In early Jan 2022, the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) issued a warning against the TradingBloom broker scam. The fake company Bloomb Trading Facility B.V. is stated on the website as the operator, acting as a clone of the AFM-licensed Bloomberg Trading Facility B.V. Other regulators such as the Italian Consob or the Belgian FSMA re-published the warning. Recently, the Spanish CNMV has issued a warning. A few hours ago, the German BaFin finally issued a warning. Too late!
We have reviewed the TradingBloom broker scam on 22 March 2022 and found that clients can no longer log in. New registrations are also no longer possible. The scammers evidently already closed their operation and vanished with the victims’ funds without any trace. The BaFin warning comes way too long to protect investors. The truth is that the scam was already closed down at the time when CNMV issued its warning on 22 March 2022.
It needs an ESMA task force!
It makes no sense that the individual regulators within the ESMA regime do not coordinate on warnings or operate a jointly operated EU Investor Alert Portal. On such a portal, warnings should be published in real-time and simultaneously for the different regulatory regimes within the EU. Otherwise, efficient investor protection is certainly not possible. Sure, there is with IOSCO (www.iosco.org) and its Investor Alert Portal. National regulators across the globe should feed their warnings to this portal, but this does not work. Not all regulators provide their alerts to the portal, and the published ones are already old. The site is also not easy to handle for consumers either.
The EU regulator ESMA has to set up a task force to establish an EU-wide investor alert site. What is difficult about that except maybe national egoisms?
