DT,
It's newbies that need protecting from the scum in the trading world that rips them off.
My experience of attempting to do this for newbies and others on these boards in the past was that they didn't want it and actually took a "shoot the messenger" mentality to me for trying to help them in the first place. I couldn't understand why to start with but then when I looked back at some other experiences I began to understand why which I will come to a bit later in this post.
The view that T2W can somehow assess the credibility of vendors is of limited use in my view and for two reasons.
1) They don't have the resource to do it
2) Even if they did faking of results is so easy that it would be pointless
When you consider that the FSA and ASA with all their resources still cannot stop rogue organisations from conning the public on an ongoing basis then to think that T2W could do better is not credible.
Coming back to this "We must protect newbies" mentality even when they don't want it and why that is the case. To me it is similar to the last government putting in level after level of legislation and red tape in order to protect us from ourselves. All it did was stop us being able to make our own decisions and no one wants that.
Here is a something that happened about 7 years ago and demonstrates why newbies were quite negative to me when I tried to warn them of unscrupulous vendors.
In the UK a new pyramid scheme called "Women Empowering Women" was sweeping the country. I had seen this the year before elsewhere in the UK but now it had reached my home town. A friend of mine called me and told me he had a business proposition which he was so enthusiastic about that I could hardly say anything. Anyway it was this same pyramid scheme and he was going to a meeting with over 100 other keen enthusiasts where he had to pay £3K and then recruit 12 others into the scheme after which he would then get £12K back.
I knew that this had already been running in my home town for 6 months before he called me and that almost everyone had not made any money at all with it. I sat him down and explained in detail that I had worked out that this was at saturation level with everyone currently in it struggling to find 12 people to join their level. Also with the possibility of 100 new people joining that the competition to get others to join would increase even further.
He rebuked me for being so negative about this wonderful opportunity. I thought that maybe I had not been clear enough or that I needed to present more proof. So I gathered even more evidence showing him letters sent to other friends of mine from people currently in the pyramid who were literally begging people to join. He again dismissed this so I made one last attempt and went through the maths of his competition but it made no difference and he started to ridicule me. He went ahead and borrowed £3K and joined the scheme and as I had predicted he lost it with the whole thing collapsing just a few weeks later.
When I saw him he still refused (and does to this day) to believe that it was not a scam and thinks it went wrong for utterly ridiculous reasons.
The reality is he didn't want protecting from this scam because he wanted to be responsible for his own decision even though it cost him dearly and I have seen this happen many times now with many different people. This is the same reason I was getting such a negative response from those I tried to warn about some of the misgivings of vendors on the boards.
I have learned that there is no point in trying to protect newbies or anyone else for that matter and that I was naive in believing that they would welcome my efforts to help them. When someone sees a potential way to make money then they often do not want to hear that it is not possible and the only way they will learn is by hard nosed experience.
Paul
