How Not to Lose Money Enrolling in an E-currency Trading Program

Every day brings a new and more exciting way to make money online. If you believe the dozens of advertisements that bombard us everyday, all of us should be millionaires. Why aren't we? Because 95% of the offers to make you rich are pure nonsense.

The latest scheme involves an old idea made new again. In the late 1990's millions of people lost billions of dollars when they discovered the lure of fast, easy profits from day trading. The rebirth of that idea is E-currency trading. Quickly becoming the darling of the online scammers, there are multiple sites offering the perfect trading system to make you rich while you sleep. These schemes are also called Forex trading systems. Forex, of course, stands for trading in foreign currencies.

E-currency trading is not new. It is however, enjoying a new popularity as more and more programs are being offered for sale. These programs, which range in price from $300 to $800 promise to train the investor to make high profits by trading in the foreign exchange markets. As with most other scams, there is always some expert who will tell you which program is the real deal. Don't believe any of them!

According to the Wall Street Journal, the average individual who purchases one of these systems, loses about $15,000. A typical program promises that if you will invest $200 to $5000 in the system, you will make thousands of dollars in profit in just a few weeks. Of course, the more money you invest the faster you will become rich. It's not going to happen.

Prior to the availability of the internet as a trading portal, individuals could only trade in currency through banks or reputable brokerage firms. But with the use of the internet by individual to trade, there is very little control by government regulators. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is charged with the responsibility of regulating the currency trading industry. But it is difficult for them to find the online sites that are responsible for the majority of the fraud and responsible for the losses suffered by individual investors. In the last 5 years, the Commission has prosecuted about 80 cases on behalf of about 23,000 individual investors. Those investors lost over 350 million dollars.

Some of the so-called experts will tell you that there is an even better system for making money than an E-currency program. They will encourage you to join an arbitrage trading program. The wonderful difference is that you can buy this program for a mere $139.

Arbitrage is simply a financial word which means taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets. E-currency trading is simply arbitrage of currency markets. They are the same thing. The scammers will tell you that arbitrage trading has been around forever as if that makes it safe.

It has been around for years because banks and investment companies have professional traders who devote their full attention to trading foreign currencies. A few experts can arbitrage the foreign currency market for large gains. The individual is always under capitalized and could never compete with large financial institutions doing the same kind of trading.

The simple fact is that if you want to try E-currency trading or foreign exchange arbitrage, understand that it is a very high risk strategy. The only funds you should ever use for this kind of investment are funds that you can afford to lose.

There is one more consideration. Many of the early guru's of Forex or E-currency trading have been prosecuted and even gone to jail. If you are invited to join such a program and offered the opportunity to enroll others in the program, you may be putting yourself at risk of prosecution for fraud. Today I counted more than two dozen different Forex or E-currency trading sites to entice individual investors. Do yourself a favor. Stay very far away from all of them.