What we found
The Federal Trade Commission brought a lawsuit against International Markets Live (IML), also known as IM Mastery Academy and IYOVIA, alleging the company advertised "educators" who often had no legitimate credentials and used false earning claims to recruit people into a large investment training scheme. According to the FTC, the people targeted through social media were young people. The FTC says that as a result of its action the company is no longer in business, its leaders must turn over assets valued at over $90 million, and they are banned from selling trading training services and investment opportunities in the future. The FTC's alert describes the recruiting look: posts flashing fancy cars and exotic trips with the claim that you can have the same lifestyle just by "learning to trade," while trading is risky and you can lose a lot of money fast. The agency states that no one can promise you will make lots of money with little to no risk, and no one can promise to teach you to trade successfully in the financial markets — anyone who does is a scammer. The FTC also publishes a companion consumer alert on how to spot the top scams that start on social media. Before you pay a cent to any trading coach or academy, search the company name and the promoters' names together with the words "review," "scam," and "fraud," and read several pages deep, because the first results can be paid ads. We do not know from this material which platforms the recruiting posts appeared on, how payments were collected from recruits, or how many people paid. The companion alert on social media scams was harvested as a headline and link only, so we cannot report what it says beyond its title. LIVEFRAUD ALERTS is independent and not affiliated with the Federal Trade Commission or with any company named above; the company names appear here only because an official source named them in its own action.
- The core claims rest on a dated FTC consumer alert describing the agency's own lawsuit and its outcome, including named defendants and a stated asset figure.
- The FTC text itself names who was targeted (young people on social media), so the audience band does not require inference.
- One of the two harvested rows carries a title and URL only, so it supports nothing beyond the existence of that alert.
- Reviewed by 3 models, 2 from independent houses.
THE RULE
Social media pitches selling trading "education" with lifestyle photos and earnings claims — an FTC case shut one such operation down and stripped over $90 million in assets.
What we don’t know
- Which social media platforms the recruiting posts ran on
- How money was taken from recruits — subscription, card, bank transfer or something else
- How many people paid and how much the typical loss was
- Whether any funds will reach the people who paid
- Whether similar operations are still recruiting under other names
The bench — who voted
3 INDEPENDENT AI MODELS REVIEWED THIS. ALL 3: HIGH RISK.
The card names a count. Here are the seats behind it, with what each one said.
ANTHROPICclaude-opus-5 · HIGH
Several statements are attributed directly to the FTC alert but appear nowhere in the two evidence rows: the description of recruiting posts 'flashing fancy cars and exotic trips,' the warning that 'trading is risky and you can lose a lot of money fast,' and the quoted absolutes that 'no one can promise you will make lots of money with little to no risk' and 'no one can promise to teach you to trade successfully in the financial markets — anyone who does is a scammer.' Row 1 is a summary of allegations and remedies only. These may well be in the underlying alert, but on this evidence they are unsourced attributions to a federal agency, which is the most damaging kind of stretch.
DISSENT, PRESERVEDThe core allegation — uncredentialed 'educators,' false earnings claims, young people recruited via social media, company defunct, $90m+ turned over, selling ban — is squarely carried by row 1 and should not be softened. My objection is to the decorative FTC-voice material layered on top of it, not to the spine of the story.
DISSENT, PRESERVEDI grade the pattern high rather than moderate. The named remedy is over $90 million in assets, the targets were young people, and 'learn to trade' pitches ask for money up front against a promise that cannot be kept. A reader who meets this pattern can lose a lot in one transaction, and the recruitment structure means losses compound socially. The unknowns the piece honestly lists — no victim count, no typical loss, no word on redress — argue for treating the risk as higher, not lower.
DISSENT, PRESERVEDThe disclaimer of non-affiliation with the FTC is well placed and should survive editing. A consumer alert that quotes an agency in its own voice while carrying an unaffiliated masthead is exactly where readers get confused about who is warning them.
GROQopenai/gpt-oss-120b · HIGH
The finding describes the recruiting look (posts flashing fancy cars and exotic trips) which is not present in the sourced FTC summary.
OPENROUTERopenrouter/free · HIGH
The finding describes the recruiting look (fancy cars, exotic trips, lifestyle claims) and quotes the FTC saying 'no one can promise you will make lots of money with little to no risk... anyone who does is a scammer.' Evidence row 1 is only a summary of allegations and remedies; it does not contain that descriptive language. Evidence row 2 explicitly states no body text was harvested, so none of that language can be verified from the provided sources.
DISSENT, PRESERVEDThe FTC's actual consumer alert likely contains the descriptive recruiting details and the 'no one can promise' language, but the evidence package provided to the panel does not include that body text. The finding should be revised to cite only what the harvested rows support, or the full alert text should be ingested before publication.
Reviewed by 3 independent models; all judged the finding to go beyond the evidence.
▼ Protocol & challenge record
Objection (medium): Single-source, secondary-summary problem vs. 'high' confidence. Every substantive claim rests on one FTC *consumer alert* — a plain-language blog summary of the agency's own case — not the complaint, the press release, or the court order. The alert is the only thing checked, so the draft inherits its compression: no case number, no court, no defendant names, no date of filing or judgment. 'High' confidence is doing work the evidence base does not support. It should be 'medium' until the case page/order is pulled.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (medium): Remedies stated as completed fact. 'its leaders must turn over assets valued at over $90 million, and they are banned' is repeated from the alert, but FTC monetary judgments are routinely entered as stipulated orders with large portions suspended on financial disclosures, and 'assets valued at over $90 million' is an appraisal figure, not money collected or redress paid. The risk_line goes further and says the FTC 'stripped over $90 million in assets' — 'stripped' asserts collection that no source shows. The unknowns list flags that redress is unknown, which is good, but the risk_line contradicts it.
Resolved: Partially resolvable by wording: attribute precisely — 'the FTC says its leaders must turn over assets it values at over $90 million' — and remove 'stripped' from the risk_line in favor of 'ordered the turnover of assets the agency values at over $90 million.' Full resolution requires OBJ-1's source check.
Objection (medium): Audience narrowing beyond the source. Source: 'the young people targeted on social media by IML.' Draft: 'the people targeted through social media were young people' — that converts 'young people were among those targeted' into 'the targets were young people,' an exclusivity the FTC never asserts. The callout 'ATTENTION: YOUNG PEOPLE ON SOCIAL MEDIA' then narrows the reach of advice the FTC directs at anyone 'considering a business opportunity or learning how to trade online.'
Resolved: Change to 'According to the FTC, young people were among those targeted through social media.' Keep the young-people callout only if the body no longer implies exclusivity; otherwise use a callout that covers anyone considering a paid trading program.
Objection (medium): 'Companion' is an invented relationship. Row 2 is a separate consumer alert published 2026-04-01, four months before row 1, harvested as title+URL only. Nothing in either row links them. Calling it a 'companion consumer alert' implies the FTC paired them. Worse, the draft cannot know whether that alert covers trading pitches at all — the title only says 'top scams that started on social media.' A headline-only row that supports nothing but its own existence should either be dropped or described flatly as 'a separate FTC alert, title only.' Note also the tense change: source title says 'started on social media,' draft says 'start on social media.'
Resolved: Either cut the second row entirely or rewrite as: 'The FTC has published a separate alert, "How to spot the top scams that started on social media" (April 2026); only its title was captured, so nothing in it is relied on here.' Drop the word 'companion' and match the source's tense.
Objection (medium): The research advice is sourced but tagged unsourced. The 'search the name plus review/scam/fraud, go several pages deep because the first results may be paid ads' step is near-verbatim from row 1, yet finding_sentences gives it role 'advice' with row_ids: []. That understates provenance and makes the strongest, most actionable line look like house opinion. It also silently drops the two other steps the same source gives — checking the state attorney general for complaints, and getting a second opinion from someone you trust — plus the ReportFraud.ftc.gov reporting line.
Resolved: Attach row b17ce0cb to the research sentence and retag its role as sourced guidance; add the state attorney general check, the second-opinion step, and ReportFraud.ftc.gov, all of which are in the same paragraph of the source.
Objection (low): 'Guarantee' softened to 'promise.' The FTC says no one can *guarantee* returns or *guarantee* to teach you to trade successfully — 'anyone who does is a scammer.' The draft renders both as 'promise,' a lower bar that sweeps in ordinary marketing puffery, and then keeps the flat 'is a scammer' conclusion. That paraphrase makes the FTC's rule broader and more accusatory than the agency wrote it. Restore 'guarantee.'
Resolved: Restore the source's word: 'no one can guarantee...' in both sentences, keeping the FTC's 'anyone who does is a scammer' attached to the guarantee framing only.
Objection (low): Headline generalizes from n=1. 'An FTC enforcement action shows how social media "learn to trade" pitches operate as investment training schemes' asserts a category-level mechanism from a single case. One action illustrates a pattern the FTC describes; it does not show how such pitches, as a class, 'operate.' Downgrade to 'one FTC case shows what one such operation looked like.'
Resolved: Reword the claim line to 'One FTC enforcement action shows what a social media "learn to trade" pitch looked like from the inside, and gives research steps to take before you pay.'
Objection (medium): Callout and directive option sets contain unusable and misleading choices. 'ATTENTION: SCAMMEDS' is garbled. 'ATTENTION: VETERANS' has zero support in either row. 'ATTENTION: EDUCATORS' plus 'Send this to any educator you know' / 'Forward this to the educators in your life' invert the source's meaning — in this alert 'educators' are the *sham* instructors IML advertised, not schoolteachers; selecting those options would send a scam warning to the wrong population on a pun. 'ATTENTION: EVERYONE' and 'Send this to any official you know' are also unmoored from the record. These should be pruned, not offered.
Resolved: Remove 'ATTENTION: SCAMMEDS,' 'ATTENTION: VETERANS,' 'ATTENTION: EDUCATORS,' and the three educator/official directives. Retain only options grounded in the alert: young people recruited on social media, and anyone weighing a paid trading coaching program.
Objection (low): Date currency and integrity. Both rows carry 2026 publication dates (2026-08-07 and 2026-04-01), and row 2's timestamp is exactly 00:00:00, a common signal of a defaulted or missing date. Nothing in the draft states the alert's date to the reader, so a user cannot judge how current the 'no longer in business' status is, and the harvest dates should be sanity-checked against the actual present before publication.
Resolved: State the alert's publication date in the finding text so readers can judge currency, and verify both harvest dates against the current date before publishing.
Objection (low): Heavy near-verbatim lifting without quotation. 'flashing fancy cars and exotic trips,' 'the same lifestyle just by "learning to trade,"' 'lose a lot of money fast,' and the search-results advice are all reproduced close to word-for-word. FTC text is public domain so there is no legal exposure, but presenting it as the outlet's own prose blurs the line between the agency's voice and the outlet's, which matters for a piece that also carries a non-affiliation disclaimer.
Not resolved — preserved on the record.
Objection (low): watch_icons includes 'video.' The source describes posts with photos of cars and trips; it says nothing about video content. Minor, but it is an inference presented as a source-derived signal.
Resolved: Drop the 'video' icon or replace with an image/photo indicator consistent with 'posts flashing fancy cars.'
Preserved dissent
ON THE RECORDI dissent from the 'high' confidence rating. Every load-bearing fact in this piece comes from one FTC consumer alert — a plain-language blog post summarizing the agency's own case — with no complaint, order, docket number, or press release checked. The second row is a bare headline. That is one source, and a secondary one at that. 'Medium' is the honest rating.
ON THE RECORDI dissent from the sentence 'The FTC says that as a result of its action the company is no longer in business, its leaders must turn over assets valued at over $90 million, and they are banned...' being presented as settled outcome, and from the risk_line's 'stripped over $90 million in assets.' Nothing checked here establishes that a dollar has changed hands or that the judgment is unsuspended and final. The outlet is repeating the enforcer's own characterization of its own win, unverified.
ON THE RECORDI dissent from calling the April 2026 alert a 'companion.' Nothing in the record connects the two documents. That word manufactures a relationship to make a title-only row look like corroboration.
ON THE RECORDI dissent from the callout and directive option sets. 'ATTENTION: SCAMMEDS' is not English. 'ATTENTION: EDUCATORS' and 'Send this to any educator you know' would push a fraud warning at schoolteachers because the source used the word 'educators' in scare quotes to mean IML's fake instructors. Offering those as selectable options is a live risk of publishing a defamatory-adjacent mismatch, and they should be deleted rather than merely ranked below the chosen option.
ON THE RECORDI dissent from tagging the search-the-name research step as unsourced 'advice.' It is lifted almost verbatim from the FTC alert. Presenting agency guidance as house advice both understates its authority and misrepresents where it came from.
The sources
Official sourceHow to spot investment training scams on social media2026-08-07
The FTC alleged International Markets Live (IML), also known as IM Mastery Academy and IYOVIA, used uncredentialed "educators" and false earning claims to recruit young people found on social media, and says the company is now out of business with leaders ordered to turn over assets valued at over $90 million and banned from selling trading training services.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-08-18.
Limitation: This is the FTC's own summary of allegations and remedies in its consumer alert; it does not name platforms, payment methods, victim counts, or individual defendants' names.
Open the original source →Official sourceHow to spot the top scams that started on social media2026-04-01
The FTC also publishes a consumer alert on how to spot the top scams that started on social media.
Authority: official. Retrieved 2026-08-18.
Limitation: Only the headline, link and publication date were harvested; no body text, so nothing in it can be quoted or relied on.
Open the original source →Other checks
Published under standing founder pass (A9) — every claim source-mapped by the machine.
▼ What the machine checked
- ✓ Not a community submission.
- ✓ No entity is named.
- ✓ All 6 material sentence(s) map to FTC.
- ✗ anthropic returned "overstated"; groq returned "overstated"; openrouter returned "overstated" — published on the receipt, not blocking (A9 amendment).
- ✓ No audience band is set.
No human affirmed these. They were verified by the classifier described in Amendment A9, on 2026-08-18.
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