How to Verify Any Bonus Claim Before Depositing

Start with the source

Who published it decides most cases on its own. An offer that exists only on a page the broker does not control has not been made by the broker, whatever the page says about it.

Is it an official channel

Start by asking whether the claim appears on a property the broker owns. For IQ Option that means iqoption.com and blog.iqoption.com, or the platform once you are logged in. An offer that is real will be visible in at least one of those places, because a firm making an offer has every reason to publish it where its own clients look. If a promotion appears nowhere the broker controls, you have learned something conclusive rather than something ambiguous.

Affiliate or third-party page

Most bonus pages in search results are published by people paid on referrals rather than by brokers. That is not by itself dishonest, and this site is one of them and says so. What matters is that a referral publisher cannot create an offer, only describe one, so a description with no counterpart on an official page is either dated or wrong. A large share of the material still circulating dates from before the 2018 intervention and was never taken down. Why promo code searches rarely deliver explains the mechanics of that backlog.

Domain and certificate check

Read the address bar character by character before you enter anything. Clone sites rely on a domain that resembles the real one closely enough to survive a glance, and on the padlock icon being mistaken for proof of identity when it only indicates an encrypted connection. Anyone can obtain a certificate for a domain they registered. If the domain is not exactly the broker one, nothing on the page is worth reading. Phishing and clone sites using bonus bait covers the pattern in detail.

If the offer does not appear on a broker-owned property, treat it as unverified and stop there rather than reading further into it.

Read the terms in full

Terms carry the actual offer, and the headline carries the marketing. Reading the full conditions is the step most people skip, and it is the step that changes decisions.

Wagering and withdrawal rules

The central question about any credited bonus is what has to happen before money can leave the account. A turnover requirement means a multiple of the bonus, and often of the deposit as well, must be traded before withdrawal is permitted. Look for whether your own deposit is locked alongside the bonus, because that detail decides whether the offer costs you flexibility or only offers you an extra. The hidden cost of deposit bonuses works through how those clauses compound.

Expiry and eligibility

Two clauses quietly narrow most offers. Expiry sets a window in which conditions must be met, and a short window turns a modest turnover requirement into a demanding one. Eligibility restricts who qualifies at all, commonly by country, by entity, by account type or by whether the account is newly opened. An offer can be entirely real and still not apply to you, which is a different failure from a fake one and needs the same answer.

Hidden conditions

Then read for the clauses that only appear on a careful pass.

• Maximum withdrawal caps applied to profits earned while a bonus is active.
• Restrictions on which instruments or trade sizes count towards the requirement.
• Forfeiture triggers, where withdrawing early cancels the bonus and sometimes the profits made with it.
• A clause reserving the right to amend the terms during the promotion.

If the terms are not published in full anywhere, that absence is the finding. An offer whose conditions cannot be read cannot be evaluated, and should be declined on that basis alone.

Read the turnover requirement, the expiry, the eligibility and the caps, and treat unpublished terms as a reason to decline rather than a detail to chase.

Confirm on official channels

Official channels settle what a page cannot. The platform knows what your account is entitled to, and no third party has access to that information at all.

Checking the app directly

IQ Option own blog states that beginners get special promo codes for newcomers, including deposit bonuses, risk-free trades and other exclusive offers, accessed through a Promo section in the left-side user panel of the platform, and notes that some offers are limited-time. What any individual account sees there depends on the entity, the country and the date. So the accurate instruction is not that promotions do or do not exist, but that you should sign in and check the Promo section in your own account and read what is actually live for you.

Contacting real support

If the platform does not resolve it, ask support and ask in writing. Reach support from inside the logged-in account or from the official site, never from a link in the message that prompted the question, since that link may be part of what you are checking. Ask a closed question: does this offer apply to my account, and where are its full terms published. A clear answer resolves the matter, and an evasive one has also told you what you needed.

Ignoring unofficial promises

Nothing said in a messaging group, a comment, a video description or an email chases down to a real entitlement. Those channels can circulate a real offer, but they cannot confirm one, and by the time a code has travelled through several hands its origin is unrecoverable. Treat every one of them as a prompt to go and check the platform rather than as evidence of anything. How fake promo code bait works follows a typical route from post to landing page.

The logged-in platform and official support are the only sources that can confirm what applies to your account, and both are quick to check.

Decide before you deposit

Deciding comes before depositing, not after. The rule that makes this work is unglamorous: if verification has not succeeded, the deposit does not happen, regardless of how good the offer looks.

No verification, no deposit

Hold the sequence in that order and most of the risk disappears. Here is the full check as a procedure.

1. Identify the publisher of the claim and confirm whether the page is owned by the broker.
2. Find the full terms and read the turnover, expiry, eligibility and cap clauses.
3. Sign in to the platform and look for the offer in the Promo section of your own account.
4. If it is not there, ask official support to confirm in writing whether it applies to you.
5. Deposit only if steps one to four all succeeded, and only an amount you had already decided to risk.

Any step that fails ends the process. There is no partial pass, because a claim that survives three checks and fails the fourth is still unconfirmed.

Treating hype as a warning

Presentation carries information. Urgency, exclusivity and pressure to act before a deadline are devices used to shorten the interval in which you might check something, which is exactly the interval this method protects. A regulated firm has little reason to rush a client into funding an account, and CySEC recorded that trading benefits offered via marketing strategies encouraged behaviours that are not in the best interests of clients. When the tone is doing the persuading rather than the terms, read the tone as a finding.

Walking away when unsure

Ending the check with no answer is a successful outcome, not a failed one. The cost of walking away from a real offer is that you did not receive a benefit you were not counting on. The cost of accepting a fake one can include your credentials and your deposit. Those two are not comparable, and the asymmetry is why unresolved should always resolve to no.

Run the five steps in order, let any failure end the process, and treat an unresolved check as a decision not to deposit.

Keep a simple checklist

Checklists beat memory once an offer is in front of you, because the pressure that makes a bad decision easy is the same pressure that makes a remembered rule easy to skip.

Source, terms, official channel

Three words are enough to carry the whole method. Source asks who published it and whether the broker owns that page. Terms asks what has to be traded, by when, and by whom. Official channel asks whether the platform or support confirms it for your account. Each question has a clean yes or no, and an offer needs three yeses. Keeping it that short is what makes it survive contact with a headline that is hard to resist.

Red flags that end the check

Some findings do not need the rest of the process.

• A request for your password, a verification code or remote access to your device.
• A deposit sent to a personal wallet or account rather than through the broker cashier.
• A domain that differs in any character from the official one.
• A specific promo code presented as universal, when no official public code could be verified at all.
• A guaranteed return, a promised win rate, or a claim that a bonus cannot be lost.

Any one of these ends the check immediately. No deposit bonus claims fact-checked looks at the most repeated of them.

When to just skip the offer

There is a point where the honest answer is that the offer is not worth the work. If verifying something will take longer than the benefit is worth, or if the answer stays ambiguous after the platform and support have both been asked, skip it. Regulatory permissions and platform offers change, and this page reflects official CySEC, ESMA and IQ Option sources checked on 3 September 2026, so confirm anything that matters on the broker own site before you deposit. If the only reason you were going to deposit was the offer, open the free demo account instead and lose nothing at all.

Source, terms, official channel, in that order, with a short red-flag list that ends the check on the spot.