A trading platform is safe to deposit into when three things are true: the company named in the terms you accept holds a license from a financial regulator that covers the service you're using, that license checks out in the regulator's own register rather than on the broker's website, and the platform lets you withdraw money on request without inventing a reason not to. Everything else, the app design, the account manager, the profit screenshots, is noise. The checks below take about twenty minutes and are in the order that eliminates the most sites fastest.
The money at stake is larger than in any other kind of fraud. In 2025, US consumers reported losing $7.9 billion to investment scams, more than to any other category the FTC tracks, out of $15.9 billion in total reported fraud losses (FTC, March 2026). Most of that money went into platforms that looked exactly like the one you're about to check.
Step 1: Find the entity you'd be signing a contract with
A broker's homepage says "regulated". The terms and conditions say which company, and those are rarely the same thing.
Open the terms of service, the client agreement and the footer. Write down every legal entity named: company name, registration number, country. Larger brokers run several entities at once, for example one licensed in the EU for European clients and another registered in an offshore jurisdiction for everyone else. The regulated entity goes on the marketing pages. The offshore one goes on the account opening form. If the footer lists three companies in three countries, find the one that applies to clients in your country; it is usually spelled out in the client agreement under "Parties" or "Governing law".
If no legal entity is named anywhere, or the only name is the brand, you have your answer already. A licensed broker can't hide its legal name; its regulator publishes it.
Step 2: Check the license in the regulator's register, not on the broker's site
The broker's "Regulation" page is marketing. The register is the source. Every serious regulator runs a public one, and the check is the same everywhere: search the entity name or license number, confirm the firm exists, confirm the license covers the activity (CFDs and forex are a specific permission, not a generic "financial services" entry), and compare the website, phone and email listed in the register with the ones on the site you're looking at.
Where to look:
- United Kingdom: the FCA Firm Checker and Financial Services Register, plus the FCA Warning List of firms the FCA knows are operating without permission.
- United States: FINRA BrokerCheck for securities brokers, NFA BASIC for retail forex and futures, and the CFTC's Registration Deficient (RED) list of foreign platforms soliciting US clients without registration.
- European Union: each national regulator's register. CySEC for Cyprus, where many EU-facing CFD brokers are licensed, BaFin for Germany, KNF for Poland, and so on. ESMA links to all of them.
- Australia: ASIC's professional registers and the Moneysmart investor alert list.
- Everywhere at once: the IOSCO Investor Alerts Portal, which collects warnings issued by securities regulators worldwide. A name that appears there is a name you don't deposit with.
The comparison of contact details matters because of clone firms. The FCA describes a clone as "a copy of a genuine firm": the scammer takes the name and license number of a real, authorised company and puts them on a site with different phone numbers and a different domain (FCA). The license number is real. The site is not. The only way to catch it is to contact the firm through the details in the register and ask whether the site is theirs.
Step 3: Know which "licenses" mean nothing
Some jurisdictions issue company registrations that brokers present as licenses. The most common one is St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Its Financial Services Authority stated in February 2022 that "forex trading brokerage activities are not licensed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines" and that it expects any company registered there to obtain a license in the country where it operates (SVG FSA notice, February 2022, archived copy). A broker that shows an SVG registration as proof of regulation is showing you a company registration certificate. Anyone can get one.
Treat the following the same way:
- "Registered" rather than "licensed" or "authorised". Registration means a company exists. A license means a regulator supervises what it does with client money.
- A certificate shown as an image with no register to look it up in. Real licenses are entries in a database, not JPEGs.
- A regulator you've never heard of. Search its name. Several "international financial commissions" are private membership organisations funded by the brokers they certify, or don't exist outside the broker's own pages.
- A license in a country the broker doesn't serve. A Comoros or Marshall Islands registration for a platform marketing to European retail clients tells you the operator chose the jurisdiction for the absence of rules.
None of this means an offshore entity is automatically a thief. It means that if something goes wrong, no regulator will take your complaint, no compensation scheme covers you, and the contract is governed by a court you'll never reach.
Step 4: Read the risk warning and the account terms
In the EU and the UK, a CFD broker must print a standardised risk warning that includes the percentage of its own retail accounts that lose money. The rule dates from 2018, when ESMA found that 74 to 89 percent of retail CFD accounts across the EU lost money, with average losses per client between €1,600 and €29,000, and capped leverage for retail clients at 30:1 for major currency pairs and 2:1 for cryptocurrencies (ESMA).
That gives you two quick tests. A site offering 1:200 or 1:500 leverage to a retail client in Europe is operating outside EU rules, whatever its homepage says. And a site with no loss percentage in its risk warning, or no risk warning at all, is not a regulated EU or UK broker.
Then read the parts of the client agreement that govern your money:
- Bonuses. A "100% deposit bonus" usually comes with a clause that blocks withdrawals until you've traded a multiple of the bonus. Licensed EU brokers haven't been allowed to offer trading bonuses to retail clients since the same 2018 rules.
- Withdrawal conditions. Fees, minimums, processing times and any clause that lets the platform "verify" or "review" a withdrawal for an unspecified period.
- Account managers. A person who calls you, pushes you to deposit more and offers to trade on your behalf is a sales role, not an advisor, and on an unregulated platform there is nothing stopping them from trading your account to zero.
Step 5: Run the withdrawal test before you scale
If the platform passes the register check, deposit the minimum, make one or two small trades, then withdraw part of the balance within the first week. Watch what happens.
A licensed broker processes it, perhaps with a verification step on the first withdrawal, and the money arrives in days. A platform that is going to rob you reveals itself here: the withdrawal is "under review", your account manager calls to talk you out of it, or a new condition appears, a tax, a fee, an "anti-money-laundering deposit" that has to be paid before funds are released. Our guide to fake crypto trading apps covers that last move in detail, because it's the signature of the whole category. No legitimate platform asks you to send money in order to receive money.
Keep the test cheap. The point is to learn how the platform behaves when you want your money back, before the amount is large enough to hurt.
By now you know whether the entity is licensed. The last question is what has happened to other clients.
Search the platform's name and domain on WebVouch. The pattern you're looking for in the reviews is specific: deposits that went in smoothly and withdrawals that didn't, accounts frozen after a profitable run, account managers who vanished, and reviewers who describe being contacted afterwards by "recovery agents" promising to retrieve the lost funds for an upfront fee. That last one is a second scam run on the victims of the first, often by the same people.
Be equally suspicious of a spotless record. A platform with a 4.9 rating from two hundred reviews posted in the same month, all describing fast profits and a wonderful account manager, has bought those reviews. Trading platforms with real clients have complaints, because trading loses money for most people; what separates a licensed broker from a scam is that the complaints are about losses, not about missing withdrawals.
Many of these sites run on rented technology, which is why a brand-new platform can look as polished as a twenty-year-old broker. How that works, and why a good interface proves nothing, is explained in our piece on white label trading platforms.
Red flags that end the check early
Any one of these is enough to stop:
- Contact came from them, through a social media ad, a dating app, a WhatsApp or Telegram group, or a "wrong number" text that turned into investment advice.
- Guaranteed or fixed returns. Markets don't offer them, so platforms that promise them aren't trading.
- A request to install remote-access software or to share your screen "to help you set up the account".
- Pressure to deposit before a deadline, bonus expiry or "allocation" closes.
- Payment by crypto to a wallet address, by bank transfer to a personal account or a payment agent in another country, or by gift card.
- A withdrawal that requires a payment first.
