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Italian regulator blacklists 6 financial service providers

Consob, the financial market regulator in Italy, has added five new websites to its blacklist of fraudulent financial service providers. These platforms offer their services illegally in Italy and are not regulated by any governing body in the country.

 

The blacklisted websites are Prime Invest, FXBoxed, New Finance LLC, Axi24, Evolve Consulting LCC, and Trustfund-Minning Global Pty Ltd. Consob has identified five of them as illegal financial intermediaries, while one offers financial products without a prospectus.

 

As of now, only three of these websites are accessible outside of Europe. Two of the blacklisted platforms claim to be regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), and their registration details are authentic, but the authenticity of the websites cannot be verified as ASIC does not list approved domains. The other platform has authorization from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

 

Sharpening The Crack Down

The three websites that are currently accessible offer speculative financial instruments, including margin forex pairs, contracts for differences (CFDs), and even cryptocurrencies, which involve high levels of risk. This brings the total number of illegal platforms on Consob’s blacklist to 845.

 

The regulator has been warning against such platforms since July 2019 when it received additional supervisory authority through legislation. Among European regulators, Consob is the only one authorized to block access to blacklisted websites at an internet service provider level, ensuring that Italian residents are protected from known scammers.

 

“Consob draws investors’ attention to the importance of adopting the greatest diligence 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,” the Consob highlighted.

 

In contrast, other regulators, such as the UK’s FCA, regularly publish lists of fraudulent websites and clones of legitimate platforms, and regulators in Cyprus and Spain maintain an active list of unregulated and fraudulent platforms.



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