Lessons Learned: How to Move Forward After a Trading Scam Experience
If you’ve fallen victim to a trading scam, you’re not alone. Over £1billion a year is lost to fraud in the UK alone, and it’s becoming increasingly common for fraudsters to choose trading as their vehicle for crime. If you’re one of the unfortunate victims, the impact can be felt both financially and emotionally. But there are things you can do to move forward after a trading scam experience.
Explore ways to get your money back
If you’ve fallen victim to a trading scam experience, your first thought will probably be, “How do I get my money back?”.
Fortunately, you have a few options:
Bank
Your bank is a great starting point if you’ve lost money as a result of a trading scam. Whilst the extent to which your bank can help with recovering lost money depends on a range of factors, at the very least they’ll be able to offer professional advice and support.
You should contact your bank as soon as you suspect fraud. Acting swiftly means banks can potentially prevent money from leaving your account or freeze your card to prevent further stolen funds.
Wealth recovery companies
There are also specific companies that help with retrieving funds resulting from scams and frauds. Often, these companies specialise in a specific area of fraud that banks are less likely to be able to help with.
For instance, cryptocurrency trading scams can be particularly difficult for banks to help with as many areas of the crypto world operate anonymously. If you’ve fallen victim to a crypto trading scam, specialised crypto wealth recovery companies will likely be your best place to turn as they employ unique tracing methods designed for fraud recovery on the blockchain.
Don’t chase your losses
If you’re a trader who’s tried and failed to recover lost funds, you might be tempted to make up your losses by trading even more frequently. This is a very dangerous strategy and is known as ‘chasing trades’ or ‘chasing your losses’.
Chasing losses is common in gambling, particularly with those who suffer from addiction and involves gamblers continuously upping their stake in an attempt to recover losses from lost bets. This can very easily snowball out of control and ultimately lead to the individual losing even more money. If you attempt to do this through trading, there’ll be nowhere you can turn if the trades don’t turn out to be as fruitful as you hoped for.
In addition, those who are overly keen to chase losses are the perfect target for lost money scams. Here, scammers disguise themselves as genuine wealth recovery experts in an attempt to lure victims in before convincing them to hand over money for their service.
To avoid losing even more money, consider taking a break from trading after fraud and be wary of anyone who makes the first contact with you regarding wealth recovery.
Look after your mental health
The period after falling victim to trading fraud, or any other type of fraud, can be a very difficult time. Even for those fortunate enough to recover lost assets, the emotional stress and shock of a fraudulent ordeal can cause enormous stress and anxiety.
In fact, two-thirds of scam victims experience some form of emotional effect as a result of their experience. If you’re experiencing stress, anxiety or depression as a result of fraud, you should seriously consider exploring ways to deal with the emotional impact.
If you’re suffering mentally as a result of fraud, consider contacting one of the groups below: