Consob Blocks More Sight Include Nadex Clone

Consob, the Italian financial market regulator, has continued to fight against illegal trading platforms. The regulator has added four new names to the list of websites that have been blacklisted by the regulator. One of the websites that were recently blocked is a clone of the derivatives exchange Nadex.

Consob blocks additional websites

Nadex is a US-based platform that supports short term trading for binary options. The newly blocked websites include Prime Markets (primemarkets.co.com), Fintech Market (fitechmarket.consulting), Luxem Capital Inc (luxemcapital.com) and Nadex CFD Limited (nadexcfd.com).

The Nadex clone website is unresponsive since Consob released the alert on blocking the site. However, the three other websites remained operational and they claim to provide investors access to contracts for difference (CFDs). Italian investors will not have access to these websites after Consob blocked them because of a regulatory framework that was established in 2-019.

In the recent statement, Consob said it “draws investors’ attention to the importance of adopting the utmost diligence in order to make informed investment choices, adopting common sense behaviors, essential to safeguard their savings: these include, for websites that offer financial services, checking in advance that the operator with whom they are investing is authorized, and, for offers of financial products, that a prospectus has been published.”

Following the recent action taken against four additional websites, the total number of websites that have been blocked by the regulator from July 2019 to date has increased to 898.

Italian regulator cracks down on fake sites

Consob has been actively cracking down against illegal operators in the Italian financial market. The regulator monitors internet activity to block offers from unregulated or suspicious platforms.

The recent action comes around two weeks after the regulator blocked four other sites, including the clones of XTB and Virtu Financial. In April, Consob blocked the websites of SolidXM, FX Alta, New Finance LLC and NEWFX Ltd.

However, Consob is not the only European regulator taking proactive action. The Cypriot regulator, the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC), usually updates its warning lists. One month ago, the CySEC warned retail investors against eight illegal CFD trading platforms.

The websites that were listed by the CySEC include financista.com, ocdfinances.net, ocdfinances.org, swiftpuprime.com and world-trade-center.io. The regulator also warned against inverbid.co, inverbid.com and inverbid.net.

Clone platforms have become increasingly popular in the brokerage industry. Clone brokers are fraudulent institutions that siphon the details of a legitimate, regulated broker to defraud investors. Clone brokers can use a similar name and the website design of a legitimate platform. Such brokers usually aim to scam investors by soliciting funds or giving poor trading advice resulting in losses.

Investors have usually been urged to verify the legitimacy of a brokerage platform before investing their funds in them. The verification can be done through the cross-referencing of broker information with the information that is available on the official website of a regulator. Some of the information that needs to be verified includes the contact details and checking for inconsistencies in the website design and branding.