High Yield Investment Programs: The Internet’s Oldest Scam

High-Yield Investment Programs, commonly abbreviated HYIPs, are among the longest-running online scam categories — and Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps devotes Chapter 42 to a pattern that has operated openly for decades.

Bick describes HYIPs as a recognized category of online Ponzi scheme, typically advertising fixed daily or weekly returns, often one to three percent daily, with minimal disclosed detail about the underlying investment activity supposedly generating those returns. What’s notable, per the book, is how openly these have operated for decades, with new platforms regularly replacing collapsed predecessors under different names.

The chapter notes something particularly relevant to this book’s overall thesis: HYIPs frequently borrow legitimacy-signaling language from the broader financial world, such as “forex trading,” “commodity arbitrage,” or more recently “AI trading,” while providing no verifiable connection between deposited funds and any real trading account. Dedicated HYIP-monitoring websites track the typical lifecycle of these platforms, which often collapse within months of launch.

Bick’s practical guidance centers on pattern recognition: recognizing HYIP language patterns — specific fixed daily percentage returns, tiered deposit “investment plans” with escalating minimums, heavy affiliate and referral marketing — provides a fast pattern-match against one of the internet’s longest-running and most well-documented fraud categories, regardless of the specific cover story used in any given iteration.

This chapter is a genuinely useful reminder that “AI trading” is just the current label being applied to a scam structure that has existed in essentially unchanged form for decades under different branding. Recognizing the underlying HYIP pattern makes any specific dressed-up version considerably easier to spot.

Felix Bick’s treatment of HYIPs in How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps connects the current AI trading fraud wave directly to its long, well-documented lineage.