If you want the FPA to help, work with the FPA, not against the FPA.
One side issue came up during the 6 month wave of complaints against Aston Markets. During April of 2014, FPA member Abidada claimed he was being blackmailed by Aston Markets employees to remove his complaints in exchange for getting the second half of his funds returned.
Because of blackmail by companies against traders, the FPA has continued to tighten the restrictions on removing complaints from the reviews and forums. If the FPA allows a company to force traders to hide that there has been an issue, a company with severe problems could have few visible complaints. This would be a disservice to traders trying to research a company's history. The FPA can't hide reviews or forum posts to save one person if that could lead to more people being victimized.
I tried to get more information and evidence, but Abidada decided the best method to get his way was to send multiple email messages demanding instant action I explained to him that flooding the FPA's email with requests would slow down response times, not speed them up. He was unable to provide any of the information I requested and instead sent irrelevant screenshots plus many more requests for immediate action. He was warned again that mailbombing the FPA only slowed down any potential action. He chose to ignore the warnings and increased the rate of sending his email demands.
The FPA's services are free to members and readers. At any given time, the FPA is actively trying to help anywhere from 25 to 100 or more traders get their problems resolved. There are only a limited number of people on staff and there are only so many hours in a day. Each issue is important. Sending email after email about the same issue does not make it more important. I'm not about to let one person's selfishness detract from the FPA's ability to help others.
Abidada's behavior got so bad that I had to take extreme action to deal with him. His forums account was banned. An email filter was created to deal with all new email messages from him. Those were sent an autoresponse, marked as read, and filed unopened.
Had Abidada worked with the FPA instead of against the FPA, he might have had some chance of getting the rest of his funds back. If he had provided evidence to prove that he was being blackmailed, his posts could have been temporarily removed and then replaced later his money showed up. At the same time, had he provided evidence, it could have been used to by the FPA to declare Aston Forex to be a scam 2 months sooner. This might have saved some other traders from losing their money.
Instead, Abidada chose to act like a spoiled child. He seemed to think that if he kept shouting louder and louder, he would automatically get his own way. He didn't show the slightest regard for the consequences to anyone else, as long as he instantly got what he wanted.
If a company does blackmail you, let the FPA know. Use the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the page. FPA policy is not to remove complaints in the forums or reviews, but to mark items as resolved once all money owed has been paid. Still, if you can work with the FPA and try to get firm evidence to support an accusation of blackmail, it may be possible to temporarily remove a few items. If another person decides to mailbomb the FPA to try to get something removed, the default reply of “We tried to help you, but you refused to cooperate” has already been written.