Investor Trust and Trading App Verification: A Conceptual Framework

This paper addresses a specific investor-protection problem: a trading app may look verified even when the evidence of its publisher has not been checked. For the first research question, prior research supports the possibility that visible assurance affects perceived legitimacy; the proposed model tests whether that effect becomes unsafe when a badge is detached from an authentic source. It does not claim that verified marketplace labels themselves are deceptive. For the second question, the paper identifies independently checkable provenance and observed checking as distinct requirements for evaluating correct authentication. Financial knowledge and confidence may influence behaviour, but neither replaces confirmation of the app’s origin. For the third question, the paper proposes a short reminder and specifies how to test whether it increases valid checking and improves classification without unnecessary refusal of genuine services. The main contribution is a conceptual framework that links an investor’s impression to the evidence used and the decision made. Its hypotheses and proposed experiment can be tested, but no effects or prevalence rates are reported here. Investor protection would be better assessed by the ability to distinguish genuine apps from deceptive copies than by trust ratings or fear of investment alone. The paper therefore places independent source authentication at the centre of future research on trading-app fraud resistance.

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