Every trading affiliate funnel narrows to the same exchange. You ask the lead to register under your link and fund the account. They come back with a number. What happens in the next thirty seconds decides whether your VIP group is a paid community or a free one with an extra step.
Handled by a person, this is a login, a search and a judgement call, repeated all day. Handled badly by software, it is either a bot that believes anything typed at it, or a bot that accuses paying customers of lying. Both are worse than the spreadsheet.
What the check actually queries
The bot does not ask the broker anything at the moment the message arrives. Broker affiliate APIs generally answer date ranges rather than single lookups, so Scalegram pulls those ranges on a schedule into a local cache of accounts and deposits registered under your link, described in the IB integration. The check is a lookup against that cache, which is why it returns inside a conversation instead of stalling it.
First the number has to be found in the message at all. People send account numbers with spaces, with the word UID in front, inside a screenshot caption, in a voice note, or three messages after the greeting. Extraction is the unglamorous half of the feature and it is where most of the failures come from.
Three outcomes, and none of them is an accusation
| Result | What it usually means | What should happen |
|---|---|---|
| Not found | A typo, an account opened minutes ago and not yet cached, or a registration made under a different affiliate | Ask once for a re-check, offer help, escalate to a human rather than refusing |
| Found, no deposit recorded | The account is genuinely under your link but not funded yet | Confirm the registration, explain what remains, keep the conversation open |
| Found and funded | The claim holds against the broker's own data | Move the stage and send the grant to a human checkpoint |
The middle row is the one that earns the feature. Telling somebody "your account is registered with us, the deposit has not landed yet" is accurate, useful and completely unlike the two responses they get everywhere else, which are silence or an unearned invite.
The top row is the one that needs the most care. A not found result is not evidence of dishonesty. Caches have an age, people mistype, and a lead may well have registered through somebody else's link months ago and forgotten. A bot that treats an unmatched number as an attempted fraud will insult real customers, and the tone rules in Scalegram exist precisely so that automated messages stay professional. Bots are blocked from flirting, from romantic framing and from promising anything the business cannot deliver, and they answer in the language the lead wrote in.
Never grant access on the client's word alone, and never take a screenshot as proof. Screenshots of account balances are trivially edited, and treating them as evidence is how a paid group fills up with people who paid nothing.
The check does not hand out the invite
A verified UID moves a stage. It does not open a door. Anything that grants access or costs the business money stops at a checkpoint in your own Telegram for a yes or no, the mechanism in ask me checkpoints. One tap, and the result is filed.
That sounds like friction until you consider what sits on the other side of the door. A VIP group is the thing your paying customers bought, and the value of belonging to it collapses the moment access is automatic. Keeping a human on the grant is a business decision before it is a security one. The full sequence from claim to invite is in verifying a deposit before the VIP invite.
What gets stored, and what does not
The account number, the match result, the funding status and the time of the check go on the contact record. The conversation that produced them does not. Scalegram stores contacts, stages, tags, purchases and timing, and never the text of Telegram messages, which is a deliberate design position rather than a limitation, argued in the Telegram CRM piece.
That matters here more than anywhere else in the product, because this is the part of the funnel where financial identifiers are being handled. Holding the minimum needed to answer the question is the correct amount, and it is also the answer you want to be able to give when somebody asks what your systems retain about their trading account.
Where it stops being reliable
An automatic check verifies one thing: that an account number appears under your affiliate link with or without a recorded deposit. It is not identity verification, it is not a compliance check, and it says nothing about whether the person messaging you is the person who owns that account. Where the feed publishes no deposit amount, and several do not, a threshold rule cannot be enforced automatically and has to fall back to a person.
There is also the plain matter of people. A lead who registered under your link on a laptop six weeks ago and now messages from a phone may not remember which email they used, let alone the account number. Half of what a good funnel does at this step is help somebody find a number they already have, patiently, without implying they are hiding something.
Build for that. A funnel that halts entirely when the feed is unavailable is a funnel that stops selling for a morning. A funnel that quietly grants access when the check fails is worse. The correct fallback is always a human being, looking at the broker portal, deciding.
"Anyone who has run a VIP group has let somebody in on a screenshot. You do it once, they tell their friend it works, and then the room you sold is full of people who never paid."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- The check reads a locally cached copy of accounts and deposits registered under your affiliate link, so it answers at conversation speed.
- Extracting the number from how people actually write is the hard half, since UIDs arrive in captions, voice notes and stray messages.
- Not found means a typo, a fresh registration or another affiliate far more often than it means fraud, and the reply must stay professional.
- A verified UID moves a stage but never opens the door on its own; the grant stops at a human checkpoint, and screenshots are never proof.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the bot say my account was not found when I just opened it?
Broker affiliate data is pulled on a schedule into a local cache, so an account registered a few minutes ago may not be visible yet. A re-check shortly afterwards, or a human looking in the portal, resolves it.
Can the bot grant VIP access by itself once a UID checks out?
No. A verified UID moves the contact's stage. Granting access stops at a checkpoint in your own Telegram, so a person always makes the final call.
Is a screenshot of the account accepted as proof?
It should not be, anywhere. Screenshots are trivially edited. The check is against the broker's own affiliate data, and where that data is unavailable the fallback is a person looking at the broker portal.
About the Author
Alex Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He built eTrader, the terminal, the mobile apps, eTrader Broker, Copytrading, Business and Community, along with the worldwide clustered-server infrastructure it all runs on, with his brother Roman Onta helping on the design, and he leads that division today. Together with Roman he builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals, and the two of them carry worldwide compliance, payment processing and international business structuring side by side. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.