Belgium's financial regulator named 51 more fraudulent trading platforms and the websites steering investors to them today (Thursday). The Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) has now flagged about 150 such platforms this year, by FinanceMagnates.com's count of its notices.
That is close to the 157 trading platforms it named in all of 2025, with three months of the year left.
Losses that Belgians report on these platforms are moving the other way. They reached EUR 8.5 million in the first half of 2026, against EUR 11.9 million a year earlier, according to the regulator's fraud dashboards.
London's trading industry is coming home!
Today's list is the largest of the four the FSMA has published in 2026, after 24 names in March, 47 in April and 25 at the end of June.
The July dashboard showed the wider fraud picture easing too, with losses from fake WhatsApp stock tips falling to about EUR 2 million from EUR 9.5 million in the previous six months.
Local Names and AI Labels
Ten of today's 51 entries are not trading platforms themselves. The FSMA said these websites were putting consumers in contact with fraudulent platforms.
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Several carry Dutch- or French-sounding names, including Gent Beursveks, Koersaven, Haute Mondrève and Belvue Capitange. Some add "ai" to their web addresses, as in ai-gentbeursveks.com and koersaven-ai.com.
Belgian fraud complaints lean Dutch. In the second half of 2025, 68% of reports about the WhatsApp stock-tip scam came in Dutch, and in the first half of 2026 more than 72% of fake-credit reports came from Dutch-speaking consumers, the FSMA's dashboards show.
The regulator marked three platforms, Bonmot Invest, Canford Castle and Fid Europeed, as clones of other firms. Others use names that echo the Chinese bank ICBC, Goldman Sachs and the MetaTrader 5 platform: ICBC Markets, SGoldmanIFA and MT5 Novatrade.
In August, the FSMA warned about fake news sites dressed up as Le Soir, La Libre, HLN and Euronews that sent readers to a platform called BitKeltTrade. Regulators elsewhere have flagged the same method, and in France brand impersonation accounted for 85.1% of warnings issued since 2010.
More Names, Flat Complaints
The FSMA's half-yearly dashboards show the wider warning count rising as well. In the first half of 2026 it issued nine warnings covering 157 fraudulent entities and 185 websites, more than 62% of them trading platforms. That compares with 98 entities and 138 websites in the same period of 2025.
| Period | Warnings | Entities named | Of which trading platforms | Websites |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 15 | 256 | 146 | 313 |
| 2024 | 16 | 297 | 185 | 396 |
| 2025 | 19 | 240 | 157 | 316 |
| H1 2026 | 9 | 157 | 98 | 185 |
Consumer complaints have not followed. The FSMA received 1,277 reports about unlawful activity in the first half, compared with 1,289 a year earlier, after an 11% rise to 2,911 reports in 2025.
The regulator also works on the supply side. In 2025 it fed 245 fraudulent websites into the Belgian Anti-Phishing Shield, which redirected visits from 22,973 unique IP addresses away from them, its dashboard shows.
Reported losses on fraudulent trading platforms have fallen for three consecutive half-years, from EUR 12.5 million in the second half of 2024 to EUR 8.5 million. The dashboards count only what victims report to the FSMA.
France Heads for a Record
Belgium is not the only regulator adding names at a faster clip. France's blacklists took 336 new entries by September 11 and are on course to pass the 2024 record of 434.
Belgium's own list is incomplete but updated often, the FSMA said. Fraudulent trading platforms accounted for 66.5% of the EUR 12.7 million that Belgian consumers reported losing in the first half, most often in investments presented as linked to cryptocurrencies, according to the dashboard.
