How to Check an AI Trading Bot Offer Before You Deposit

Start with who is behind it

Check 1 is the age of the domain. The CFTC's customer advisory on AI trading bots tells readers to research a trading website's history by checking when its domain was registered at lookup.icann.org, a free lookup. Enter the domain and read the creation and expiry dates. One offer we read on 3 August 2026 sat on a domain registered on 16 September 2025 for a single year, while its parent site claimed a system tested on more than ten years of data. A young domain proves nothing on its own, since every real firm was new once. A one-year registration behind a ten-year claim is a mismatch worth writing down.

Check 2 is the footer. Look for the name of a regulator and a licence or registration number, then search for that number on the register itself: NFA BASIC for CFTC registrants such as futures commission merchants, retail forex dealers, commodity pool operators and commodity trading advisors, the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site for advisers, and FINRA BrokerCheck for brokers. A number that resolves is only half the check. The SEC keeps a public list of impersonators that copy real firms' registration details from EDGAR and BrokerCheck onto phony websites, so compare the phone number and website on the register with the ones on the offer. The joint SEC, NASAA and FINRA alert on AI fraud suggests exactly that comparison against a firm's Form CRS. The August offer named no regulator anywhere on its own site; only syndicated articles about it did.

Check 3 is the contact block. Put the street address next to the country code of the phone number. The August offer listed a London address, a +357 telephone number, which is Cyprus, and a fax number identical to the phone, with no company registration number to tie the address to any legal entity. None of that convicts anyone. Together it describes a business you cannot locate from its own page.

Read the legal shelf

Check 4: do the legal pages exist? Click Privacy Policy and Terms, then type /privacy and /terms after the domain yourself. On the August offer both footer items were plain text with no link at all, and both addresses returned a 404 error. Its 217 KB homepage did not contain the word disclaimer, the phrase past performance or any word starting with regulat. A trading offer with no terms has told you nothing about what happens to your money.

Check 5: do the legal links on the page the ad sent you to go anywhere? This is a different failure from check 4, and a quieter one. A landing page we read on 20 October 2026 belonged to a seller whose main site does carry a four-paragraph risk disclaimer. The page its ad pointed to had Privacy Policy, Terms of Service and Contact links that all led to '#', in dark grey on a near-black background, and its body never named the product it was selling. The disclosure existed; a visitor from the ad was routed around it. Hover each link before you click and read the address your browser shows. A link to # goes nowhere.

Test the performance claim

Check 6: does each performance figure carry a period, a sample and a method? A line like 92% accuracy, with no dates and no count of calls, cannot be checked by anyone, its author included. The August offer stacked five of them on one page: an accuracy rate, a dollar total its users had supposedly earned last quarter, a total credited to one named trader, a user count, and a backtest on more than ten years of data, with no source for any of them. A backtest is a simulation, not a result. When the two sit in one list, the page is asking you to read them as the same thing.

Check 7: search the page for 'guaranteed'. The CFTC warns that fraudsters use public interest in AI to tout automated trading programs that promise unreasonably high or guaranteed returns, and FINRA's list of fraud red flags opens with guarantees, because every investment carries some risk. The August offer used the word three times in its page source, twice attached to results or payouts. In a case study in the same CFTC advisory, a bot program that guaranteed at least 10% a month was in reality a Ponzi scheme: its operator stole more than 1.7 billion USD in bitcoin from at least 23,000 people and created fake customer balances on demo trading accounts.

Check 8: count the losing rows. Any method with a stop loses some of the time, so a record that lists trades should contain losses. The October seller published a free record for 7 to 20 October with 30 calls: 19 wins, 11 at exactly zero and no losses, which caps its win rate at 63.3% against a headline of about 90%. Its direct sales page listed 50 calls and 50 wins beside an 82.03% win rate, and an 82% rate over 50 calls implies about nine losses that the list leaves out. FINRA warns about the same shape from the other side: returns that rise month after month regardless of conditions should raise suspicion. If the record lists options trades, our track record checker settles each row on the close and adds the drawdown and the losing streaks.

Test the social proof

Check 9: where do the press logos go? A strip of famous mastheads under the words As Featured On looks like coverage. Hover each one. On the October landing page, four of six logos linked into the press-release sections of wire and news sites, with addresses containing /press-release/ and /pressreleases/. A press release is written by the company that issues it and distributed for a fee, so a masthead that hosts one has reported nothing. The August offer showed the pattern another way: at least six syndicated articles called it licensed, while its own homepage named no regulator at all.

Check 10: is the member count a sum? The October landing claimed 1,05,000+ members, which is 105,000 written in Indian digit grouping. The seller ran three free Telegram channels with 57,700, 39,200 and 9,270 subscribers, and those add up to 106,170. Someone in two channels is counted twice and someone in all three is counted three times, so a sum of subscriptions is a ceiling on the number of people, not a count of them. The same seller's homepage said 50,000+.

Check 11: read what the five-star reviews praise. On the October seller's review page, 13 of the 20 newest reviews thanked support staff or installation help, most of them naming the agent. A one-star reviewer quoted an agent offering to help install the trade-copying software in exchange for a review. A rating built that way grades the help desk. It says nothing about whether the trades made money.

Follow the money

Check 12: what does free cost? The October seller offered its paid tier free to anyone who opened and funded an account at its partner broker. The August offer said it accepted no deposits and that all funds stayed in the customer's own account, at a binary options broker it named. Either way the price is a deposit somewhere else. When a broker pays the seller instead of you, ask on what basis: a payment per deposit or per trade rewards the seller for your activity, not for your results. FINRA counts a seller who insists you use a specific trading platform among its red flags.

Then price what the offer leaves out. The CFTC asks readers to consider the effect of fees, spreads and subscription costs on returns. A plan that sells trade calls for 54.99 USD a month needs the account to earn more than 54.99 USD a month after spreads before the first dollar of profit, and a 1,000 USD account needs a 5.5% monthly gain just to pay for the subscription. Run your own numbers through the risk of ruin calculator before you believe anyone else's.

What the regulators already say

Three regulator alerts cover this category and all three are free to read. The CFTC customer advisory titled AI Won't Turn Trading Bots into Money Machines says AI technology cannot predict the future or sudden market changes, describes claims of returns in the tens of thousands of percent and of 100% win rates, and supplies the domain check used in check 1. The joint investor alert from the SEC's Office of Investor Education and Advocacy, NASAA and FINRA, dated 25 January 2024, says securities laws generally require firms, professionals, exchanges and other investment platforms to be registered, and calls claims of high guaranteed returns with little or no risk classic warning signs of fraud. FINRA's red flags page adds guarantees, unregistered sellers, overly consistent returns and requests to use a specific trading platform.

The CFTC's registration page lists where to check: NFA BASIC for CFTC registrants, the SEC's adviser search and FINRA BrokerCheck for brokers. For unregistered entities soliciting US investors it points to two more lists: its own Registration Deficiency (RED) list and the SEC's PAUSE list, which names entities that falsely claim to be registered, licensed or located in the United States, impersonators of genuine firms and fictitious regulators. The CFTC also says foreign firms that solicit US residents to trade are generally required to register with it, though some are exempt, and it names binary options, forex and digital currencies among the markets with many fraud complaints.

What a clean result does not prove

Passing every check clears nothing. A domain can be old, a licence real and a record honest while the product still loses money. The CFTC's registration page puts it plainly: registration and a clean disciplinary record won't protect you from fraud, though most scams involve unregistered entities, people and products. Failing several checks is not proof of fraud either. What the checks give you is a short list of specific, dated facts, each one something you saw for yourself.

When a check cannot be run, record the gap instead of guessing. A review site that blocks you, a funnel that exists only inside a chat app, a register search that returns nothing because the firm is abroad: each is a hole in what you know, not a pass. The same rule runs this site. We print a figure only when we can show where it came from, and we say so when we cannot. If an offer recommends specific trades for your account, our guide to publishers and registered advisers explains which kind of firm is allowed to do that.