RESOLVED (AFCA findings in favor of financial firm): GlobalPrime is a dishonest scam broker too. Please don't fall into their trap.

[The Punisher]

im being working with ameritrade and XTB for almost 2 years already, and their price action (chart movement in pips/ticks) doesn't really differ much from one to another.. just 1-2 pips which is logical..
now I can't understand how some brokers would just make up their own price action moves... that can be legal? doesn't sound legit and would be too easy for those brokers to make money off traders investments.

@FPA Forums Team can you please invite the OP back to this thread?

 

[FPA Forums Team]

The FPA invited the Original Poster to update this discussion on Dec 5, 2021 at 11:18 PM

 

[Surepips]

A little late seeing this but want to pass on a massive well done and personal thank you @Shiro21 , you went into alot of effort to provide evidence regarding your argument. Im not a GP user and after having read most of this thread (all linked articles will be tonight's reading material) but no, I will never use now in light of this. talk about going down the rabbit hole. I really appreciate you compiling all of this and I really hope it's seen by any current users who may be on fpa forums, any I come across I will forward them as I was completely unaware of the connections between previous names they were under. Real eye opener and a very very interesting read.

 

[GigiFX]

Thank you so much @Shiro21 .
I am appaled, flabbergasted and relieved at the same time, because I thought it was all in my head and that I was imagining things..
Could we please talk in private?
I am a small fish, yet considering closing my account with GP. I have stopped trading with them for nearly a year because I started to see some similar patterns with "REMOVED", whenever I got into profitables trades.
Thank you for the free lesson

FPA Forums Team Note: Do not mention unrelated companies in a Scam Alerts thread. Doing this permanently ties the unrelated company to the complaint.

 

[4evermaat]

Could we please talk in private?

You just use the "start conversation" button on the user's profile page.

Thank you so much @Shiro21 .
I am appaled, flabbergasted and relieved at the same time, because I thought it was all in my head and that I was imagining things..

As a side comment, I would await the AFCA decision along with the posting of Shiro's complete trade history before passing judgement on either side. Hopefully within the next month or so this will be concluded.

 

[jemook-old]

Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce the following:

AFCA has dismissed all of the issues raised by Shiro21 in his extensive complaint and the final determination is in Global Prime's favour.

AFCA is the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. I won't be posting the full response as it has not been made public yet.

The final verdict included these comments:

"The complainant has not established the financial firm made any statements which were false or misleading, nor has he established his reliance on those statements caused him a direct loss.

While I appreciate he may have misunderstood some of the information, the complainant has
not been able to demonstrate any wrongdoing by the financial firm, nor that the losses he
suffered were directly caused by any conduct of the financial firm.
I am also satisfied the complainants orders were priced and executed with a range of liquidity providers in accordance with the information on the financial firm’s website.

This determination is in favour of the financial firm."

Thank you to all that participated in this thread with your comments and support.

Thank you to Forex Peace Army for giving traders the space to air their issues.

Global Prime just cracked the 400+ review mark at FPA with an incredible score of 4.74 out of 5 stars over a ten year track record.

I'm proud of our team and services and we will continue to practice ethical and fair dealings with our clients as we always have.

Regards,
Jeremy

 

[4evermaat]

If you're looking for real evidence, there are 7 pages of it here. Go through each page and if you find any of the evidence provided here disputable, raise it with proper logic and proof, not just talk and have nothing to back it up.

So now the case is still ongoing. And with all the evidence that we've gather here in this thread, I'm actually feeling pretty confident and optimistic about it. Thanks again to all the members here who have contributed to the discussion, as it really had helped me immensely in terms of gathering the right information and evidence.

The AFCA determination (https://service02.afca.org.au/CaseFiles/FOSSIC/794409.pdf) further amplifies the suspicions I long held about the validity or motives of Shiro21's "research" and evidence. The only 2 arguments that made it into the official complaint were:

1. That the financial firm alleged misrepresentation the jurisdiction to which the complainant was supposed to be regulated
2. The financial firm's alleged misleading advertising about improper relationship with Liquidity Providers (including Vidarr) and potential conflicts of interests, and use of the term ECN

So what happened to all the mountains of ShiroEvidence e.g. speculative drama / hearsay presented in this thread???????????? I can only assume based on what was presented here in this thread that >90% of Shiro's "evidence" was in fact hearsay and speculation. Both of which are inadmissible.

....The reason it dragged for so long, was because GlobalPrime tried to stop AFCA from taking up the case by claiming they had shifted my account to Vanuatu.

However, they had made multiple false and misleading statements when trying to coerce me into accepting having my account shifted to their Vanuatu entity, and thus their attempt to stop AFCA from taking up my case was denied.

The gist of it was very well summarized by the professional AFCA case analyst, after considering all the evidence provided by me

Ah yes....one of the many examples of Shiro offering a very narrow context of the whole situation.

AFCA didn't address individual trades as it was outside of their jurisdiction. And the final determination specifically referred the complainant to Vanuatu VFSC regulator to dispute that if he so chooses to do so. But I will take a crack at it...and see if the individual trading activity.

What Shiro the seasoned trader never did was show us publicly was his full track record. This is evidenced here.

I'm not sure how showing my account statement here is going to help prove any of that, as all the misleading advertisement can either be found on their website or on my earlier posts. If it's to verify the number of trades to see if the calculations made in one of my previous post was indeed correct, i have no problem masking all details showing only the instrument traded and the order/ticket number for you to tally the numbers. Drop me a PM and i will send it to you. I won't be putting it up here as you can see how some people with ulterior motive will use anything as a reason to start something with me.

And more specifically here:

I post relevant evidence that is related to my claims. My claim is about Globalprime falsely advertising themselves as an ECN broker to intentionally mislead potential customers into signing up with them after reading those false advertisements. Are Globalprime's false advertisements in my trade statement? Is Globalprime's past shady behavior of running multiple scam brokers to scam their clients in my trade statement? Are you a forensic investigator who is able to uncover traces of slippage or broker-side trade/order manipulation from my past statements?

What he shared privately was heavily edited, but did reveal that the Margin Stop Out (SO) was hit over 40 times. [Margin stop out is when you have insufficient equity to maintain all open positions, and the broker will liquidate part or all of your positions to bring your margin level back above the minimum]. And these SOs was not all on a single day, within a few seconds/minutes of each other (which would indicate that a large market move took out all his positions quickly in one swoop).
But instead the SOs were spread out over 5 month period!

And SOs had different account balances, which suggests multiple re-deposits. And the small fact that he continued trading over and over again....over 5600 times (2800 x 2 for entry + exits) without complaint or some comparative study with an identical strategy traded at a different venue at the same times.....which would make a side-by-side comparison fair and measurable.

I believe Shiro knew that his track record alone would have shown that even if GP's advertising was deemed misleading, it would not have negated his lack of trading skill gambling habit. So Shiro was very careful NOT to reveal his complete trade history publicly for all members to come to their own conclusions. After all, we may not measure up to Shiro's definition of forensic investigator. I'm sure he knows how to mitigate loss just fine....by continuing to move to Vanuatu brokerage and keep clicking the buy/sell button....and get stopped out.

Shiro is still free to upload his full trading record here, without deletions, in chronological order to dispute any of these claims.

I'm not holding my breath.

...The topic here is about Globalprime's scam tactics. If you want to disprove any of my points, you can begin by proving that globalprime did not lie to its clients about not being a true ECN broker, starting from the evidence provided in my first few post.

Well, let's start with your own admission:

...And who is this external compliance you spoke of? CySEC? VSFC? Or is it ASIC? I think I will submit an enquiry to ASIC and seek their opinion on this and update you guys on this....

You mean to tell me that prior to starting this thread, you had not yet clarified from the related regulatory agency or publications what the proper use of the disputed terms are? Not sure why a seasoned trader like yourself did not first seek clarification with the ASIC / AFCA in regards to the "correct" use of the term ECN (or if it is even regulated at all). Instead you used some 3rd party blog (e.g. Investopedia), which you have no contract with in regards to dealing on your GP account, to make a public declaration on FPA forum that GP does not fit Shiro's interpretation of an ECN. And therefore that makes GP a scam.

And therefore that somehow.......invalidates all 2800 trades (5600 including exits) made by yourself of your own free will.

Or maybe it was because.....

Non of these information is on the homepage or sign-up page. The only thing plastered all over the homepage is the word "ECN", which is a lie. Not everyone would navigate to those subpage where all this information is buried.

But didn't you provide screenshot evidence of portions of "those subpage" as part of your case?? (e.g. "ECN advantage" "Best Execution" "How we make money" "Ethical Dealing Model" et. al.) This would suggest that you knew (or should have reasonably known) to review these pages when researching the company. So cant the same company also cite the same webpages as evidence to support their own claims? Or is citing only allowed when Shiro says so?

Could have saved yourself and us FPA members a bunch of time by making a few common sense inquiries ahead of time. That one admission alone would condense this thread content by 70%

I thought the whole Vidarr conspiracy theory was thoroughly debunked when Shiro's own screenshot showed GP Uk entity was a dormant company. And the financials showed 1 GBP (one British pound) going through the GP UK entity. But surprisingly you still went with this argument. Perhaps you will take that to your grave . I won't waste any more time on it.

.....The details and result of the complaint will be shared here once the outcome have been decided by AFCA, so people can get the full picture instead of making speculations.

While unfortunately the AFCA decision pdf could not yet be posted here, it will eventually be available to the AFCA database in a few months (Case #794409). Unless Shiro wishes to post his copy of it here earlier. (Again, not holding my breath.) Why let people have a more complete picture anyways? Emotionally driven speculation is easier to sell to those willing to drink the kool-aid.

As for the complaint lodge with AFCA, the case has only recently been picked up by the case manager and we've had about 3-4 email exchanges, with the remaining information conveyed through a call. Evidence is largely the same as what have been posted in the last 5 pages in this thread, minus all the drama.

While I appreciate @Shiro21 desire to want some kind of "refund" for trading services he felt were not rendered (or rendered "properly" due to some false advertising), he could have done so minus all the drama and saved us all a lot of time.....that could be used on much more legitimate cases of company fraud. E.g:

• closing trades on the weekend (when market is closed)
• removing / disappearing stop losses
• delaying payout (withdrawal) of account balance weeks/months
  
  • delaying payout case #2
  • delaying payout case #3 [too many to list here]
• Artificially spiking prices/ to force a margin close out / lost trades
• deleting legitimate trades ( article 1 | article 2 | article 3 )
• deleting whole records deemed too profitable.
• fake trades that are opened by brokerage then closed at a loss to erase profits.
• delaying order execution up to 5 minutes per ticket
• streaming one price on-screen, executing at a much different [worse] price.
• disconnecting client account in 7-figures to prevent client from closing trades while in profit.
• outright theft of client deposits / deposits-become-donations [too many to cite here]
• etc. etc. etc.

I won't belabor the fact that >95% of the "evidence" hearsay / speculative nonsense (the "drama") never made it into the actual complaint or go into further detail why AFCA likely rejected it (or would have likely rejected such "evidence" had it been attached). Perhaps this seasoned trader could have redirected that same investigative energy into researching and improving his trading strategy....or at least minimizing the gambling impulse that I see displayed all too common in the scam alerts folder.





The only question left is: has this thread qualified for forex insanity status??

----------------------------

As a side comment, Australia does have laws that cover defamation. I found this article interesting.

#RegulatedFool

 

[mickaelsolomon]

well, congrats to GP for having won the case I had serious doubts both regarding the firm and Shiro21's motives and all this took time but at least it's settled

​

 

[oscarra]

While unfortunately the AFCA decision pdf could not yet be posted here, it will eventually be available to the AFCA database in a few months (Case #794409). Unless Shiro wishes to post his copy of it here earlier. (Again, not holding my breath.) Why let people have a more complete picture anyways? Emotionally driven speculation is easier to sell to those willing to drink the kool-aid.

hum, i would say a must have....so we see what and how things had or had not been investigated by this
mediator AFCA

 

[4evermaat]

well, congrats to GP for having won the case I had serious doubts both regarding the firm and Shiro21's motives and all this took time but at least it's settled

I believe if Shiro had posted his full trading history in his initial posts of "evidence", it would have likely removed any doubts. He could have continued with his rants about misleading advertising, Vidarr conspiracy theory, et al., but I think you would have asked more questions as to how specifically did all those other things cause his losses? You'll never see that track record here, unless Shiro returns to prove me wrong. His sheer[o] narcissism will not allow him to do this.

This isn't the first time someone has used FPA to generate black PR against a company. But when the company responds positively, it actually becomes an opportunity to be used in a positive way.

But if you took a honest comparative look on this forum with the number of complaints (and type of complaints) that GP has gotten vs other companies, the results of that comparison tells you everything you need to know.

Or put more plainly, if you compare some ECN advertising wording mix up with this list

that could be used on much more legitimate cases of company fraud. E.g:

• closing trades on the weekend (when market is closed)
• removing / disappearing stop losses
• delaying payout (withdrawal) of account balance weeks/months
  
  • delaying payout case #2
  • delaying payout case #3 [too many to list here]
• Artificially spiking prices/ to force a margin close out / lost trades
• deleting legitimate trades ( article 1 | article 2 | article 3 )
• deleting whole records deemed too profitable.
• fake trades that are opened by brokerage then closed at a loss to erase profits.
• delaying order execution up to 5 minutes per ticket
• streaming one price on-screen, executing at a much different [worse] price.
• disconnecting client account in 7-figures to prevent client from closing trades while in profit.
• outright theft of client deposits / deposits-become-donations [too many to cite here]
• etc. etc. etc.

...then I would think the answers to any doubts is fairly obvious.

I've come to the conclusion that we pick our teachers (or brokers) and we ultimately get what we want. The real question then is what do you really want?

Another side comment I forgot to post in the "post-verdict" reply was: Suppose Shiro had won a significant partial or full award determination. After that precedent was set, who in the world [in Australia] would still offer cfd brokerage services to retail traders??? Because if traders knew that they can just complain if trades/bets don't go in the direction they thought it would, there would be no LPs left to accept retail flow.