In recent years we have seen an explosion in the popularity of Forex trading and cryptocurrency trading, unfortunately however this has also meant there has been a big increase in Forex trading scams with fraudsters taking advantage of those who are new to the platform.
Social Media’s Influence On Forex Trading
One of the main reasons for the popularity of Forex trading is down to the promotion it has got on social media with influencers pushing it as an easy way to make money to your average person. You’ll frequently see pictures of Ferrari’s, mansions and private jets with captions saying “earn millions of pounds a year”, of course these people haven’t earned any money from it and are just trying to sell some kind of eBook supposedly promoting their ‘method’ in order to be successful from it. As with all things in life, the only sure way to success is to work hard, understand it thoroughly, start off small and gradually increase. The problem with Forex though is that even if you fully understand it, it is still a gamble. Nobody knows for sure what is going to happen in world markets or when a new war could break out which can affect currency prices massively.
What Is Forex Trading?
Forex trading is summed up easiest by saying you’re betting on whether certain currencies are going to go up or down. It is attractive in the same way that the stock market is in that anyone can do it and you COULD make a lot of money from it and be extremely lucky, the chances are though that you’ll probably end up losing unless you do it as a full time job. In order to be effective at it you need to fully understand a countries situation from socio-economic factors through to a countries debt levels, government bonds, employment rates, GDP and much more. You need to have a thorough understanding of a countries issues to be able to accurately determine what will happen in the future with their currency.
Obviously, as an amateur investor there are certain things you can determine quite easily, for example, that the Ukraines currency would go down and continue to go down for a while in relation to the Euro or Dollar, the problem is that this won’t make you much money at all.
Forex Fraud & Scams
There are a large number of Forex scams circulating at the moment, anything online where people just need to deposit money is at a high risk of fraud. One form of scam, referred to earlier in the article is supposed experts selling eBooks and giving ‘advice’, its not really too big a scam but definitely something you should avoid paying for. Probably the biggest one that loses people the most money is a phishing scam. Phishing scams replicate a website so that it looks normal but in reality it is a fake one and they are simply going to steal your login details and/or card details. Always make sure when you are going to a site that you type the URL in yourself, never click on a link in an email or on a social media channel.