On Thursday, the Italian financial markets regulator again ordered that four new websites be blocked for illegally offering financial services within its jurisdictions. With this addition, Consob is now blocking a total of 796 such illegal platforms.
The latest online financial services platforms added to the list of blocked sites are Tetris Group Ltd, Broker Capitals Limited, MTinvesting, and NBIMarkets. These platforms explicitly target Italian speakers as they offer services in the local language. Two of the platforms even provide services in multiple European languages.
These platforms offer high-risk investment instruments, usually contracts for differences (CFDs) for forex , stocks and other popular asset classes. In addition, they added cryptocurrency instruments that are very popular among retail traders for market volatility .
At least one of the flagged platforms is claiming to be 'fully regulated' but without any details of its license.
Fraudulent trading platforms often look legitimate with seamless deposit modes and suitable trading environments. However, the trouble starts when the traders try to withdraw their funds from these platforms, which is when these platforms get exposed.
Rampant Frauds
Scams are rampant in all markets. Data from the industry trade body, UK Finance, show that Britons lost more than £1.3 billion to online fraud and scams last year. Australians also lost AU$158 million to investment scams in the first five months of the ongoing year.
While regulators are taking several steps to limit these acts of fraud, it is never enough. Fraudsters always find innovative ways to target potential victims. However, major technology companies are now jumping into the fight against fraud. A month ago, Apple banned two MetaTrader apps from App Store as several shady companies licensed the trading applications to offer services.
Meanwhile, Consob is the only financial market watchdog with additional authority to block red-flagged websites at an internet service provider level. “The black-out of these websites by internet service providers operating on Italian territory is ongoing. For technical reasons, it can take several days for the black-out to come into effect,” Consob added.
