Some people fish. Some people restore old motorbikes. I answer scam messages.
I know how that sounds. When a stranger writes to offer a job that pays for liking videos, the sensible move is to block them and get on with your day. I reply. Then I take up as much of their time as they are willing to give me.
The one rule of the hobby
A scammer's day has a fixed number of hours in it. Every hour spent on me is an hour not spent on someone who would believe them. My grandma, for example.
That's the whole theory. I never said it was sophisticated.
I'm not picky about the genre either. Any type of scammer will do. Task scammers are a favorite: the ones who pay you a few dollars for simple "tasks" and then ask you to deposit money to unlock the rest. I've gone as far as tracking those down.
It earns nothing. It will never go on a resume. I can't prove it has saved a single person. I do it anyway, which is what makes it a hobby and not a business plan.
Then I built a signal copier
TTMT copies trades from Telegram signal channels onto your own MetaTrader account. Running it means I read a lot of signal channels, and after a while the hobby started twitching.
Here's the pattern. A channel posts decent signals for months. Then a message appears offering "account management": send your MT4/MT5 login, or send money, and the admin trades it for you for a share of the profits.
I'll say it flatly. Signals can be legit. Account management offers are scams. Even when nobody runs off with the money, the deal is the same: they get access to your funds, they take a cut when they win, and 100% of the risk stays with you when they lose.
What bothered me most was my own product. TTMT's Explore page showed that channel's real, good numbers – and those numbers were vouching for the offer.
I can waste one scammer's afternoon. I can't do that for every channel my users follow. So I automated the hobby.
The hobby gets a codebase
On October 2, 2026, TTMT started scanning.
- It reads the channel's own posts. Never a group member's message – a warning is a statement about the channel, so only the channel's words count.
- A keyword filter finds candidates, then an AI check reads each one. The check has to quote the exact sentence that makes the offer. No quote, no suggestion.
- I review a suggestion before a warning goes public. Today no warning publishes without me reading the evidence first.
- A flagged channel gets an "Account-management risk" label on Explore and in your dashboard, with the reason. Before you enable one, you tick a box that says you won't share your trading login or send money to anyone to manage your account.
The warning says what the channel did. It does not call the channel a scam, and it does not remove it. You can still copy its signals through TTMT – on an account in your name, at your lot size, with nobody else holding your password.
A broker referral link is not what I'm flagging. Plenty of free channels pay their way by asking you to open an account through their link. The account stays yours. That's a different thing.
What it found in the first few days
As of October 6, 2026:
- About 264,000 channel posts read.
- 775 posts where the AI check found an account management offer.
- 146 channels with a suggested warning.
- 6 of those reviewed by me so far: 5 warnings published, 1 thrown out because the scanner got it wrong.
That last one matters. One wrong call in six is why I read every suggestion myself, and why 140 channels are still waiting on me. Turns out a hobby with a codebase comes with a backlog.
What it can't do
The scanner reads what a channel posts in public. It can't see a DM. If an admin makes the offer privately, the only people who know are the ones who received it.
So if you're a TTMT subscriber and a channel you follow asks for your login or offers to trade your money, report it in TTMT. And if you run a channel and think a warning is wrong, write to [email protected]. I read those.
If you want the long version of how these offers work and what regulators say about them, I wrote that up here: Forex account management scam: why good channels cost you.
I still answer scam messages on my own phone. This version works for everyone who uses TTMT, and it doesn't need me to stay up for it.
