What is Happening with Recovery Firms?
Someone from Brazil was searching for a term yesterday that came across the sircles Blog. They were searching upon Ecosia for "and was unable to make withdrawals of my deposits let alone my gains even after several calls, text, and mails. Fortunately, I got to know about trade recovery through research and positive reviews on the internet. Long story short, all my funds were recovered without payment of upfront. I can’t thank these guys enough"
Why is this Happening?
And this is interesting, as many of these small-time recovery agent type firms, that take money upfront from people who've been scammed in order to help them write a letter to the bank, seem to be using this term as part of their spiel.
Should I Use These Recovery Firms?
As you can see from the above, recoverystation.net still have their description (at least at last Google crawl) still set to '- Just another WordPress site' which indicates that they were set-up in a hurry and are definitely not a suitable partner when trying to recover money from fraudsters. Stay away from recovery firms until you have read a bit about them on this site.
Who Are RecoveryTrade.net?
In the case of recoverytrade.net, they are obviously just copying and pasting the same comments from the recoverystation.net site and this probably means they are all run by the same person. MyChargeBack.com have a habit of starting lots of different sites to try and get business without having to work on their trustpilot score, and the tactic works for desperate people as sooner or later they will fill in a contact form somewhere.
Who Are GlobalRecoveryFunds.org?
We can also see that globalrecoveryfunds.org (one of the most desperate and irrelevant domain names we have seen so far) are also using part of the text on their site as a fake review. This is an odd tactic as Google will mark them down for duplicity, but if they are advertising on Google Ads or similar they may not care. We can see in the below how brazenly they are throwing around this fake review on all of these duplicated sites:
Why Are All The Sites The Same?
Whoever is writing the text is probably an affiliate reseller of the recovery companies, trying to get a slice of the pie from people who have already been scammed once. The contracts that these companies use are designed so that they keep their upfront fee regardless of whether anyone has any money returned to them by the banks. None of these companies will ever find the culprits of the original scam, and some of the recovery companies are actually run by those very same scammers and their affiliates.
Looking further down the search page on the same term, we can see that the list continues some way further:
Are These Sites All The Same Recovery Scam?
All of these recovery company sites above appear to use the same text to far too greater a degree for it to be anything less than plagiarism. Traderstech.org, FraudRecoveryAgents.org, aguiacontabil.com.br and GoldmanAndJones.com have all been using the text, while most of the above sites appear to be exactly the same wordpress template using the same strategy.
They are mostly the same company either just copying the site across many domain names or subbing the scam out to multiple affiliates.
Which Recovery Company Should I Use?
Don't use one! Wait until you have exhausted communications with the bank before you seek any other advice. If you are in Central or Eastern Europe then you are going to have more difficulty with your bank, but things are improving. The chances of catching the criminals are pretty much zero, so you must accept that. The banks, however, should be legitimately expected to protect you from fraud, as they are the paid custodians of your money. Start a chargeback claim with your bank and just keep phoning until they get you your money back. You can read about organising your own claim at the FCA or on our claiming recoveries personally page.