How to spot a make money online scam

A dashboard showing $30,000 in a month is the most common hook. It almost always shows sales, not profit. In dropshipping, a store that works often keeps only 10% to 20% of each sale after the product, shipping, duty, fees, refunds and the ads that found the buyer. A screenshot says nothing about the months that lost money, or the students who never made a sale.

Check whether the method even works here. Much of the dropshipping content on your feed is about TikTok Shop, which as of 2026 does not accept Canadian sellers. Under the Competition Act, false or misleading claims are illegal, so ask for profit after ad spend across all students, not one person's best month.

The US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) says the Growth Cave operation took about US$50 million, partly by promising US$20,000 to US$50,000 in passive income from making online courses. Buyers were then sold a done-for-you upgrade for US$30,000 to US$50,000 more, and the promised services never arrived. Most buyers never made a sale. Canadians bought these programs too.

Real courses keep selling only while the creator keeps marketing them, which is the opposite of passive. A course worth buying is taught by someone with results outside of selling courses, promises a specific skill rather than financial freedom, and has a refund policy in writing.

Ads promise an Amazon store run for you, often powered by AI, for a big upfront fee. In the US, the Automators AI scheme sold done-for-you online stores; regulators said most buyers lost money, won a judgment of about US$21.8 million and banned two owners for life from e-commerce coaching.

The pattern is the same each time: you pay up front, someone else runs the store, and income is promised. Amazon closed many of these stores, and buyers were left with nothing. A Canadian store also has to handle duty, English and French labels and tax registration, which the pitch never mentions.

Since 2023 the pitch has moved to AI: an agency template, a chatbot business kit, or a store where AI does the work. In its 2024 Operation AI Comply, the US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) said buyers of one online store scheme, Ascend Ecom, lost about US$25 million after promises of income from AI that almost never came.

The AI tools themselves are real and cheap, and n8n, Make and Zapier all have free tiers to learn on. What a kit cannot sell you is the hard part: knowing an industry, finding clients, following Canada's privacy and anti-spam laws, and fixing things when they break. Learn from free documentation first.

Urgency is a sales tool, not a fact. Only 3 spots left, a price that doubles at midnight, a call where you must decide today: all of it is there to stop you from checking. A real course will still be for sale next week.

Watch for the ladder. A free webinar leads to a $500 course, then a $5,000 mentorship, then a done-for-you package for tens of thousands. Each step suggests the last one was missing the secret. Decide your limit before the first call, and never borrow to pay for a course.

Trading groups on Discord and Telegram sell monthly access to someone's buy and sell calls. Wins get posted, and losses quietly disappear. Many creators also earn a commission when you open a brokerage account through their link.

Selling trading advice or managing other people's money needs registration with your provincial securities commission. Promoters who are paid to push a stock must say so: in 2025 the Alberta Securities Commission fined a YouTube finance creator $30,000 for not doing it.

Online prop (proprietary trading) firms sell a test, not a job. You pay a fee for a simulated account, and the fees from the many who fail are the firm's main income. Topstep says only 0.71% of its funded traders were moved to a live account in 2025, and an industry study found about 7% of accounts ever reached a payout.

Most of these firms are based abroad and not registered with any Canadian securities regulator, so you rely on their contract. My Forex Funds, one of the largest, was run by an Ontario company; in 2023 the OSC (Ontario Securities Commission) ordered it to stop trading, and traders waited years for money they were owed.

A coin trending on social media is often being sold by the people promoting it. On the memecoin site Pump.fun, only 0.4% of more than 13 million wallets had made US$10,000 or more in profit.

Crypto platforms serving Canadians must register with provincial regulators, and the CSA (Canadian Securities Administrators) publishes the list. A platform not on it, or one offering high leverage to ordinary customers, is a warning sign. When the Vancouver platform QuadrigaCX failed in 2019, more than 76,000 clients lost at least $169 million, most of it to fraud by its founder. And if you lose money, ignore anyone who offers to recover it for a fee.

Search the person's name with the words scam, lawsuit and refund. Read reviews outside their own site, especially on Reddit, where buyers compare notes. Then ask whether their income comes from the thing they teach or from teaching it.

Ask three questions in writing: what share of students made back the price, what the refund policy is, and exactly what you get. For anyone offering investment advice, look them up in the national registration search run by the CSA (Canadian Securities Administrators). No registration means no personal investment advice.

Try the free versions first. Shopify's guides, Amazon Seller University, YouTube's creator guides, brokerage practice accounts and the material from the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada cover most of what paid courses repackage.

Ask for a refund in writing right away, pointing to any promise that was not kept. Provincial consumer laws, such as Ontario's, give buyers rights on online contracts. If you paid by card, ask your card issuer about a chargeback quickly, because there are time limits. Keep screenshots of the sales page, the income claims and your messages.

Report it to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, and to your provincial securities commission if trading or investing was involved. Misleading ads can be reported to the Competition Bureau. Then ignore anyone who contacts you offering to get the money back for a fee.