The Italian financial market regulator, Consob, has continued its actions against illegal financial services platforms with the latest blacklist of four new websites. According to today's (Friday's) announcement, these websites are illegally offering services in Italy.

Consob Continues Blacklisting Illegal Platforms

The blocked platforms are Caledonia Advisory, Trade4winner, OnspotBNK, and other related pages. These platforms offer high-risk investment instruments, like contracts for differences (CFDs) of forex and other asset classes.

To offer financial services in Italy, platforms need authorization from Consob, or they can passport their license from another jurisdiction within the European Economic Area (EEA). However, the local regulators still have the authority to decide on the activity of the platforms.

The latest blacklisted platform did not hold any valid authorization to operate in Italy. Two platforms, Caledonia Advisory and OnspotBNK, look like outright scams with no licenses or any authorization.

However, Trade4winner claims to be based in St. Vincent & The Grenadines and mentioned the license details of Trade Capital UK, which operates legally with authorization from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Finance Magnates reached out to both companies and will update their on relation accordingly.

Recently, Consob blocked the clones of E*TRADE and ActivTrades, two regulated FX/CFDs brokers.

Crackdown Continues

With the latest action, Consob is now blocking a total of 927 websites for illegally offering financial services in Italy.

Unlike other regulators, the Italian watchdog has the authority to block access to the blacklisted websites at a domain level. These powers were granted by legislation in June 2019.

"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," the regulator added.

"Consob draws investors' attention to the importance of adopting the greatest diligence in order to make informed investment choices, adopting common sense behaviors, essential to safeguard their savings: these include, for websites that offer financial services, checking in advance that the operator with whom they are investing is authorized, and, for offers of financial products, that a prospectus has been published."