• Please try to select the correct prefix when making a new thread in this folder.

    Discuss is for general discussions of a financial company or issues related to companies.

    Info is for things like "Has anyone heard of Company X?" or "Is Company X legit or not?"

    Compare is for things like "Which of these 2 (or more) companies is best?"

    Searching is for things like "Help me pick a broker" or "What's the best VPS out there for trading?"

    Problem is for reporting an issue with a company. Please don't just scream "CompanyX is a scam!" It is much more useful to say "I can't withdraw my money from Company X" or "Company Y is not honoring their refund guarantee" in the subject line.
    Keep Problem discussions civil and lay out the facts of your case. Your goal should be to get your problem resolved or reported to the regulators, not to see how many insults you can put into the thread.

    More info coming soon.

Binary Options Regulated and Scam Brokers

Joa,

I think you have over-stated some items.

Crown Forex may or may not have been criminal from the start, but they were a well respected broker before the cracks began to show. The company had high ratings at the FPA and elsewhere. All evidence pointed to it being well liked by the majority of its clients. It was licensed to operate in Switzerland, unlike most brokers with the word Swiss in their name. Later evidence points to Crown Forex getting into partnership with Universal Brokerage FX not long before the problems began.

The FPA was in close contact with Crown when complaints of delays in withdrawals began. I am proud to say that efforts by the FPA did help some investors recover their money before all withdrawals ceased. One of the FPA's invesigators helped bring together a large group of investors to seek their money and file complaints with the authorities.

Pharaoh was the one who wrote an article at the FPA calling attention to the problems with Crown Forex...

https://www.forexpeacearmy.com/forex-forum/general-forex-talk/3597-big-swiss-safe.html

You were the first to reply. You did point out some suspicious items, but did not label Crown as a criminal entity from the word GO in that post. If you had any real proof of it being a criminal organization, why would you have held back?

MT4 does allow retail forex brokers to cheat. It does not guarantee that all MT4 brokers do cheat. It does not guarantee that no NT4 broker passes trades directly onto the market. It does not guarantee that no MT4 broker hedges itself against the market.

More forex brokers are offering other platforms. cTrader claims to remove the ability of brokers to manipulate prices or interfere with trades in any way.


This thread was supposed to be about avoiding the dangers of binary options and brokers. Now you want to start a large debate every time you disagree with some side point,. This thread no longer serves its stated purpose and does not belong in the Scam Alerts folder. Since you want a general education thread where you can debate all the comparisons between forex and binaries, I'm now going to merge this into the binaries thread Roaming started.


I'd like to ask you to do 1 thing...

Contact some of the better regulated binary brokers. Use your skills to question them about whether or not they have liquidity providers.
 
FYI
I was not declaring them a fraud for a simple reason: I did not want to warn them here while working with the Swiss Banking commission (later called FINMA).
Crown Forex was NEVER authorized, never licensed. They belonged to am SRO (Self Regulating Organization) which means nothing because they only "educate" their members about rules of conduct.
You have no idea how many times I was in Berne...... I indeed took action personally to take them taken off the market.

... it appears that the truth should never be said. He who can't stand the heat should get out of the kitchen
 
Pharao, please do NOT claim that an honest Binary Broker doesn't have a liquidity provider if you can't back up your statements.

I think the burden of proof is on you on this one.

Please provide public evidence that ANY binary broker of your choosing has a liquidity provider. By liquidity provider I mean anything OTHER than the company selling the binary option trading platform (SpotOption, Tradologic). A financial firm like a bank or hedge fund or HFT would do.

I'm talking about fixed payout style (70%-90%) binary options, NOT ABOUT VANILLA DIGITAL OPTIONS like those offered by Nanex or Saxo Bank.
 
Wow Joa,

Just reread this and am very grateful.

Thank you for taking the time to share your wisdom and experience.

Tim
(None so blind as those who will not see.)
 
I guess i I've had enough of reading, time to replay.
After going through this thread which was informative to say the least, i would not completely agree with everyone saying every binary broker is scam and BO trading is nothing but true gambling. See Whenever u r dealing with online world that is behind ur computer screen there is element of risk. but reward comes with risk.
If all the BO brokers are scam no one would be trading and reading threads like this. There are regulators who have started to regard BO as financial instrument and many well known fx brokers have launched binary option trading.
There are traders who said u can never make money trading BO. I say its easier than forex trading. At least for me.
 
I wish you the best of luck in your BO trading. Unless you are very careful in your broker selection, you'll need it.
 
I am only a member of the FPA - I am not a moderator, nor a supervisor of the FPA

Therefore I act on my own, NOT in the name of the FPA, so sue me if you like.

All the following statements are based on personal experience, esp. with Cypriot companies (and the CySec) and 35 years in Forex.
I am NOT an affiliate to any broker or bank either.
.

nice post. it's a summary of what we should do to avoid suspicious brokers. Thanks v much.
 
Wow, just spent a few hours of my life going through this lengthy thread ... lots of good info and great advice, hopefully newbies will see it before they spend, unfortunately there will always be the ones that spend first and think to check after. A few years ago I and quite a few others across the U.S. were scammed by a smooth talker (had nothing to do with forex or trading), and since he was local to me, I took it upon myself to make sure he paid for his crimes. I worked with the FBI in helping to catch him and he's now serving a sentence. We got a few bucks back in restitution from what he hadn't spent yet but nothing close to what we lost. So yeah, even though I had done my due diligence and thought I was being extra special careful, I still got scammed. That's something that sticks with you on a forever basis and I'm very thankful for the info in this thread about BO brokers.

Because personally, I prefer BO over traditional forex ... my choice, my preference. For me it's a lot less riskier, and it helps me attain a more "emotionless" trading stance knowing in advance the max amount I could lose in a trade. For me, that's basically stress-free trading.

I'm in the U.S. so my only option at this point is Nadex. I'm not sure where you guys are getting some of your information from, but with Nadex a contract/trade isn't filled unless there's another client on the other side willing to take the opposite of your trade or stance. If no one is willing to go opposite your position, your contract doesn't get filled, the trade doesn't happen. And Nadex charges fees for every trade placed and executed, on both ends. Granted, it's not a large fee, but multiply that fee by the hundreds of thousands of trades placed every day and that number can becoming quite staggering. In other words, it ain't nothun' to sneeze at.

Quite frankly, I've very thankful for several things ... for this forum that we can come and discover all this information, for the people who take the time to post about their knowledge and experiences so we can learn from them, and for the fact that there actually is an honest-to-goodness regulated broker for U.S. clients that allows me to trade BO in the first place. It may not offer the "pot of gold" type returns that other offshore, unregulated brokers are offering, but then again, I can actually withdraw my profits as ... well, real profits into my bank account. Those other guys, not so much. Or at all. Which really makes it a moot point, right?
 
If you are careful with trade sizes and stoploss settings, I have a forex solution for you. Allow for 5 pips slippage, never leave trades open over weekends, and avoid the biggest news times (like NFP), and your SL+5 will be the max you can lose 99.8 percent of the time.
 
Attention all USA Traders interested in Binary Options!

A little about me first, I have been trading Forex, Stocks, Options, Futures, E-Minis, etc., etc. for decades except Forex since 2007 and now for about 3 years, dare I say it…Binary Options! So before you yell scam! I want you to know I am posting this message to help my fellow USA traders that are interested in trading Binary Options the legal and correct way and not selling anyone anything. I am not aware if something like what I am about to tell you exist outside of the USA for my fellow non USA Traders. I hope it does for them because it is the only way to legitimately trade Binary Options.

Okay, so let’s get real here and now. All those free Binary Option trading software (Auto or Manual) that send you to an offshore broker are all scams. The reason the software is free is because when you sign-up for the software they receive hefty commissions from the broker that the software automatically sends you to. At this point you have become excellent bait for the blood thirsty shark brokers. They will try to con you into depositing huge amounts of money to trade for you and tell you all kinds of tall tales about huge profits they will make for you. You will soon discover the fake software is depleting your hopefully meager account (probably $250 - $500) and your so called account manager will keep calling and bugging you to deposit more money so they can make your losses back. This starts to sound attractive since you like the idea of Binary Options but don’t have the skills to profit. So you give in (please do not!) and the so called professional trader gets lucky or wins from manipulation so you send in even more money in (again, please never do this!). WooWhooo! You are all excited making bank, you may even do a small test withdraw and receive so now you are gonna be rich at last! You tell family members what you have discovered because you can’t keep this golden goose to yourself, that just wouldn’t be right. So now and this is if you’re lucky to even see profits in your account you wanna buy something valuable or simply need the dang money for an emergency so you put in your sizable withdrawal request. It sits pending for too long, you chat, email, call and excuse after excuse...too many to list here keep happening. Your great buddy account manager can no longer be found, what the heck...he was such a nice guy! Soon you escalate your emails and phone calls in attempt to get your profits let alone now worried about your deposit. They will at this point simply ignore you, it becomes futile and a waste of time. It’s over folks, you will never see those profits. You have sent your $$$ to an offshore broker whether regulated or not the USA will not be able to help you. Your money is gone forever and the sharks are fed. The only hope you have is to try to get your deposit back via charge back from credit card if you deposited that way. This is usually successful because from what I have seen they do not dispute the chargeback as what they are doing is not legal in the USA. I don’t know the recourse if you wired in funds. But it does not matter much, you will not see any hard earned profits whether you traded yourself, used bot, in house trader, etc., etc.

It is important to understand the fact that It is simply not legal for offshore brokers to offer Binary Options on Currencies or Commodities to USA Clients. They are required to block these BO’s and make available only Stock Indices to USA Traders (this is why a lot will not accept USA anymore, the legit ones that is for non USA traders). This does not happen with all these phony software operators that send you to the offshore brokers for huge commissions from your deposit! The phony baloney software is sending signals or auto trading Currencies and Commodities as well as Stock Indices so only sends you to a broker that does not follow US law. So now in 2015 you are seeing tons of what I wrote above happening everyday, enough! Please stay away, and also don’t believe any of these so called watchdog sites. They have found a way to make it look like they are disclosing scams and then recommend one they say is legit. They post fake reviews on their site (try posting one questioning the software and they will delete your post) and use Fake Fiverr Actors giving testimonies...it’s all a shame my fellow traders to get those huge affiliate commissions from the offshore brokers. Many have already found out what I have written about and unfortunately learned the hard way, and now have decided to stay away from Binary Options completely and think it’s all a scam. This is also unfortunate as I will explain below.

Now that that’s all out of the way I have good news regarding Binary Option Trading for us traders that live in the USA. Many USA traders already know about NADEX but this is all still in it’s infancy so many more do not. So now we have the NADEX Exchange, no more phony brokers to deal with. NADEX is regulated by the CFTC and offers protection to USA traders that offshore brokers cannot. It is all legal, this offers great peace of mind in itself. You trade against others on the exchange, sweet! Your money is safe as it gets in segregated accounts in major USA banks. You can set up ACH with your bank and not pay the expensive wire and credit card fees the offshore brokers charge. You can still also use your credit card if you like. You will find some blogs knocking NADEX for various silly reasons and you notice they also promote the scam software that leads to offshore brokers so they too can get some of that huge affiliate commission, I don’t think so!

Okay, so NADEX is a different platform from what you have seen or used and not all that user friendly at first but you get the hang of it in no time. It’s the real deal at last! So you can use your charting software and make some great BO trades. But here is where it gets much better! Some of us are not that great with our trading tools or simply do not have the time to watch the tools, indicators, etc. on our charts. Face it, it is extremely time consuming. For this reason and after discovering the at last legit NADEX Exchange I began my research to find a legit signal service for NADEX. I found very few that were specifically for NADEX. There are a ton for all those offshore brokers I already wrote about. To meet my criteria the signal service had to be specifically for NADEX only! I narrowed it down to three. The easiest one to find with the NADEX name as part of the service (which sounds like could be problematic with copyright) did not respond to my emails. The second did respond but saw a number of negative post about their service. The 3rd service I found (not in order) from my extensive research is the clear winner and half the cost of the competition to boot! The name of this signal service is; U.S. Binary Signals and can be found by using their name with .com added to the end (usbinarysignals . com). I do not put their link in this post as want to make sure you find out about this excellent Binary Option Signal Service specifically tailored for NADEX. As you may know, many forums do not allow links and may delete my post. I am not an affiliate of theirs even though they do offer an affiliate program for others that may like internet marketing. I myself am simply a trader that wants to share the great signal service I have found that's specifically for NADEX Traders...no affiliate link here.

So, to wrap up this long post please be warned about the offshore brokers as I have written.
For USA Traders that want to legitimately trade Currency and Commodity (also Indices) Binary Options in the USA you now have the NADEX Exchange. Now that you are on the NADEX Exchange you will want to sign-up with U.S. Binary Options Signal Service that is specifically tailored for NADEX Trades. They offer a 14 Day Trial (for only $14) so you can see for yourself the many great signals you will receive. The U.S. Binary Option Signal Support Team answered all my questions via email very promptly which demonstrated their exceptional customer service. The signals come to you via text and or email so it’s very easy to place trades on the fly from your smartphone with the new NADEX App, how cool is that? You don’t have to worry about missing signals if busy with something else as many will keep coming and if you have time check against your charts to see if you may want to not take the trade. Even if you are using your own trading tools it’s well worth the cost of the service to get a signal and then check against your own tools. Sometimes it works out better to wait a bit and get in at a better price and sometimes just jump in right away. At any rate, the signals are 1 hour expiry so you usually have plenty of time to decide if you want to trade the signal. If it wasn’t for the U.S. Binary Signal in the first place you may have missed the trade entirely. Whether you are using your own trading tools or on the go and have no time for charting, U.S. Binary Signals is a must have for any trader on the NADEX Exchange. It truly is a no brainer, if you are a member of the NADEX Exchange you should also be a member of U.S. Binary Signals (usbinarysignals . com)

I am not going to apologize for the long post because this had to be told.

Happy Trading!
 
Back
Top