A channel with a confirmed scam report against it cannot buy anything sold about a channel — and a paid listing it already bought stays on the page wearing our warning, not quietly taken down. Money here buys visibility and nothing else; the only thing we ask readers for is their story.
What is the rule?
Money here buys visibility and nothing else. Not a badge, not a better number, and not our silence.
A channel with a confirmed scam report standing against it cannot buy any of the three products sold about a channel: the checkout refuses the order. A paid listing the channel had already bought does not quietly come down either — it keeps the slot, framed in red, carrying our warning and a link to the report.
And the homepage, every channel page and every article — including this one, just below — end with the one thing we do ask readers for: what happened to you.
What do we sell, exactly?
Everything a reader comes here for is free: the ratings, the replayed track records, the scam database, the reviews, the forum. What costs money is extra backtest runs, and three things a channel owner can buy about their own channel: a listing tier (Featured or Spotlight), a section of their own page that they write, and a Promo banner.
All three buy visibility. None of them touches anything we measure. The score, the hit rate, Verified status, the activity labels, the edit counter, the reviews and the scam reports on a page are all indifferent to whether its owner has paid us for anything. That has been in our Terms from the start, and the checkout enforces it rather than trusting anyone to remember.
What happens when a scam report is confirmed against a paying channel?
Each of the three products answers differently, and the differences are deliberate.
- New purchases stop. While a confirmed report stands, the checkout refuses all three products for that channel. We would rather not take money we would then have to argue about.
- The Promo banner stops being shown the moment the report is confirmed. That is automatic — nobody has to remember to do it. A banner is the owner's words in the owner's voice, and printing someone's advertisement with a warning attached is still printing the advertisement.
- The owner-written page section is taken down by a moderator, with a reason and an email — not blanked without notice.
- The paid listing stays up. It keeps the slot that was paid for, and it is shown with a red frame, the line "Verified scam report on this channel — be extremely careful", and a link to the report itself. The outbound link to the channel is removed: the card no longer sells the click the report exists to prevent.
Why does the listing stay up instead of coming down?
Because taking it down would be the wrong kind of mercy.
A listing card contains no words of the owner's — only the channel's name and our numbers. Quietly removing it would hand the channel back its anonymity at the exact moment a warning is most useful. The channel paid for visibility, and visibility is precisely what a warning needs; so it gets what it paid for, wearing what we found.
The small print follows the same line. We do not refund — payments here are final. On the banner and the page section, the days lost to a report that is later resolved are put back by hand. A listing loses no days, because it was never taken down. The full text is in Terms of Service §11 and the Provider Terms.
What do we ask readers for?
Not money. The block that now closes the homepage, channel pages and articles asks for exactly one thing: your story.
Everything on this site starts with something a person went through — a channel that went quiet, a withdrawal that never arrived, an evening spent working out how the business actually runs. The block offers two doors: review a channel you followed, or simply tell what happened on the forum. If you are writing a review, How to write a review that holds up is the standard moderation will hold it to.
Two doors, deliberately not three. There is no "file a scam report" button on the storefront, because a scam report has to carry evidence, and a button in a feel-good block collects accusations that arrive without any. And the block never appears on a scam report page at all: someone reading one may be in the middle of losing money, and at that moment we ask for nothing.
Since when
The scam-report gate and the red frame on paid listings — since 24 August 2026; the story block — since 25 August 2026. The full text lives in Terms §11, the Provider Terms and the Community Rules.