Bulgarian Court Mandates ISPs to Restrict Access to Brokers

The Bulgarian financial regulator has teamed up with local courts to institute a ban on several websites. The companies include offshore brokers and binary options providers. The Bulgarian Commission for Financial Oversight led the initiative.

The Sofia Regional Court mandated Bulgarian ISPs to block access to 40 websites. The court order document includes several binary options and CFDs brokers. All of the mentioned entities are not regulated in the EU.

One More Possible Move Against Offshore Brokers

The list of tools that EU member states are using against unregulated brokers has just grown by one more. The outright ban on a country level of web addresses was pioneered by Poland some years ago.

Since then the unregulated brokers keep registering new domains and continue offering their services to EU residents.

Recently Indonesia became another country which banned access to several websites. The country’s financial regulator has been focused on binary options. Companies operating in the country have sent out emails to their clients with a new URL where they can access their services.

List of Brokers

The full list of brokerages which are limited from providing their services in Bulgaria includes different types of companies. Most notably those include binary options brokers and Forex and CFDs providers.

On the binary side, there are quite some companies that have been operating for years. BinaryBook, Option500, SuperBinary, Binatex, BinaryUno, and others.

Forex and CFDs brokers include offshore-based entities like SimpleFX, FXGlory, Trade 24, HBCBroker, and many others.

The full list of companies which have been affected by the Bulgarian ban is available below:

List of Banned Brokers in Bulgaria by TorVik on Scribd

As you can see, there is a slew of companies. Bulgarian authorities are likely to keep updating this list with new entries as firms start changing their URLs. Then again, the likelihood that the local market proves to be too small for the hustle could discourage firms from taking any steps to go around the new ban.