AUDIT 001 · METHOD v1.1
potionalpha.com sells a $599/year crypto trading membership on two promises: a risk-free trial and a profitable track record. Each claim below sits beside the site's own refund policy, its payment processor's reviews and public records. Three of the seven claims check out.
01
Left, what the marketing states. Right, what a public record shows, with its source. Green means the claim checks out. Checked 11 September, re-checked 25 September 2026.
02
The same seven rows with the full quotes and where each one lives. Every quote is verbatim.
"You can try Potion Alpha for 14 days, if you don't like it for any reason, we'll refund you no questions asked!"potionalpha.com homepage, "Potion's Double Guarantee"
"If you follow the Potion Process* and don't profit, we'll refund you the full amount."same section. We could not locate the asterisk's conditions in the page text.
"Crypto Payments: Payments made using cryptocurrencies are non-refundable. All crypto transactions are final."potionalpha.com/refund-policy §1
"Fiat Payments via Whop: For payments processed through our partner Whop, all payments are final. Refunds will not be issued."same page §1
Both statements cannot be true at once for the same buyer. The refund policy also states that cancelling brings no prorated refund, and directs all payment disputes to the processor rather than to the company.
Fiat payments are processed by Whop, which operates its own refund handling. Whether that overrides the policy above is not stated anywhere on the site.
ARCHIVED: refund policy, 13 Aug 2026 · homepage, 24 Sep 2026
The block headed "Potion trading performance for last 6 months" shows four figures, captioned "Real Potion Perps signal performance data from September 2025 to April 2026". Those figures are fixed values written into the page's own source code:
They are constants, the same for every visitor, not the result of any query. The homepage requests no trading, market or performance data from any source; the only outbound calls are analytics and a marketing pixel. A figure that is typed cannot be audited, and no date range, instrument list or losing trade can be derived from it.
The two images beside the figures carry no numbers on either axis. The performance claim is instead written into their alt text, which is the description read aloud to blind visitors and indexed by search engines:
alt="Daily profit-and-loss bar chart showing mostly green winning days from September to April"/charts/perf-bars.png, homepage source
alt="Cumulative equity curve rising steadily from September to April"/charts/perf-equity.png, homepage source
ARCHIVED: homepage, 24 Sep 2026
The homepage says "Trusted by over 108,000+ traders & investors." Discord's public invite endpoint, which requires no account and no joining, returns for the "Potion" server:
The advertised figure is below the number the community itself reports, and the server predates the domain by two and a half months.
The marketplace listing says "over 110,000 members", and its join counter read 124,377 on 11 September and 124,445 on 24 September; that counter totals joins over time rather than current members. The claim says "traders & investors", while the number behind it counts everyone who has joined a free Discord server. No figure for paying subscribers is published anywhere.
SOURCE: discord.com/api/v10/invites/potionalpha?with_counts=true · READ 24 Sep 2026
The listing's overall rating is 4.77 of 5 across 392 ratings. Most reviews are positive. We quote the first page in full rather than selecting from it, because a page that only quoted the complaints would be doing the thing this site exists to call out.
"Amazing service. Recommend to everyone!"Brody chivington, written 1 year after purchase
"Great group, if you know what you're doing in terms of trading there are great people to converse with over potential wins. Huge wins called daily."Trey Hewitt, written 2 months after purchase
"Great group and an amazing community"olejohnnysta, written 22 days after purchase
"Terrible. Completely dead chats. Hardly any decent calls. Auto renewed for 3 months, and even within an hour, he cancelled the request for refund."Salman Aziz, written 1 year after purchase
"terrible, not worth it and not refundable."Justin Mills, written 6 days after purchase
"There are better free groups than this group paid"Brandon, written 5 days after purchase
The reason this page carries these quotes at all is the row above it: the sales page promises a refund "no questions asked" and the refund policy says refunds will not be issued. Two buyers here describe the second version rather than the first. That is one page of reviews, not a measurement, and a 4.77 average says most buyers were satisfied. Both facts are on this page so a reader can hold them at once.
A note on the top review: it is five stars, three words, and marked as written two years after purchase. We draw no conclusion from that.
SOURCE: whop.com/potion-alpha → Reviews · READ 24 Sep 2026 · each quote verified word for word against the live page
The homepage sells "clear calls" and one-click trade execution. The terms of service describe "educational tools" and state that "no financial advice is given". The same document sets out:
"Governing Law: Florida law applies… Arbitration: Disputes shall be resolved by binding arbitration, except for claims that can be brought in small claims court. Class Action Waiver: Users agree not to participate in class actions against us."potionalpha.com/terms §10
"Service can be terminated at our discretion without notice."potionalpha.com/terms §9
None of this is unusual and none of it is evidence of wrongdoing; arbitration clauses and liability caps appear in most consumer contracts. We record it because a buyer deciding whether to pay $599 is entitled to know which document governs their money, and it is this one rather than the sales page.
ARCHIVED: terms, 24 Sep 2026
Domain registered 21 September 2024 through GoDaddy. The first TLS certificate was issued 89 seconds later and the first web archive capture four minutes after that, so there is no earlier history under this name. Certificate transparency logs list 70 certificates and three names in total: the domain, its www form, and one funnel subdomain, start.potionalpha.com.
We looked for a family of sister or rebranded domains and did not find one. The certificate log shows three names, which is what an ordinary single-site business looks like.
A buyer's money passes from the website to the Whop marketplace to a Discord server, and crypto payment is accepted. Under the company's own policy, crypto payments are final. Which payment rail you choose decides whether you have any way to dispute a charge.
SOURCE: rdap.org/domain/potionalpha.com · crt.sh/?q=potionalpha.com · READ 24 Sep 2026
The site's footer says "© 2026 Potion LLC, Florida, USA". The Florida Division of Corporations lists exactly one company of that name:
The record lists a principal address in Miami and a registered agent who can accept legal service. The entity is real and currently in good standing.
The company does not publish its document number, so the link between the website and this filing rests on the name and the state. That is a strong match rather than proof.
The filing also names a registered agent and an authorised member. The document number above retrieves the complete record from the state in under a minute.
The LLC was filed in January 2025. The domain was registered in September 2024 and the Discord server created in July 2024.
SOURCE: search.sunbiz.org → Search Records → Detail by Document Number · CHECKED 25 Sep 2026
1. Regulators not searched. The Florida Attorney General, their home state, returned nothing. Three sources remain unsearched and nothing is implied by that in either direction: the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, which was unreachable; the New York Attorney General, whose site search returned nothing even for a control word it certainly contains; and the other 48 states, which have no usable public search between them.
2. The asterisk. "Follow the Potion Process*" carries an asterisk whose conditions we could not find in the page text. It may exist somewhere we did not look.
3. Whop's own refund terms. Fiat payments are governed by the marketplace's buyer protection, not by this site's policy. We have not read Whop's terms and they may override the policy quoted in Finding A. This is the most likely innocent explanation for that contradiction and it deserves to be checked before anyone concludes otherwise.
When any of these resolves, this section updates with a dated line and the change is listed at the foot of the page.
STATUS: open · last updated 24 Sep 202603
Public records only. No paywall was bypassed, no private server probed, nothing bought. These five steps work on any paid trading site, so you can run them yourself before you pay anyone.
Archive the homepage, pricing, refund policy and terms before you interact with anything. Claims get edited quietly; captures do not.
Tools: web.archive.org/save/<url>, archive.today
A domain registered last year cannot hold a five-year track record. Compare the registration date with every claim about history and size.
Tools: rdap.org/domain/<domain>
Put the promises beside the refund policy and the terms. Where the two disagree, the boring document is the one that governs your money. This is where most of the case usually is.
View the page source and the network panel. If the performance figures are constants in the page and nothing is requested from any data source, the figures are design, not measurement. Beware the opposite error: a number that reads 0 in an automated browser may simply be an animation that never ran.
Tools: browser dev tools, network tab; curl -sL <url> | grep
A bot check is not the boundary of what a regulator publishes. We could not use the FCA's warning-list search, which is behind an automated challenge we will not bypass. We did not need to: the FCA's own robots.txt invites crawlers to its sitemaps, and those index all 18,688 warning-list entries going back to 2009, with an RSS feed covering the last few days. Same records, through the door the site advertises. Check the sitemap, the feeds and the open-data endpoints before writing any item off as unverifiable.
Tools: /robots.txt, /sitemap.xml, /news/warnings/rss.xml
Reviews on the payment processor, positive and negative. Then map the domain family in the certificate logs and look up the named company in its state registry. Quote the balance you find, not the half that suits you.
Tools: crt.sh/?q=<domain>, the seller's marketplace listing, the state corporate registry
04
Not about this company in particular. These are the questions that would have surfaced everything on this page, in the order that saves the most money.
A footer that says "LLC" is a claim, not a registration. Find the entity in the state or national registry, with a name that can accept legal service. No verifiable operator means no accountability, and the refund policy is then whatever someone feels that day.
Not testimonials. A dated, complete record with the losses in it. Figures typed into a web page are typed; charts without numbers on the axes are drawings. If a track record cannot be checked by an outsider, then for your purposes it does not exist.
Read the refund policy and the terms, not the sales page. When they disagree, believe the boring one. And note your payment rail, because it is your exit: card beats wallet beats marketplace beats crypto. Crypto-only checkout means no door out.
05
What this measures: how checkable Potion Alpha's public claims are. It does not measure whether the product is good, whether the analysts are skilled, or whether any member made or lost money. A low score means the claims cannot be verified from outside. It does not mean the company is dishonest, and it is not a verdict.
40 of 100 across all seven items. Four items check out in the company's favour: its Florida registration, its member count, its regulator record, and half of the pricing item.
The three zeros share one cause. The central promises — a profitable record, a refund guarantee, and the results in the testimonials — cannot be verified by anyone outside the company.
Not checked, and not counted either way: the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, which was unreachable, and 48 state attorneys general.
Every band above is published, so the total can be re-derived from the findings on this page. If you reach a different number, say which band and it will be corrected or explained.
06
Potion LLC is invited to respond to any statement on this page, at any time. There is no deadline and no window that closes: a reply sent tomorrow and a reply sent next year are both published here unedited and in full, whatever their tone or length.
Any row shown to be factually wrong is corrected the same day, with a dated line in the changelog at the foot of this page. Corrections stay visible; we do not quietly swap text out.
Write to hello@thetrencheslab.com. That address is read by a person.
This is the same offer every company audited here receives, before publication rather than after.
This page reports facts observed on 11 and 24 September 2026, quotes sources verbatim, and asserts no legal conclusion about the company or any person. Where something could not be verified it is marked unverified, not assumed false. Three of the seven rows above are neutral or favourable to the company.