Fake brokers rarely claim nothing — they claim something that sounds like regulation and regulates nothing. Across the registry’s case records, five claims recur constantly:
1. “Registered company” presented as a licence
The most common. Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, the Marshall Islands — jurisdictions where an International Business Company can be registered in a day. Company registration is paperwork, not oversight. Registry case files like Zagros show exactly this pattern: an IBC certificate doing costume duty as a financial licence.
2. The invented regulator
Official-sounding bodies — “International Financial Market Supervisory Authority” — complete with certificate PDFs and sometimes an entire fake regulator website. If you have never heard of the regulator, search whether the regulator itself is real before considering the licence.
3. The stolen licence number
A real number belonging to a real firm — the clone-firm play. Survives every check except comparing the domain on the regulator’s register.
4. “FinCEN registered MSB”
US money-service-business registration is a filing, not an endorsement, and emphatically not an investment licence. Scammers love it because it is real, checkable — and meaningless for trading.
5. “Blockchain certified” / audit-badge salad
Certificates from consultancies, “smart-contract audits”, ISO badges. None regulate a broker holding client funds.
The rule: a licence only counts if a regulator with enforcement power lists the firm — and the domain — on its own public register. Anything else is decoration. Check the name here, then verify at the source.
before you go
Two free checks that take one minute
1 — Run the broker’s name through the Veribeacon registry (9,000+ reported operators on file). 2 — If you’ve already sent money, check whether the case is under investigation at the SARFund case registry — the escalation body for verified fraud reports. Veribeacon never asks you to pay.