Is this crypto bot a scam? A 7-question checklist.

Discord servers and YouTube channels regularly sell bots and signal services for $500 to $2,000. Some are legitimate. Most aren't. The way to tell the difference isn't gut feel. It's a checklist.

If you already bought one and want to know whether you got scammed, this is the framework. If you're considering one, run it through this before you pay.

1. Do they show fees?

Look at every equity curve, every P&L chart, every screenshot. Is there any mention of fees, slippage, or spread? If not, assume the numbers are gross (before fees), which on a typical high-turnover bot means subtracting 20-60% from the claimed returns.

A legitimate vendor publishes after-fee results on the specific exchange they expect you to use. If they show percentages without saying “after fees,” the returns are almost always cherry-picked from a zero-fee backtest.

2. Do they show losing trades?

Every real strategy has losing trades. If every trade in the screenshots is green, either the strategy is new and got lucky on 10 samples, or they're only showing you the winners. Look for the drawdown number. Look for the worst month. Look for the trade that lost the most. If those numbers don't exist, the results are curated.

3. Do they show the trade log, or just the summary?

Summaries lie by omission. A real performance report has every trade with entry, exit, P&L, and timestamp. If they only show “+317% YTD” without the underlying trades, you can't verify the number. And you shouldn't take it on faith.

The tell: ask for 100 consecutive trades from any month. If they refuse or start listing reasons why they can't, that's a scam. If they send you a CSV in under a day, it's worth a closer look.

4. Is the “performance” backtest or live?

Backtests are easy to make look great. Live forward-trading results, where the bot is running on actual exchange APIs with real fills, are hard. If the vendor is advertising “we made +200% last year” and the 200% number comes from a backtest on historical data, ignore it.

The forward test number is the only one that matters. It should be linked to actual exchange accounts or broker statements, not a screenshot of a chart on the vendor's own website.

5. Can you replicate their strategy logic?

A legitimate strategy can be described in plain English. “Enter long when the 20-day breakout fires and ADX is above 25, exit on 3x ATR stop or 10-day trailing.” That's a real strategy and you can test it yourself.

“Proprietary AI models trained on blockchain sentiment” is not a strategy. That's a marketing sentence designed to be un-falsifiable. If a vendor won't describe what the bot does in concrete rules, you can't verify it works, and you shouldn't trust it.

6. Who is the operator and are they identifiable?

Anonymous operators can vanish with your subscription money the moment results turn bad. A real person with a LinkedIn, a years-long trading history on a public forum, or a verifiable employment history at a trading firm has reputation skin in the game. A Discord handle with no connection to a real identity has nothing to lose.

This is the single strongest signal. Scams almost always run on anonymous operators because the playbook depends on being able to disappear when the complaints hit.

7. What do they say when their strategy loses?

Every real strategy goes through drawdowns. How the vendor communicates during those drawdowns tells you everything. Legitimate operators publish the bad months, own the losses, and explain what they think happened. Scammers mute channels, delete messages, blame the user for “not following signals properly,” or disappear for a week and come back with a new pitch.

If you can't find any record of the vendor acknowledging a losing period, either they're new enough that they haven't had one (risky), or they're filtering bad news out of their public channel (scam pattern).

What to do if you already bought one

Don't assume you got scammed. Some bot sellers are legitimate and simply communicate poorly. Run the bot's strategy through an independent backtester with honest fees. If you can describe what the bot does in English, that's enough to test.

Specifically:

1. Ask the vendor for the exact entry and exit rules
2. Ask for the exchange the bot is designed for, so you know the fee structure to test against
3. Run it against 3 years of historical data at realistic fees
4. If the numbers come back wildly different from what the vendor claimed, you got scammed
5. If the numbers come back similar to what the vendor claimed but with much smaller absolute returns, the bot is probably legitimate but the marketing was inflated

Either way you know the truth. That's more than you had when you were running on faith.

A last note on expected outcomes

Even after running the checklist, understand the base rates. In our own research lab, fewer than 5% of tested single-indicator crypto strategies pass honest statistical gates. Multi-indicator combinations fare slightly better. But the population of strategies that actually work with real fees and walk-forward validation is small.

If a vendor claims 300% APY and you run their logic through an honest test and it still shows 300%, don't buy it. Triple-check. Either the test is wrong or the edge is so large the vendor would not be selling it to strangers.