Consob, the securities market regulator in Italy, announced on Friday that it has blocked a further five websites providing financial services in an illegal manner in the country.
The red-flagged platforms are Italiano Invest, which operates with the domain name www.italianoinvest.net and secure.italianoinvest.net; EZ2GO Ltd, operating with www.capitalfx.co and client.capital.co; Ozava Partners LTD, operating services with goldmanbanc.com; Pro Star, offering services under www.ictrades.co; and New Traders Holdings, operating with the domain www.newtradersholdings-fx.com.
All of these websites are offering trading services with forex and CFDs products, and mostly targeting retail customers.
The Vigilance of the Financial Industry
As the frauds in the trading space are increasing and becoming more sophisticated to detect, Consob is actively blacklisting all suspicious platforms operating without proper authorizations in Italy. The regulator started the blacklisting process in July 2019 and until now has blocked 431 platforms.
Unlike other European regulators, the Italian securities market regulator has additional authority to block public access to these suspicious websites.
“The black-out of these websites by Internet service providers operating on Italian territory is ongoing. For technical reasons, it can take several days for the black-out to come into effect,” Consob wrote in the official notice.
“Consob draws investors' attention to the importance of adopting the greatest diligence in order to make informed investment choices, adopting common sense behaviors, essential to safeguard their savings: these include, for websites that offer financial services, checking in advance that the operator with whom they are investing is authorized, and, for offers of financial products, that a prospectus has been published.”
Other European regulators are also blacklisting dodgy websites and many regulated firms see the red flag for non-Compliance . FCA, CySEC and most of the other financial market regulators are maintaining proper lists to warn traders of scams.
