It doesn’t offer any real trading services but is used as a vehicle for scammers to convince victims that they’re involved in legitimate financial activities.
Victims are often targeted at random via social media platforms or dating websites before being befriended by a scammer posing as someone else.
Once the scammer has gained the victim’s trust, they’ll turn the conversation to investing and suggest Markets1 as a platform where huge returns are available with little risk.
However, once a victim has deposited a significant amount of money, they’ll find their accounts blocked and any ‘profits’ locked as well.
The scammers will try to extract further funds by making up various ‘fees’ which need to be paid before any money is released.
These are fake though, and any further cash sent by the victims will be stolen as well.
Spotting the Markets1 scam
The Markets1 scam is relatively easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for.
Some of the things that give it away include:
- A website that contains very little real content compared to a legitimate financial platform.
- Much of the content that is there appears to be scraped from other sites.
- No information about the company, its location, or the team on the ‘about us’ page.
- No social media presence or engagement with channels.
- No apps are offered for using a mobile version of the platform.
- There are multiple scam reports online from Markets1 victims.
- A relatively new domain name registration.
- The only point of contact is a single email address, with no online chat or helpline.
Putting these issues together with the reports from people who’ve contacted Chargebackpros about Markets1 leads us to conclude that this is a scam site.
Recovering funds from Markets1
It’s highly unlikely that you’ll get your funds back from Markets1, but it’s still worth reporting what’s happened to the authorities.
There are private companies that might be able to help which I’ve written about here.
