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If you look at the most-downloaded finance apps in Egypt at the moment for Android devices, the first company in the trading industry to come up is not Exness, it’s not MetaTrader, and it’s not XM.
It is…Olymptrade (19th). The next is Pocket Option (20th) and after that it’s Expert Option (23rd).
Alongside a couple of other firms, these companies pop up everywhere. I find them interesting to a degree that seems to weird everyone out.
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The main reason for that is they are simultaneously gigantic, omnipresent in almost all emerging markets, and yet have completely opaque ownership structures.
That is a rare combination to have. It is weird to think there are companies out there in the ether dumping more on ads annually than a lot of brokers earn in revenue, where they have these traits.
To give some examples of this scale, earlier this year Expert Option filed a complaint against someone who they said was infringing on their copyright.
They claim in that complaint to have over 70m app downloads since launching a decade ago and to have regularly been among the most-downloaded finance apps in the world on the Google Play Store. On a smaller scale, Olymptrade has run close to 1,000 Google ads in the last month alone.
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Anyway, something I noticed recently on Telegram was a consistent stream of ‘people’ who were trying to get me to join their Telegram channels via paid ads, who were ultimately funnelling traffic to Pocket Option.
All of these channels had the same NPC, robot vibe that you get when you looking at comments on some brokers’ TrustPilot pages or YouTube videos (‘wow, I’m so happy I traded with Pocket Option after making $600 and also getting paid so fast. What a great and amazing company Pocket Option is and I would recommend them to anyone’).
For example, here is Evelyn Morgan and here is Simon Bakker.
So far I’ve found six channels like this, with accounts on both Telegram and YouTube, but there are probably more. They all have that weird, uncanny valley feeling to them and the goal always seems to be to create a Trustworthy Generic WASP™ persona.
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So how does this work?
First you create fake profiles on Telegram and YouTube for these people.
You then buy loads of followers on both platforms to give your puppet characters some superficial level of credibility. Evelyn has almost 300k subs, for example, but her videos tend to get less than 50 views.
After that you set up ads on Telegram. This is almost certainly done via an ad network based in Cyprus, although it could also be directly on Telegram’s ad platform itself.
Before you start running the ads, make sure that you have filters in place to avoid being scammed by the ad network because they’re going to send you a lot of fake traffic – Вор у во́ра дуби́нку укра́л.
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With those checks in place, you can start spamming your target markets with Telegram ads, directing people to join the Telegram channels.
You then have other ‘trust markers’ that you can link to in those channels, like the YouTube channels.
What is the end goal of the channels? They are essentially a copy paste of signal channels that brokers are using, meaning the goal is to get people to sign up (obviously) and to copy Evelyn Morgan or John Smith’s trading signals.
However, you have that added layer of credibility because, to the end user, it’s not the broker doing the advertising, it’s one of their partners who ‘makes’ loads of money trading with them.
The end result is that you have the sort of higher trust, more personable influencers who can send you traffic. Except in this case, Pocket Option seems to just employ the influencers.
To top that off, if there are any problems with their marketing or other behaviours, Pocket Option – although I doubt they’d care either way – can keep themselves at arm’s length and blame Evelyn and the other NPCs they created.
It’s simple bratan – why have an IB when you can be the IB?
