Apps That Never Actually Trade — The Ultimate Deception

At the most extreme end of AI trading fraud sits a category Felix Bick describes in stark terms in Chapter 17 of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps: platforms that never place a single real trade at all.

As Bick explains, the entire “trading engine” in these operations is a front-end display connected to a database that increments displayed balances according to a formula, entirely independent of any real market activity. There’s no algorithm making decisions, no trades executing anywhere — just numbers on a screen designed to look like the product of sophisticated trading.

The book offers a genuinely interesting technical angle for more advanced readers: these operations are sometimes discoverable through basic technical inspection. Examining a platform’s network traffic may reveal no connection to any real exchange API, or the displayed “market prices” may fail to match real-time quotes from legitimate sources during periods of high volatility, when a fabricated system’s designers haven’t bothered to update reference data.

For non-technical readers, Bick offers a more practical, universally applicable signal: legitimate trading requires a licensed broker-dealer or exchange as an intermediary, holding client funds in segregated, regulated accounts. If a platform holds your deposited funds directly, with no independent custodian, there is no structural mechanism preventing it from simply fabricating whatever “trading results” it wishes to display.

This structural framing is one of the book’s most valuable contributions — it gives readers a test that doesn’t depend on technical sophistication or catching a specific lie, but instead depends on understanding how legitimate custody arrangements actually work.

For anyone evaluating a trading app and wondering whether the underlying trading is even real, this chapter of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps by Felix Bick gives you both the conceptual understanding and the practical test to find out.