Italy's financial market regulator, known as Consob, continues its bust of fraudulent financial services platforms with the latest blacklist of five new websites. None of these platforms are regulated in Italy and illegally offer their services.
Conbob Blacklists Six Dubious Platforms
The blacklisted platforms are Prime Invest, FXBoxed, New Finance LLC, Axi24, Evolve Consulting LCC, and Trustfund-Minning Global Pty Ltd. According to the regulator, five are illegal financial intermediation websites, and one offers financial products without any prospectus.
Only three of the six websites were reachable from outside Europe as of press time. At least two blacklisted platforms claim to be regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC ). The registration details provided on these two websites are also authentic. However, the authenticity of the websites cannot be verified as ASIC does not list the approved domains like the regulators in the United Kingdom and Cyprus. Another platform is operating with authorization from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
Finance Magnates reached out to the registered regulatory companies to verify the authenticity of the websites blacklisted by Consob but did not receive any response as of press time.
Offering Risky Investment Instruments
Further, all three reachable websites offer risky financial instruments, including trading with margin forex pairs, contracts for differences (CFDs) instruments, and even cryptocurrencies .
The latest addition by Consob has taken the total number of illegal platforms on its blacklist to 845. Consob began to raise red-flag against these platforms in July 2019 when it received additional supervisory authority through legislation.
The Italian regulator is the only one in Europe with the authority to block access to the blacklisted website on an internet service provider level. It ensures that no Italian residents accidentally fall into the trap of known scammers.
"Consob draws investors' attention to the importance of adopting the greatest diligence 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," the Consob stated (translated from Italian).
Meanwhile, other European regulators are publishing names and details of unregulated and fraudulent platforms. The UK's FCA often lists dozens of fraudulent websites and clones of legitimate platforms. Moreover, the regulators in Cyprus and Spain maintain an active list of such dubious platforms.
