Tips To Avoid Scammers At The MQL5 Market

Keep the following in mind before buying an EA (Expert Advisor or robot) at the MQL5 community market:

1 - Never buy an EA that has a version for MT4 only. The reason being that the scammers found a special way of coding that makes the EA perform really well on the MT4 backtester. It seems MT4 interpolates the close data even if you use real ticks from dukascopy exported from a software like tickstory. This flaw is exploited by the scammers to produce those results that look like a holy grail. There is even some threads there talking about this thing, look for "Tester Grails". As soon as you put the EA on a live chart, the performance is completely different. That is why they don´t offer a MT5 version, because if they did, the EA would perform real badly when you tested in MT5 with the "every tick based on real ticks" option.

2 - If the sellers offers the EA only for MT4 and refuses to provide you a demo for forward testing, probably scammer. He knows that the EA will fall apart on the live chart.

3 - Avoid the sellers that sells tons of EAs, specially if most of the EAs area all for the same market. Those are the copy and paste shop runners. They sell the same EA under a different name and just with a few parameters change as if it were a new product.


Now, if the EA has version for both MT4 and MT5 and the performance on MT5 is good, high chance that the EA is solid and will do well. You can even test in MT4 too if you want, the results should be similar.

If you follow the above you gonna avoid headaches over there, because that site is a scammers heaven. If you end up buying something, there is no refund, your money is gone and even if you report those guys to service desk, they won´t do anything.

Good luck

Very good tips

Quoting meck1

Disliked

{quote} Very good tips

Ignored

Complementing my OP, I just wanna post two examples of scammer profiles here so you can avoid those types and know what too look for:

https://www.mql5.com/en/users/nguyenhanghaiha

https://www.mql5.com/en/users/lykakuruhl (this one here even has two 1 star reviews with people saying they got scammed)

Check those profiles here and the products. Lots of red flags, the main ones being:

-Tons of EAs
-MT4 Version Only
-All of them showing holy grail test results

If you inspect closely you will see they are basically running a copy and paste shop. I bet the farm that if you download their EAs and run on the tester you will see they doing the exact same thing. Even the EA settings should have the exact same inputs (or minus or plus one) with a slightly different value adjustment.

Another great tell is the release date of the EA, you can see that they were all released very recently and with a short interval between them. do you know why? Because they keep deleting the pages of the products that start to get bad reviews exposing them. They delete the page, just change the name of the EA file and reupload as a new product.

Do you think the service desk is not aware of them? I am sure they must receive tons of complaints from people who got scammed, they just don´t do anything because they earn money too per sale.

The only money those scammers make with their EAs is with sales.

Great post.

A new type of scammer here who found a way to fool you even with MT5


https://www.mql5.com/en/users/dmitrievsky/seller

But don´t despair because there is a way to see if the results are fake or real.

What this guy is doing is: somehow he is programming the EA with historical data from the symbols he recommends (EURUSD, GPBUSD and AUDUSD), that is why the backtests have extremely perfect entries and exits, something that is very unlikely. Then by the end of june this year the EA starts doing real bad on the backtest.

If you check the release date of the EA, you can see it´s 3rd of July. So you should go "a-ha" by now.
He released the EA on the beginning of july which is when it starts doing bad on the backtest, meaning the EA does not have the data for the perfect trades.
You can bet the farm that in the next update of the EA it will do great on july.

So guys, now you have to pay attention to the release date of the EA, the date of the latest update, and see if the EA performs well only up to that date and then starts tanking. If performs well past the date it was released or updated, then it´s solid EA.

Good tips. But would you sell your profitable strategy? Think about it for a moment... I'm also selling my EA, but without a strategy. I would estimate that 99% of EAs are not worth the money after all.

And by the way, I could also easily create a backtest with 100% profitable trades. Simply store the opening and closing time of each trade in the EA, done. Maybe add a few losing trades, easy.

Complementary to this important topic of debunking manipulated backtests
I have listed here all the identified tricks people should be aware of (please note I am also an algo developer on mql5).

How not to be fooled and to evaluate and algo
https://www.mql5.com/en/blogs/post/763236

thanks for the tip bro. It gets hard even to separate your own self from these scammers when you're affiliate marketing

I don't know what you meant by "affiliate marketing" as I am the owner of the boutique but I kinda understood your ethical warning.
So I added this mention in the previous post
"(please note I am also an algo developer on mql5)".

I do believe there is a place for serious algo sellers that provide interesting products with all warnings about risk in trading to be made.
Like in any industry right ?

Oh I saw you last post on The Mindset on another topic and understood you were really talking about yourself ;-))

Anyway I was the right move to add this in my own post ^^