The Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the offshore paradise St. Vincent & The Grenadines recently advised investors to be careful when dealing with legal entities registered in its regulatory regime. Legal entities registered in the island country in the Caribbean are not licensed to carry out broker activities in forex or binary options. Currently, the offshore regulator does not issue broker licenses. While SVG entities can engage in any legal activity, they are doing so without an FSA license if they engage in forex trading and brokerage.
SVG entities are not prohibited from offering broker services, but the SVG FSA has no regulatory framework and thus no license for this kind of financial service. However, the SVG FSA points out that these entities have to obtain the appropriate permission for the regulatory regimes where they offer their services. We assume that this FSA announcement also applies to the crypto trading and broker segment.
There are dozens of companies registered in SVG offering Forex, CFD, and crypto broker services. They often claim on their websites that the FSA would regulate them. We now know officially that this is not the case. These offshore licenses are worth nothing, as they do not entitle the offshore brokers to operate in other regulatory regimes. An offshore license is mostly just a fig leaf to pretend respectability. Most SVG brokers are either scammers but, in any case, operate illegally.
