How Can I Spot Fake News or Reviews Online?
OK well let's go through a few pointers that can help you avoid fake reviews online and hopefully keep you safe from teh boiler room scammers.
Firstly, what is it that you are considering using or signing up for? Is it a service, is it a website or is it some way to make money online?
Making money online is a very dangerous game. Most of the sites that say 'make money online by performing reviews' or whatever are usually fairly harmless as all you are doing is writing a review and then being paid in vouchers or in cash some how, there is no risk as you do not deposit any money. This is a reasonable way to try and make money online?
But what about trading? Well trading is much more difficult as it requires you to make a deposit, and so is much more suitable for scammers to get involved with.
As a result, all trading websites, especially trading review websites, have to be treated as if they are disingenuous until proven otherwise, as there is so much money to be made by lying. If we look at some of the fees offered by scammers for a good prospect (in other words by being an affiliate of a scammer website) we can see immediately that the temptation to earn $800 USD for a single prospect is a powerful one.
One of the first ways to spot a fake review site is that they always operate the same MO because they are affiliates. What this means is that they are given a specific toolkit for making their site and so all the sites are the same, just with different logos and different text.
What remains the same across all of the fake scam review sites are these important signs:
- They are always WordPress sites
- No matter which scammer site you are dealing with, the affiliate networks and affiliate scammers always use WordPress so that they can use the same templates and SEO tools and the scammers can optimise their sites all at one. Right click on one of their images and see if the path contains a /wp-content/ link like below:
- They all typically use the YOAST SEO plug-in like most WordPress sites so that they can use the same settings as one another to optimise their rankings by ensuring that they have to write decent articles before they are posted
- They all use CloudFlare to cover their tracks. CloudFlare is a very popular hosting proxy that allows websites to mask their IP and server provider making it more difficult to find out who is the offending hosting company. All of the scammer sites invariably use them.
- They use the same stock photos for all of their supposed authors. If we look at the photo above, of Jimmy Kelly at Tokenhell, we can see that this photograph shows up on many different trading advice sites with different names. This is a sure sign that he is not real and is just a pseudonym being used to post fake reviews:
- They ask questions like 'Is it a scam?' or 'Is it legit?' or 'Scam or legit?' which is just noit what a good review site does. No decent review site reviews whether or not Elon Musk has invented a new quantum computing AI trading software because he never would. That is a scam review site that you need to avoid at all costs.
- Do they review anything ridiculous, like Bitcoin Prime or Bitcoin Code or immediate Edge or Brexit Millionaire and not say it is a scam? Then it is a scam review site and should be blacklisted. Never return to that site again.
Fake Review Site Examples:
We think that it is worth keeping a list of affiliate linked sites to scammer sites so that we can try and establish a pattern between them all.
The affiliate network system that scammers use has given rise to companies like Finixio who write falsehood for a living. Their mission is to defraud, but to not be accountable, so their main area of business is as the affiliate network false review author. Essentially what they do is to write a review of a known scam, like Bitcoin Circuit for example, and then add an affiliate link to their review so that they are paid by the scammers every time someone if successfully defrauded. In other words, they knowingly defraud innocent people for a living. We do also believe that Finixio also run some of the Bitcoin Circuit sites too, as they do not always have affiliate links on their scam pages, so they must know that they are making money further down the line.
As you can see from the list below, Finixio operate many fake review sites, and are one of the main defrauders here in the UK, but they operate sites to defraud people all over the world. They are without a conscience, and so all they can see is the fiscal gain in the misery of others.
For those sites for which we have written a review, we have linked them to the relevant pages below.
onlineinvestmentsguide.com
cripto-valuta.net
Finixio Scam Sites:
https://www.indexuniverse.eu
https://greenfinanceinitiative.org/
https://www.cryptovibes.com/
https://cryptominded.com/
https://www.economywatch.com
coininsider.com
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/
Others:
https://www.ScamCryptoRobots.com
https://www.bitconnect.co/
https://cryptonews.com
https://www.TechBullion.com
https://techreport.com
https://www.forexcrunch.com
https://tradingplatforms.com
https://thesportsdaily.com
https://www.safebettingsites.com
https://buyshares.co.uk
https://sportslens.com
https://www.techopedia.com
https://buyshares.co.uk
timebusinessnews.com
tokenhell.com
Even many of these share author images (if not names) with the Finixio sites and so Click Out Media (Cyprus) and other companies are most likely all the same scammer network.