Inside the Billion-Dollar Scam Industry Bick’s Book Exposes

It’s easy to think of investment fraud as isolated incidents — a few bad actors here and there. Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps makes a compelling case that this framing badly understates the scale of the problem.

Chapter 3 of the book lays out sobering context: investment fraud connected to cryptocurrency and online trading platforms has cost victims billions of dollars annually according to regulatory and law enforcement reporting in recent years. These aren’t small, isolated operations — many are organized, well-funded, and run with the operational discipline of a real business, complete with customer support teams and marketing departments.

Perhaps most striking is Bick’s discussion of organized fraud networks operating across borders, some using trafficked or coerced labor to run so-called “pig butchering” scams — long-con romance and investment frauds that build trust over weeks before soliciting money. This isn’t the work of lone opportunists; it’s professionalized criminal enterprise with scripts, quotas, and continual reinvestment in more convincing technology.

Bick argues that recognizing this scale reframes the entire problem for individual investors. This isn’t a matter of avoiding a few bad apples — it’s a matter of navigating an environment where a meaningful share of “opportunities” encountered online are professionally engineered specifically to separate people from their money.

This chapter sets a sobering but important tone for the rest of the book, establishing why the detailed, mechanism-by-mechanism approach Bick takes throughout How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps is genuinely necessary rather than excessive caution. When an industry operates at this scale and sophistication, casual vigilance isn’t enough — readers need the kind of systematic understanding this book provides.