reality, you are signing up with eTorro and there is no license.
This is why it is important to:
- Know exactly which entity you are signing up with.
- Verify that this entity actually holds the claimed license, and that the license is still active.
Below, we will share a few tips that can be helpful as you verify a brokers alleged license.
How To Verify A License
Visit the financial authority website
Do not follow any links from the broker or from the YouTube channel promoting it. Instead, find out the alleged license giver´s official site and write it into your browser yourself.
Financial Authorities will usually maintain an online register where their license holders are listed.
Examples:
- FCA register: https://register.fca.org.uk
- ASIC register: https://connectonline.asic.gov.au
- CySEC register: https://www.cysec.gov.cy/en-GB/entities/investment-firms/cypriot/
Use the broker’s full legal name (not the brand or domain) to search for their license. As mentioned above, fake brokers often use brand names that sound similar to licensed firms to confuse traders.
Check for Matching Details
Match the registration number, business name, and contact details listed on the regulator’s site with those on the broker’s website. Even one mismatch should be treated as suspicious. Some scam sites will steal license numbers from legitimate firms to appear trustworthy.
Check for Name-Napping
A fraudster can easily put up a web site where they claim to be IC Markets, eToro, XM Group, or any other well-established online broker. Because of this, it is a good idea to search for the name online and see if you come across another web site.
Example: The fraudster wants you to sign up for an IC Markets VIP-account at icmarketsvip.com, but when you do an independent search for IC Markets you realize that their official site is icmarkets.com, and that icmarketsvip.com does not seem to be connected to IC Markets. You contact the official icmarkets.com support and they confirm your suspicion.
As you can see, icmarketsvip.com is not a safe site even though the true IC Markets broker is a licensed broker.
Check the Regulator´s Warning List / Red List / Black List
While you are in the process of checking up on a broker, it is also a good idea to check the regulator´s list where they show warnings or disciplinary actions against brokers.
Tips for Spotting YouTube Promotion Scams
Check the Video Description
Scam promoters often hide affiliate links behind URL shorteners or generic phrases like “official broker link” instead of actually writing out the broker´s name and being clear about the fact that it is an affiliate link. Inspect where a link leads before clicking.
If it is an affiliate link, but the content creator is not making this clear, there is an increased risk of the video to be shady in other ways too, and it might not be worth you time to watch it.
Look for Unrealistic Claims
Any video promising “guaranteed profits” or “no-risk trading” should be dismissed immediately. These videos are not educational; they’re sales pitches for something sketchy.
Search for Broker Reviews Independently
Don’t rely on the video. Use reputable forums to see if other traders have reported issues with the broker. Watch out for fake positive reviews posted in batches. All brokers, even serious ones, will have some disgruntled clients, just like all restaurants will have some reviews from sourly patrons. Your goal is not to find a broker with a spotless reputation (that would actually be a warning sign in itself). Instead, the point is to look for how serious the complaints are, and if certain problems seem to be showing up over and over again. If one person is angry about having to verify their identity before their first withdrawal, you have probably just found one person who doesn´t understand how this anti-money laundering rule works. If you run into post after post where different users report having their accounts frozen indefinitely while the broker asks for an endless amount of paper work, and no documentation is ever enough, you have probably found a shady broker.
Check for Regulatory Warnings
Search for the broker name along with phrases like “broker warning”, “broker alert”, “blacklisted broker”, and so on. Many scam brokers have already been flagged by financial authorities and other governmental agencies, but it can be difficult for law enforcement to get a domain shut down outside their own jurisdiction.
Verify any License Claims
If the broker claims to be registered in a certain jurisdiction and licensed by a specific financial authority, verify these claims.
Note that some companies and organizations have names that make them sound official (e.g. The
Beware of “Success Stories”
Videos featuring supposed millionaires or lavish lifestyles often use paid content creators, rented props, and other dishonest practices. These clips are created to tap into emotion, not to provide trading education. Real trading education is not about flaunting private jets, it is about concepts such as risk, strategy, and loss management.
The market for “fake success stories” is now so big that numerous photo studios are available that have been staged to look like the inside of a luxurious airplane. One of the most famous is the jet-style photo studio in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, USA, which comes fitted with details such as plush leather-style seats and fake “air plane windows” with special lighting the helps create the right mood in pictures and videos. At the time of writing, renting this studio costs less than $70 per hour, which is considerably less than actually getting on an opulent plane and jet off to some exotic location.