While a lot of information comes from real experience of people that have used a brokers’ services, some may have a hidden agenda of promoting the broker. Promoting a broker is OK, as long as it’s done in a transparent way. Let’s see the 5 ways to identify fake reviews:
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Look at the site: if this officially a forex news site / education site, but the first thing that you see is a big list of forex broker reviews, then you can take the reviews with a grain of salt – the site’s sole purpose is to make money on affiliates and not necessarily have up to date news. So are the reviews genuine?
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Check the link: If you see something like landingID=3 or affiliate=fxsite at the end of the link that leads from the review page to the broker’s site – this is definitely an affiliate link – the reviewer gets paid for referring clients to the broker. Getting paid for referrals is legitimate, but hiding the fact that the reviewer is paid for the service isn’t proper. For site owners, the solution is to write a disclosure about the affiliation. This way, the readers can judge for themselves if this genuine or not, having the knowledge about the affiliation deal.
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Option to comment: If the site has an option to add your own comment on the review, actually your own mini-review on the broker, that’s a good sign of openness. But this may be tricky as well. Try commenting and see if your comment really appears on the site, or if it’s held for moderation forever. Sometimes comments are automatically posted, but are later deleted when they aren’t convenient. Such sites’ openness, but it’s fake.
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Check the forum member: if a forum member posts a reply with a recommendation about a forex broker, even without an affiliate link, he could be associated with the broker. If he’s officially representing the broker, that’s like a full disclosure – you can judge him for yourself. But if he’s not? Well, check out what else he wrote on the forum. If he’s a regular participant, it could be genuine, but if his main agenda is promoting the same broker, don’t take his word. I must say the Forex Factory is doing a good job at getting such promoters out of the forums.
- Search the web for negative commentary: A common check if to search for the name of the broker with the word “sucks” – this will easily bring you to negative reviews, and you can see how bad they are. Getting results for this search doesn’t mean the broker is necessarily bad, but this is how you’ll get some negative words as well.
Do you have additional ideas about how to find false broker reviews?
This is a guest post from FXStreet, a leading provider of data, real time analysis and actionable tools for Forex traders.
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