On Monday the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV), a Spanish financial regulator, released a statement warning traders from using the services of an unregulated broker.
According to a statement released by the regulator, TradeBNP has been trying to convince traders to use its services despite having no regulatory licence in Spain.
A quick look at the firm’s website indicates that it allows users to trade in a variety of different financial instruments, including contracts-for-differences, FX and commodities.
Like most of its fellow unregulated brokers, it doesn’t list any people or contact names on its website. As a result, figuring out who owns and runs the website is difficult. The author ran a scan of the website's ownership details but nothing significant cropped up.
On its contact page, the company lists an office address in that Hub of economic activity, the Marshall Islands. It is almost certain that the company has no one based in that country.
CNMV joins the struggle
The regulators at CNMV will likely struggle to take down TradeBNP. Sadly, websites such as TradeBNP’s crop up on a near daily basis.
Many of these brokers will accept client funds and then refuse to allow those clients to withdraw them. In the case of TradeBNP, it seems that if you use some of their services you can’t withdraw funds for six months and, even then, the company will take 25 percent of any profit you make.
Whether the firm would even be processing the transactions and trades that a user sees is debatable. One binary options fraudster, who was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in jail in September, was accepting deposits and then immediately putting them into his own pocket. Users of his site were trading on a fake platform that gave the impression they were really trading when, in reality, nothing was happening.
