Worth knowing
A short video, a Telegram channel, a few weeks of confidence-building, then a link. Here is the mechanism, step by step, and where the money goes at each one. This isn't a method we're offering you: it's a funnel worth recognising.
Six stages, always the same, in this order. It turns up in the files examined by the French National Assembly in 2025 and in the investigative programme Cash Investigation devoted to the subject; the profile of Rayan PSN gives a documented example, with a Telegram channel of around 230,000 members.
A very brief format shows a lifestyle, a gain, a screenshot. The aim isn't to convince: it's to get enough views to catch a few hundred curious people with each post.
The video sells nothing. It points to a channel, almost always Telegram, because a channel escapes the algorithms and lets you write straight to an audience that has agreed to receive the messages.
For days or weeks the channel posts analyses, results, screenshots of gains. This stage sells nothing either: it installs the idea that the person speaking knows what they're talking about.
An account presented as a help desk replies privately, guides, reassures, walks you through signing up. This is the stage that turns an audience into funded accounts, and the one that creates the impression of a regulated service.
The link carries an affiliate identifier. The platform therefore knows exactly who brought this client in, and for how long it owes them for it.
It lands once the account is funded, then sometimes on a rolling basis. This is the stage to look at closely, because how it's calculated explains everything else.
Two ways of paying an affiliate, and one consequence nobody says out loud.
The work of the French AMF and the European securities authority on leveraged contracts has converged for years: depending on the period and the product, somewhere between 75 and 90 per cent of retail clients lose money on them. That isn't an opinion about trading, it's a statistic about accounts.
An audience led into losing money doesn't come back, recommends nobody, and talks. So the funnel runs on volume that has to be renewed constantly, which means rebuilding the audience over and over. Nothing accumulates.
No assetMany of these platforms aren't authorised in France. If they stop paying, block a withdrawal or vanish, neither the referred person nor the affiliate has any useful recourse: no French authority can act against a provider it never licensed.
No protectionThe influencer marketing act doesn't target the platform sitting abroad: it targets the person who did the promoting. The affiliate is the identifiable link, the only one a French judge can reach, and the only one with a name.
The exposed linkThe consumer code prohibits advertising, direct or indirect, for certain highly speculative financial contracts offered to retail investors: binary options, contracts for difference with unlimited leverage, forex. The ban applies to the promotion itself, whatever the medium and whatever country the platform is established in.
The act of 9 June 2023 regulating influencer marketing took that ban up and applied it explicitly to content creators, adding digital assets whose provider isn't registered. The penalties run to two years' imprisonment and a €300,000 fine, with a possible ban on carrying out influencer marketing. On top of that, depending on the role actually played, comes the question of status: bringing a retail investor together with a financial provider for payment is a regulated intermediary activity.
This passage describes the framework and doesn't replace legal advice. It's here because the question isn't theoretical: these practices were examined by a French National Assembly committee of inquiry in 2025, and the subject was the object of a Cash Investigation documentary in 2024.
Every platform authorised to offer its services in France appears on the register of financial agents, freely consultable online. If it isn't there, it has no right to approach you. Checking takes two minutes and settles the matter.
Public registerThe AMF publishes the list of unauthorised sites reported to it, and updates it regularly. Many of the platforms promoted in these funnels are already on it.
Kept updatedA screenshot proves nothing: a demo account shows the same interface as a live one, and an image can be edited. A verifiable gain is money moving through a bank account, never a screenshot.
Proves nothingAsk the question directly. The answer, or the absence of one, tells you what you need to know. A link carrying an affiliate identifier is visible to the naked eye anyway: look at the address before you click.
The right questionAffiliate marketing in general is. Promoting highly speculative financial contracts to retail investors — binary options, leveraged contracts for difference, forex — is prohibited by the French consumer code, and the influencer marketing act of June 2023 extended that ban explicitly to content creators. So it isn't a grey area, it's a prohibition.
Either by a fixed commission paid the moment the referred person deposits money, or by a share of what the platform collects from that client. In the second case, on leveraged contracts, that includes the other side of losing positions: the affiliate takes a share of what the referred person loses.
Because a channel isn't subject to an algorithm and lets you write directly to people who have agreed to receive the messages. It's also far less policed than the public networks, where moderation of financial content is stricter.
Impossible to tell from an image, and that's precisely the problem. A demo account shows exactly the same interface as a live one, and a statement can be edited. The only proof of a gain is money moving through a bank account, which is never shown.
The penalties under the 2023 act run to two years' imprisonment and a €300,000 fine, with a possible ban on carrying out influencer marketing. On top of that come civil claims from people who lost money, and the question of intermediary status.
Request the withdrawal in writing and keep a record of every exchange. If the platform isn't on the register of financial agents, report it to the AMF through its Épargne Info Service and file a complaint. The chances of recovering funds are slim when the company sits outside Europe, but reporting moves collective cases forward.
Every method on this site starts from the same principle: an asset that stays, not an audience you burn once. The detail is in the member area.