CF Invest is apparently ‘using’ the rightful license granted to properly-regulated CFI Markets.

Cyprus financial regulator CySEC has sent out a release warning investors against CF Invest Ltd., and their website www.cfinvestltd.com, stating that they are not and have never been licensed by CySEC.

From a quick visit to the CF Invest website, it appears that they claim to be an institutional FX liquidity provider, based in Luxembourg, licensed by CySEC (and MiFID, and the FSA…). CF Invest actually never states that they are licensed by CySEC — they just post the CySEC logo (along with the logos of MiFID, the FSA, MetaQuotes and the Cyprus 2012 Presidency of the EU) on their home page, as per below.

CF Invest does not appear to be very professional — they actually misspelled ‘Sydney’ as “Sidney’, and hyphenated ‘New-York’, on their top-of-website global clocks. Some of the clocks (at least New York) are actually showing the wrong time.

CySEC notes in its warning that there is indeed a properly licensed and operating forex broker with a very similar name and website, CFI Markets, at www.cfimarkets.com. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen ‘copycat’ websites set up with names and url’s similar to those of properly regulated firms.

As a reminder, we strongly urge traders to always trade with a forex broker having a real address and location disclosed on their website, regulated by a recognized financial regulator such as CySEC, the FCA, the CFTC, etc., depending on where the trader is based, of course. And we encourage traders who trade to look at our Approved List of regulated forex brokers.

For the full CySEC warning against CF Invest Ltd. click here (English, pdf).

For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.