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, fees, refunds and the ads that found the buyer. A screenshot also says nothing about the months that lost money, or the hundreds of students who never made a sale.

Under the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) Business Opportunity Rule, sellers of business opportunities who make income claims have to be able to back them up. Ask for profit after ad spend, across all students, not one person's best month. If the answer is another screenshot, you have your answer.

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) says the Growth Cave operation took about $50 million, partly by promising $20,000 to $50,000 in passive income from making online courses. Buyers were then sold a done-for-you upgrade for $30,000 to $50,000 more. Most never made a sale. In January 2026 its owners were banned from selling business opportunities, and its co-chief executives had to sell a house, a Rolls-Royce and a Ferrari to repay buyers.

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 or Walmart store run for you, often powered by AI, for a big upfront fee. The owners of Automators AI, which also sold coaching as Ecom Skool, agreed to a judgment of about $21.8 million and a lifetime ban from selling e-commerce coaching in 2024. Buyers of FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) Machine lost about $15.9 million, according to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).

The pattern is the same each time: you pay up front, someone else runs the store, and income is promised. Amazon shut down many of these stores, and buyers were left with nothing. If someone else runs it and promises you income, treat it as a red flag.

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 FTC (Federal Trade Commission) said buyers of Ascend Ecom lost about $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 and fixing things when they break. Learn from free documentation first, and be wary of anyone whose income comes mainly from teaching the business.

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 broker account through their link.

In 2022 the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) ordered Warrior Trading to pay $3 million, saying most of its customers lost money while it advertised its founder's gains, and in 2023 it sent refunds to about 20,400 people. Trading other people's money or selling investment advice needs registration with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) or your state.

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.

Firms have also failed to pay. In 2025 about 1,272 traders at The Funded Trader had waited more than a year for payouts, and some settled for 10% to 30% of what they were owed. Before paying, check how long the firm has existed, its record of paying, and what its contract says. FTMO (a Czech prop firm), for one, states that all its accounts are demo accounts.

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 $10,000 or more. Americans reported losing about $11.4 billion to crypto-related fraud in 2025, more than half of all internet crime losses the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) recorded.

Losing once makes you a target again. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) logged more than 10,500 complaints in 2025 about fake recovery services that promise to get stolen coins back for a fee, with about $1.4 billion lost. Nobody legitimate charges you up front to recover stolen crypto.

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 on BrokerCheck, run by FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). No registration means no personal investment advice.

Try the free versions first. Shopify's guides, Amazon Seller University, YouTube's creator guides, broker practice accounts and regulator education cover most of what paid courses repackage.

Ask for a refund in writing right away, pointing to any promise that was not kept. 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 FTC (Federal Trade Commission), and to the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) Internet Crime Complaint Center if crypto or a large sum is involved. Then ignore anyone who contacts you offering to get the money back for a fee.