Every file on this site is produced by the same procedure. It is written down here so that a reader can repeat it, disagree with it, or find the step where we went wrong.
Step one: collect the operator's own words
Before any database is opened, we read what the service says about itself: the landing page, the terms if they exist, the imprint, the privacy notice, the footer. From those pages we copy out every checkable item: company names, registration numbers, addresses, authority names, licence references, the name of any bank.
This step decides how the rest of the file will read. A service that names a company gives us something to search for. A service that names nothing leaves only the brand, and a brand is a weak search key because anyone may use it.
Step two: the commercial register
If a company name and a country appear anywhere in those documents, the national commercial or companies register comes next. It answers a narrow question, whether the entity exists and is active, and nothing more. A company in good standing may still have no permission to offer investment services, which is why this step never ends a file.
Step three: authorisation
We then search the financial supervisor of the country in question, the European register maintained for investment firms, and the national databases of the markets where the brand is being advertised.
Two habits matter here. The first is to read the entry rather than to note its existence: an authorisation covers named services in named countries, and a permission to receive and transmit orders is not a permission to hold client money. The second is to compare the website and the address in the entry against the site in front of you, because a clone borrows a real firm's identity and fails precisely at that comparison.
Step four: warning lists and public notices
Next come the warning lists and enforcement notices published by European authorities, plus the international collection of investor alerts. We search the brand, the company name if we have one, and the obvious spelling variants.
A finding here is decisive and we quote it with the authority and the date. A blank result is recorded as a blank result, with the date of the search, and nothing more is inferred from it. Lists are built out of complaints that arrive after the harm; being absent from one says nothing about the future and very little about the present.
Step five: write down the absences
The file then records what could not be established: the operating entity, its jurisdiction, any authorisation, the bank holding client money, the identity of the people behind the service. These sit in the unverified list of the verdict card, which exists to mark the boundary of what the desk knows.
How a file is dated and rechecked
Each file carries the date its searches were last repeated. That is a promise about the checking rather than about the editing. Files are reopened when a reader sends a document, when a supervisor publishes something, or in the ordinary course of rechecking; the status changes only when evidence changes it.
Where we look
Check it yourself
These registers are public and free. If a platform claims a licence you cannot find here, treat the claim as false.
Limits of the method
Three of them, stated plainly.
A register search proves the state of a database on a day, not the character of a business. Databases lag reality in both directions: authorisations are granted and withdrawn, and notices are published weeks or months after the conduct that prompted them.
A brand is not a legal person. Searching a brand name that no company has claimed can only ever return nothing, and that nothing is a fact about the search, not a verdict on the operator.
We do not test the product. Nobody at this desk opens an account, deposits money or trades, so we can say nothing about execution, withdrawals or software behaviour from our own experience, and we do not pretend otherwise.