"On February 12, 2020, the FTC filed a massive 8000+ page lawsuit alleging that the Online Trading Academy ripped off thousands of consumers for a total of $370 million dollars, since at least 2014." Tradingschools' article: -> https://www.tradingschools.org/online-trading-academy-yes-its-a-fraud/
"the Federal Trade Commission was thorough…they subpoenaed TradeStation Securities.
..
The Federal subpoena was clear. The FTC wanted the names, addresses, phone numbers, and most importantly…the account statements of each and every victim of Online Trading Academy.
..
According to court records, the Federal Trade Commission individually analyzed4,799 trading accounts.
The average account size varied between $5k to $15k. Of all of these accounts, 74.9% of the accounts lost an average of 94%.
Typically, the accounts were drained to nothing within 6-months. Which seems to perfectly match when consumers were required to pay off their $60k debt, at 18% interest.
Consumers that refused to pay, or could not pay were threatened with lawsuits and negative credit reporting.
One victim, in particular, lost his entire life savings of $1,364,337."
Emmett's comment: "After the lawsuit was filed…people came out of the woodwork like crazy. There are so many ex-employees with stories to tell. And wow, some of the ex-students are howling mad and want blood. In the past several years of writing reviews, I have never seen the level of intensity from consumers. The pitchforks are out. The tar is bubbling. The feathers are ready. And it is a complicated situation because the people that own franchises are sitting on now worthless businesses…and deservedly so. The whole business model was a scam from Day 1. Of course, Online Trading Academy is going to cite a survey they recently sent to thousands of their students claiming the “education” was of value, and how satisfied they are. But these poor fools that signed the survey don’t even realize that if they signed that survey, they are going to have a difficult time getting their money back in a settlement with the FTC. It not too often that I hope to get sued. But this is one of the rare situations where I would love to conduct discovery and depositions. There is so much more unpublished information. How these guys are not in jail is amazing."
Finally, an era is over for this upselling scam. So much shilling posts done on other forums, and ripoffreport was bribed to take down past bad reviews.
The following user says Thank You to Cloudy for this post:
Now I know why the trainers were intent on getting "feedback" of course when it was done. I would be surprised if there were many who gave below satisfied in that.
I hope that is thrown out of courts, they blatantly gave BS to students saying "its for improvement" etc
Very clever scam indeed. I hope they start investigating its overseas branches as well.
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Online Trading Academy final settlement. Sad to see so many people that were scammed out of several thousands of dollars. FTC lawsuit final settlement and press release is below.
Thanks, I wish they would also have some way bring international branches of OTA to same justice. Amount of people they have scammed is LOT bigger outside US than within US.
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There is one thing left out of this tread . They had a respected accomplice( TRADE STATION) . There were guaranties made by Trade Station you would receive the amount of the training courses in saving on future trading commissions . All students were trained on their software and pointed in their direction. Trade Station has good data and software but as a broker I found them to be very unfriendly to new traders . As soon as you were handed of to Trade Station they had a nice way of showing new traders the door out .
The following user says Thank You to forgiven for this post:
Exactly, OTA also has similar practice elsewhere, for example in India, they tie up with the broker "Sharekhan", very similar story, good platform and good data but very expensive and borderline scammy broker.
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