Two of the oldest and best known review sites for trading/investing services, products and companies are ForexPeaceArmy.com (FPA) and Investimonials.com. The scope of this article is to show that they are both untrustworthy and more or less fraudulent.
ForexPeaceArmy.com is run by Dmitri Chavkerov, a Russian national apparently living in the US. If you were to believe his story as told by himself, Dmitri was invited to manage $500 million in a $1 billion fund in 2007, when he was only 25 years old. In reality, around that time Dmitri was an Internet-ordained minister who performed a sham marriage ceremony for his girlfriend in a green card fraud case. But maybe he’s reformed since, right? I very much doubt it. When you call someone like Andrew Mitchem a ‘trading giant’ and continually push and advertise his overpriced junk, then you can’t be taken seriously.
Shoulders of Giants
It is a widely known fact that 98% of forex traders lose money. The 2% that are successful can be called giants. The reputation and profitability of traders in this section is beyond question or doubt. – FPA pitch
Andrew Mitchem advertised by FPA
Investimonials.com is run by the master of self-promotion himself, Tim Sykes. I’ve detailed last year, when he deleted my comments on an article and then blocked me on Twitter that his apparent honesty and transparency are just a facade.
All that’s wrong with Investimonials.com in one picture
What is Investimonials.com?
A place to discover the best financial products…and to weed out the worst. We want to help readers ‘invest in the best’ because saving you money and helping you grow and get rich is our top priority.
Trade with Kavan and other penny stock scammers are among the best financial products, right Timmy? And how about weeding out the worst? Marcello Arrambide, aka Wandering Trader has 146 five star reviews out of a total of 161.
Marcello Arrambide rated on Investimonials.com as the best thing since sliced bread
Yet as my review and common sense would say, he IS the worst, 100% scammer.
To conclude: these two sites are run by shady individuals and advertise proven scams as the best thing a (novice) trader would need. Extreme caution is advised when using them .
You have to use your common sense with sites like these because all reviews are anonymous and unlike Amazon there is no ‘verified purchase’ badge. So for instance an employee of brokerage A can pose as a wronged customer of rival brokerage B and write a negative review. If done intelligently, this can’t really be helped by the sites mentioned.
The danger lies particularly when they are in cahoots with fraudulent vendors. An inexperienced person might search for this Arrambide guy, see that he is in top 10 and actually believe the fabricated reviews.