The Forensic Trust Index
Every rating on this site is produced by the rubric on this page. Six pillars, fixed weights, scored against documents that anybody can pull up in a browser. Take the evidence listed on a company's page, apply the tables below, and you should arrive at the same number we published. If you don't, tell us — that is a defect, and we will fix it in public.
We score what the public record establishes, not what a platform feels like. A firm's authorisation, the warnings published against it, enforcement and court action, whether client money is protected by anything real, who is behind the company, and how long the entity has actually existed. Each pillar carries a fixed weight and admits only a short list of verdicts, each worth a fixed amount. A pillar scores only if a source is attached to it; pillars we cannot evidence are dropped and the rest re-weighted, so an open question never silently becomes a black mark. The percentage of the rubric we managed to evidence is published on the page as coverage. Reports sent to us by readers sit on a separate tier, clearly labelled, and are worth nothing to the score until there are enough of them to describe a pattern.
What we score, and what each answer is worth
Regulatory authorisation
Is the firm licensed to do what it is selling, in the place it sells it?
| Verdict | What it means | Value |
|---|---|---|
Tier 1 authorised TIER_1_AUTHORISED | Live entry on a major register (FCA, ASIC, CFTC/NFA, BaFin, FINMA, MAS, IIROC) matching the trading name. | 1.00 |
Tier 2 authorised TIER_2_AUTHORISED | Live licence from a mid-tier regulator (CySEC, FSCA, DFSA, FSA Japan) with real but weaker recourse. | 0.70 |
Offshore licence only OFFSHORE_LICENSED | Licensed only where the regime imposes little capital or conduct obligation (SVG, Seychelles, Vanuatu, Comoros, Mauritius). | 0.35 |
Company registered, not licensed REGISTERED_NOT_LICENSED | A company exists on a corporate registry, but nothing authorises it to take client funds or offer investments. | 0.15 |
No authorisation found UNLICENSED | No licence located on any register covering the markets it solicits. | 0.00 |
Licence withdrawn LICENCE_REVOKED | Held an authorisation that the regulator has since revoked, suspended, or lapsed. | 0.00 |
Clone of an authorised firm CLONE_OF_AUTHORISED | Uses the name, registration number, or address of a genuinely authorised firm without being it. | 0.00 |
Regulator warnings
Have financial regulators publicly told the public to stay away from this firm?
| Verdict | What it means | Value |
|---|---|---|
No warnings found NONE_FOUND | Not present on IOSCO I-SCAN or any national warning list we searched. | 1.00 |
One regulator warning SINGLE_WARNING | Named on one national warning list. | 0.30 |
Warnings in several countries MULTI_JURISDICTION | Named by regulators in two or three jurisdictions. | 0.10 |
Warnings across many countries WIDESPREAD | Named by four or more regulators, typically syndicated through IOSCO I-SCAN. | 0.00 |
Enforcement and litigation
Has an authority or a court acted against the firm or the people running it?
| Verdict | What it means | Value |
|---|---|---|
No actions found NONE_FOUND | No enforcement action, prosecution, or civil fraud claim located. | 1.00 |
Historic action, resolved REMEDIATED | An action was brought and closed, with the firm remaining authorised afterwards. | 0.50 |
Civil action pending CIVIL_ACTION_PENDING | A regulator or claimant has filed and the matter is unresolved. Allegations are not findings. | 0.20 |
Criminal charges filed CRIMINAL_CHARGES | Operators charged criminally in connection with the firm's activity. | 0.05 |
Fraud established PROVEN_FRAUD | A conviction, judgment, receivership, or asset-freeze order has been entered. | 0.00 |
Client money protection
If the firm failed tomorrow, is there a mechanism that gets clients their money?
| Verdict | What it means | Value |
|---|---|---|
Segregated plus compensation scheme SEGREGATED_PLUS_SCHEME | Client money held separately at a credit institution and covered by a statutory scheme (FSCS, ICF, SIPC). | 1.00 |
Segregation required by licence SEGREGATED | Licence conditions require segregated client accounts, without a payout scheme. | 0.75 |
Claimed, not verifiable CLAIMED_UNVERIFIED | The firm asserts segregation or reserves, but no licence condition or attestation supports it. | 0.30 |
Crypto deposits only CRYPTO_ONLY_DEPOSITS | Funding is accepted only in crypto, so there is no bank rail, no chargeback, and no custodian to compel. | 0.05 |
No protection NONE | No segregation obligation and no scheme. Client funds sit on the firm's balance sheet. | 0.00 |
Corporate transparency
Can you find out who you would actually be handing money to?
| Verdict | What it means | Value |
|---|---|---|
Fully identified FULLY_IDENTIFIED | Named legal entity, registry number, named officers, and a verifiable address. | 1.00 |
Partly identified PARTIAL | An entity is traceable, but ownership or the operating address does not check out. | 0.50 |
Opaque OPAQUE | Shell structures, nominee directors, or an address that is a mail drop. | 0.15 |
No identifiable operator ANONYMOUS | No legal entity can be tied to the platform at all. | 0.00 |
Operating record
How long has this specific entity been running, and is it still running?
| Verdict | What it means | Value |
|---|---|---|
Five years or more ESTABLISHED_5Y_PLUS | Continuous operation of the same registered entity for five years or longer. | 1.00 |
Two to five years OPERATING_2_5Y | Established but without a long record. | 0.70 |
Under two years UNDER_2Y | Too new for the record to show much either way. | 0.40 |
Rebranded from a failed operation REBRANDED_OR_CLONE | Traceable to an earlier platform that collapsed, was warned against, or was shut down. | 0.10 |
Collapsed or gone dark COLLAPSED | Public record shows withdrawals halted, the site withdrawn, or the operation wound up. | 0.00 |
How the number is produced
Worked example. A firm has three evidenced pillars: authorisation is No authorisation found (value 0.00, weight 30), warnings are Warnings in several countries (0.10, weight 25), client money protection is Crypto deposits only (0.05, weight 10). The weights sum to 65, so coverage is 65%. The weighted total is (0×30) + (0.10×25) + (0.05×10) = 3.0, divided by 65 = 0.046. The score is 1 + 4 × 0.046 = 1.2, which lands in grade F. Nothing else feeds in — not our opinion of the website, not the tone of their sales calls.
The scale bottoms out at 1.0 rather than 0, because a rating of zero implies a certainty about a firm's future conduct that no document supports. 1.0 means every pillar we could evidence failed.
What each grade means
Top-tier authorisation, clean public record, client money protected by statute.
Properly licensed with no serious findings, but weaker recourse or a shorter record.
Real gaps in the record — thin regulation, unresolved findings, or poor transparency.
Serious documented problems: warnings, unlicensed solicitation, or no fund protection.
Enforcement action, widespread warnings, or a collapsed operation. Do not deposit.
The rules that keep the score honest
No source, no score
A pillar with no document attached is not scored at all. It is dropped, the remaining weights are renormalised, and the shortfall is published as coverage. This is the single most important rule here: it is what stops "we couldn't find out" from turning into "they failed".
Allegations are not findings
A filed complaint scores as a pending action, not as proven fraud. Charges, judgments, convictions and receiverships each have their own verdict and their own value. We do not promote an allegation to a finding because it is widely believed.
Check the number, not the name
Where a firm claims a licence, we look up the registration number and compare the website, phone number and address on the register entry. Clone firms survive a name check by design; that is the whole trick.
Every citation carries a checked date
Registers change. Warnings are withdrawn, licences lapse, cases settle. Each source on a company page shows the date somebody last opened it and confirmed it still says what we say it says.
Nobody can buy, edit, or remove a rating
We run no affiliate links to the firms we score and accept no payment for placement, removal, or revision. A firm that believes a finding is wrong can send us the document that shows it — a licence, a withdrawn warning, a dismissal — and we re-score against the document. That is the only route, and it is open to everyone.
A thin file can never certify a firm
Because unevidenced pillars are dropped, a company with one favourable finding and nothing else would otherwise sail to an A. So two ceilings apply, and they only ever push a score down. If we could not establish whether the firm holds a licence at all, the score is capped at 3.4. If less than 60% of the rubric could be evidenced, it is capped at 4.0. Where a cap has bitten, the company's page prints both the capped score and the number the arithmetic produced.
We publish what we do not score
Marketing conduct, celebrity endorsements, affiliate funnels and website quality are recorded on the page but carry no weight, because they are judgements rather than records. They reach the score only when a regulator has acted on them.
Where the evidence has to come from
Listed strongest first. Every entry on a company page is tagged with which of these it is, so you can see at a glance whether a finding rests on a court record or on the firm's own marketing.
The regulator's own licence database. Checked by registration number where one is claimed, never by trading name alone.
Public alerts naming firms operating without authorisation. Cross-checked against IOSCO I-SCAN, which pools alerts from member regulators worldwide.
Orders, fines, suspensions and press releases issued by a financial regulator under its own name.
Complaints, indictments, judgments, receivership and asset-freeze orders.
Company filings: incorporation, registered office, officers, and dissolution dates.
The firm's own published terms, licence conditions, or audit reports. Weakest source, used only where it is against the firm's interest.
First-hand reports submitted through this site. Second tier only — see the section below.
The starting point for almost every assessment is IOSCO's I-SCAN (Investor Alerts Portal), the portal through which securities regulators worldwide publish their investor alerts. It is free, it is public, and we would rather you used it directly than took our word for anything on this site. Search the exact company name, then search the exact domain you were sent — the two often give different answers.
Reports from readers, and why they are held apart
We publish no invented customer reviews. Not a single testimonial on this site is written by us, and we do not buy, generate, or solicit favourable ones. What we do hold is first-hand reports sent in through the form on each company page, mostly from people trying to get money out of a platform that has stopped answering.
Those reports are real, but they are unverified by their nature, and they arrive from a self-selecting group: people with a problem write in, people who withdrew fine rarely do. So they are held on a second tier, displayed as what they are, and given no weight at all until we hold at least 5 reports on a company. Above that threshold they enter the score at a weight of 10, scored on the share of reports describing an outright failure to withdraw or an advance fee demanded before release of funds.
Below the threshold, the panel still appears on the page and says plainly that it is not scored. Showing you three reports and calling it data would be the same failure as inventing them.
What this rating cannot tell you
A high grade is not a recommendation and not a guarantee. It means the public record carried nothing against the firm on the date we checked. Firms with clean records and real licences still fail, still lose client money, and still change hands.
A low grade is a statement about documents, not a verdict from a court. Where we record an allegation, we say it is an allegation. Where a firm appears on a warning list, that listing means the regulator has not authorised it — which is a specific claim, and the only one we make from it.
Coverage matters as much as the score. A 1.2 built on two evidenced pillars and a 1.2 built on six are different statements, and both numbers are printed on the page for that reason.
Nothing here is financial or legal advice. If you have lost money, your first calls are your bank and your national regulator, in that order, and quickly — chargeback windows close.
Getting a rating changed
Send the document. A live register entry, a warning that has been withdrawn, a case that was dismissed, a licence granted since we last looked — any of these re-scores a pillar, and the score moves the moment the evidence does. We will publish the change and the date.
What does not move a rating: a request, a legal threat, an offer, or a claim unaccompanied by a record. Version 1.0 of this standard applies to every company in the directory equally, and changes to the rubric itself are versioned and re-run across the whole directory rather than applied to one firm.