Safety and account risk
How do I know if an SMM panel is a scam?
Last updated by The PanelCompare editorial team
What are the recurring scam patterns?
| Pattern | What you see |
|---|---|
| Exit scam | Normal operation, then aggressive deposit bonuses, collapsing support, a spike in partials, withdrawals disabled, then silence |
| Provider collapse | Identical symptoms, but not malice — a supplier died and the panel kept accepting orders |
| Credential harvesting | A request for the account password, a 2FA code, or OAuth with write scope |
| Bait-and-switch pricing | A headline rate that becomes “service disabled” the moment the wallet is funded |
| Fake free trials | Free balance that requires a deposit to unlock, or only buys services that never deliver |
| Fabricated social proof | Cloned testimonials, invented order counters, a review widget that is an image rather than an embed |
Source: PanelCompare domain research, 2026-09-06.
How do you test a panel cheaply?
- 1.Deposit the minimum, not a working balance. The minimum deposit is the size of the loss you are agreeing to.
- 2.Buy one small order on a mid-priced row, not the headline cheap one.
- 3.Check that a partial refunds to the wallet correctly, and that support answers a ticket within its advertised time.
- 4.Claim a refill on something, even a small one, before you trust the refill terms on anything large.
- 5.Only then decide whether to hold a balance there — and split balances across genuinely independent operators, which means checking for common ownership first.
Think this answer is wrong?
Prices, refill terms and platform policies in this market all move, so an answer that was right in September may not be right in December. Every figure above names its source and the date it was checked; if one of them is stale or wrong, the correction process on the about page has a two-working-day reply target, and corrections are published with a dated note rather than quietly patched.