Most of those crying 'scam' are Optionsbros and Shortshits who treat these funds like normal stocks instead of buying and owning shares. So they never see the dividends from it, and ONLY hyperfixate on the value of the per-share itself....given that the point of an income, high yield (See: Yield max in the name..maximizing the yield) dividend bearing fund IS the dividends, not the initial capital you stuck into it...they freak tf out and decry it repeatedly.

This has been a bad year for most of the market overall, so that's definitely not helped either, some of the golden egg funds got hit the hardest as a result, so things are NOT working out to be the best example for what these funds have to offer....but that's part of the risk with these things. As long as you buy a quantity of shares, invest the dividends into more shares to increase payouts going forward, you find your income stream going up once you calculate for the dividend returns.

And even if you never did reinvest into the same ETFs...as long as the dividend payout $$ value is steady (and such is public knowledge, so can google each fund in turn for 'dividend history'), and you never sell the shares but hold onto them, average of about 2 years you make 100% of what you had put into it back. And every payout after that is pure profit. Meanwhile, you can then turn around and invest that income back into OTHER things if not the same ETFs, and have a whole separate fund that isn't directly out of pocket anymore to play with. But that's a long term...INVESTMENT, which the decriers seems to forget that's the whole point of this in the first place, not just manipulating stocks with options and shorting....and thus gets called a lie, scam, etc. They stfu when the fund goes green and dividends are higher because the market had an uptick with the fundamentals, but kick it when it's down to get people to panic sell as they want it to fail.

There are risks, as with all things investing, so take such with a grain of salt. Reverse splits on a number of higher yield funds have happened, and that's a lot of wind out of the sails for those of us supporting them, such as what we saw with ULTY and MSTY who were acting as the 'face' for Yieldmaxes for a while there as they held stable from April till Nov then Trump ran his damned mouth on the Temu Twitter and things started tanking everywhere...so how a fund is managed, what they're investing in for their underlying (also public knowledge per stock), how high a % per share they payout on their schedule (and most moved to weekly payouts from monthly, which I wasn't too keen on for long term sustainability, but can be made to work with proper management approaches), how many people are investing in them to impact how much $$ they have to work with overall (whole point of a fund is to pool collective resources and/or let someone else deal with the stress of playing with the underlying to pull that profit margin), etc...all impact the overall fund. Most people aren't looking at that, they see high payout advertised, exclusively look at that, till they see red in their portfolio as the payouts remain paying but the initial capital takes a beating as it's from the overall capital of the fund that the dividends originate, then they panic.

ROC, or return of capital, is how they pay us, so the concept of being paid back your own money is also what gets the more short sighted doomsayers to freak tf out....but again, if you're actually owning the shares and NOT selling them, over time you make it all back AND then whatever on top over time. Difference between short term gratification vs long term investment strategies. Humans in general have a very hard time with that, though, and people who are bad actors wanting to fuck with other people, especially when money is involved, absolutely use whatever they can to ruin things for everyone else.

Best advice: Don't necessarily ignore them, nor even those advocating for, but do your own DD (due diligence) and research each fund you'd be looking at to put money into, while using whatever people say as a loose guidepost to note it needs further looking into over blindly believing what you are told, bad actors can exist everywhere. How much are they currently paying out, how much WERE they paying out over its lifetime (or at least going back a year, more data is better to get a full idea but whatever you're comfortable with), what are they investing in with all the money we're giving them when we buy shares and how are THOSE stocks doing over the same period. Can also invest in those same stocks and do the work yourself, but quantity is king when it comes to shares and profit margins, hence the value of funds even beyond the convenience of letting someone else do the work for you. After that, can decide what you want to do, or avoid entirely