Reviews and trust · Fraud

How to spot a prop firm scam before you pay

No single sign proves fraud. What does exist is a pattern, and it is not a forum that describes it: three European supervisors have it in writing — Spain's CNMV, Belgium's FSMA and Italy's Consob — each with a date and with the specific complaints they received.

This page is what you can check before you pay: the pattern those three documents describe, six checks that fit into one afternoon, the things that look like proof and are not, and what to do if you have already paid. There is no list of names here, because a list of names goes stale in a week and what you need is to know where to look.

Sources read on 31 August 2026 · linked at the foot of the page

This page does not point at any particular firm

The pattern the supervisors describe

A paid course or challenge first; the account afterwards, if it ever arrives. That order is what all three describe.

The CNMV, the Spanish securities regulator, put it in writing on 6 June 2019 and it is still published in its investor alerts section. It describes websites offering what it calls funded trading accounts: the user would not risk any capital of their own, would apparently trade with capital the website itself puts up, and in exchange would supposedly receive a percentage of the profits. To get there you take a course, pass trading tests in a simulated environment inside a set of risk parameters, and that course requires a payment up front which the CNMV describes as sometimes running to several thousand euros.

The risk it points to is one specific thing rather than a vague worry: fraud or deception as to whether the funded account can be accessed at all. In other words, the promised account never arriving.

The Belgian FSMA published its warning on 7 March 2024 and adds the piece that explains the model from the inside: "These courses are not easy, not cheap and often consumers have to take, and pay for, several of them before they can successfully complete them. There is a good chance that some consumers never pass the courses. This is how prop trading firms earn money from them".

Italy's Consob completed the set on 8 July 2024, in a press release that calls the whole thing a sort of finance video game. The most useful part of that text is the complaints it says it received, because there are two of them and not one: the difficulty of the tests, which users say is engineered to push players into trying again, and the promised share of the profits never being handed over.

The three texts know about each other. The Consob release closes by noting that equivalent warnings have been issued by the national market supervisors in Belgium and in Spain, which are precisely the other two.

SupervisorWhat it warns about

CNMV · SpainWarning

Date: 6 June 2019
What it describes: Funded trading accounts tied to paid courses
Risk it flags: Fraud or deception over access to the account
Where it came from: Queries and complaints from users

FSMA · BelgiumWarning

Date: 7 March 2024
What it describes: A shadow investment game on a demo account
Where the money is made: On the paid challenges nobody passes
Authorisation: None held, and none allowed to provide investment services

Consob · ItalyWarning

Date: 8 July 2024
What it describes: A finance video game built on skill tests
Complaints received: Engineered difficulty and profit share never paid
Channel flagged: Websites and social media

Read all three precisely: not one of them says that every prop firm is a fraud. They describe a pattern of offer and they flag a risk. There are firms that charge for their evaluation, publish their rulebook and pay the split. What these warnings give you is the mould to hold the one in front of you against, and the mould costs nothing.

Six checks before you pay

None of them needs you to understand trading, and all of them can be done from the sofa. The longest takes ten minutes.

Which company this is, and whether it is where it says it is
The Spanish e-commerce act, Ley 34/2002, requires anyone providing services over the internet to give permanent, easy, direct and free access to a specific list: registered name, address, a direct and effective means of contact, the details of its entry in the relevant public register and its tax identification number. A name on a page is not enough: the exercise is to take those details and look them up in the register they cite, which is where half of these websites fall over. Do it to this site as well — its legal notice is here.
Whether it has been warned about, here or elsewhere
The CNMV runs a public warnings search, and warnings from foreign supervisors feed into it and into IOSCO's. Search by the company name and by the domain. And do not read too much into a clean result, because the CNMV's own guide says the opposite: a firm that has not been the subject of a warning is not necessarily an authorised firm — it may simply be that its irregular activity has not been detected yet.
Whether what they are selling is a reserved activity
Spain's securities markets act, Ley 6/2023, states it plainly in article 129: nobody may carry out the activities listed in articles 125 and 126 on a professional or habitual basis without holding the required authorisation and being entered in the CNMV's or the Bank of Spain's registers. Those activities include portfolio management and investment advice. Selling a program or a course is not one of them; trading your account for you, or recommending trades tailored to your circumstances, may well be, and then authorisation is required. The same act draws the other edge: generic, non-personalised recommendations are not advice, and neither is anything disclosed exclusively to the public.
Who you are paying, and how
The CNMV's guide describes a trait you can check in thirty seconds: these outfits tend to require payment into a current account, sometimes abroad, in the name of a non-Spanish company. The check is not that the payee is foreign — plenty of legitimate firms are — but that the payee matches the company named in the legal notice. And paying by a method that leaves a trail and can be disputed with your bank guarantees nothing, but it is the difference between having a route and having none.
What the contract says about withdrawing
In a distance sale from a trader subject to Spanish law, the consolidated consumer act gives fourteen calendar days to withdraw without giving a reason, and declares void any clause that penalises you for exercising that right or makes you waive it. What you need to read are the exceptions: the right is lost once a service has been fully performed with your prior express consent, and, for digital content not supplied on a physical medium, once performance has started and you have acknowledged that this is why you lose it. That is exactly what the tickbox is for.
What happens when you ask for everything in writing
The same guide describes the behaviour: they are reluctant to provide up-to-date information or to answer the investor's questions, and propose instead a relationship based on mutual trust. Ask for the contract, the rulebook and the payout terms as documents, and compare them with what you were told on a voice note. Then do not stop at the answer, which is the part the CNMV underlines: asking is not enough, because people who set out to defraud are trained to be persuasive and will dodge the answers with reasonable-sounding arguments.

There is a seventh that depends not on the seller but on where you saw them. Since Ley 6/2023, search engines, social networks and media outlets have to obtain information showing that advertisers of financial instruments or investment services to the general public hold the corresponding authorisation before publishing their ads, and have to check that those advertisers are not on the list of firms warned about by the CNMV or by foreign supervisors. The CNMV, for its part, banned advertising of CFDs to retail investors in its resolution of 11 July 2023.

Both rules share a blind spot, and knowing it explains what you see every day. The 2023 resolution binds firms authorised to provide investment services in Spain, and the advertising check is triggered by advertisers of financial instruments or investment services. Somebody selling a course, a challenge or a piece of software advertises outside that perimeter. The rule is not failing: that advert is simply not what the rule regulates.

It still works as a yardstick. The annex to CNMV Circular 2/2020 requires advertising of investment products and services to be clear, balanced, impartial and not misleading, and to avoid omitting relevant information or including ambiguous, biased, incomplete or contradictory information that could mislead. That is the bar for the firms that are inside. Holding the advert that brought you here against it binds nobody, but it tells you a fair amount.

What looks like proof and is not

Almost everything shown to build confidence can be produced in an afternoon. That does not make it false; it makes it beside the point.

A polished website proves nothing. The CNMV's own ten-point list says as much: do not be taken in by how sophisticated some websites look, and be wary of unsolicited offers through social media and of trusting the affinity of your own followers. The same guide describes the older staging — dressing well and renting smart offices that open to the public as though they were a distinguished investment firm — and a subtler technique: incomprehensible explanations and jargon, whose purpose is to leave the potential victim understanding nothing and choosing to trust whoever appears to understand it.

A certificate proves nothing either. The FSMA sets it out with the detail that matters: somebody who completes the challenges "receives a 'certificate' - a diploma that the firm itself issues". A diploma issued by the firm certifies that you passed its own test, and nothing beyond that.

And being incorporated is not the same as being authorised. They are two different registers: one says the company exists, the other says it may provide investment services. Check 03 is about exactly that, and it is the one almost nobody performs, because the first register is already reassuring.

Testimonials and screenshots of results have a problem of their own, longer than this page allows: what it actually means for a track record to be verified, what can be manipulated and what cannot. That is set out, with the five warning signs that apply to one particular program, in the guide on whether trading bots are reliable.

If you have already paid

Two things before anything else: stop sending money, and report it even if it feels pointless.

The CNMV's guide describes the conversation that usually comes next: the trading has not gone as expected, there are losses, and this is precisely the wrong moment to unwind positions — better to top up and catch the imminent turn. Its verdict is blunt: the truly dangerous thing at that point is to keep putting money in, because that capital is not coming back either.

What it recommends applies whether or not you get the money back: tell the CNMV what happened and report it to the police or the relevant court, with all the documentation that evidences the services received and the amounts involved. It is not a symbolic gesture. The guide explains that those reports are what allow the warnings to be published, and those warnings are where check 02 on this page gets its data for the next person.

There is also a second fraud that arrives after the first. The CNMV warned about it on 31 July 2019: recovery room firms that contact victims of an earlier fraud offering to recover the money. The tell it gives is specific — an unsolicited approach asking for money up front for taxes, fees or insurance as a precondition for the service — and it adds a line worth committing to memory: neither the CNMV nor its staff contact affected individuals directly, and nobody is authorised to use its name to do so.

If what is left is the underlying question — whether the model itself holds up, who answers when something goes wrong and what protects you — that has a page of its own: whether prop firm accounts are legit.

Sources · read on 31 August 2026

Frequently asked questions

How do I know whether a prop firm is a scam?

No single sign proves it, so the useful question is a different one: what can be checked before you pay. What can be checked is which company this is and whether it is entered in the register it cites, whether it appears in the CNMV public warnings search or in another supervisor's, whose name the payment goes to, what the contract says about withdrawing, and whether they hand you the rulebook and the payout terms in writing. A firm that fails several of those checks is not necessarily a fraud, but there will be no way to tell it apart from one until it is too late.

Is it normal to pay up front to get a funded account?

Charging up front for an evaluation is the standard model in this sector and on its own it does not indicate fraud. What Spain's CNMV warned about in June 2019 is what can follow: it described websites offering funded trading accounts tied to courses that require a payment up front, sometimes running to several thousand euros, and flagged the risk of fraud or deception as to whether the promised account can be reached at all. Belgium's FSMA added in March 2024 that the challenges are neither easy nor cheap, that people often pay for several of them, and that this is how these firms make their money. So the thing to look at is not that you pay first, but what happens if you do not pass and how many times you could end up paying.

What do I do if I have already paid and no account arrives?

First, stop sending money: the CNMV guide warns that continuing to top up against a promise of recovery is the genuinely dangerous move, because that capital does not come back either. Second, gather every document evidencing what you contracted and what you paid, tell the CNMV what happened and report it to the police or the relevant court. Third, expect a second attempt: in July 2019 the CNMV warned about recovery room firms, which approach earlier victims offering to recover the money and ask for a payment up front for taxes, fees or insurance.

Does it help that the firm is registered as a company?

It helps you know it exists and who to complain to, which is not nothing, but it is not the same as being authorised. They are two different registers: the companies register says the company has been incorporated, and the CNMV or Bank of Spain registers say it may provide investment services. The Spanish e-commerce act also requires the website to publish, on a permanent, easy, direct and free basis, its registered name, address, a direct and effective means of contact, its registration details and its tax number, so the real check is to take those details and look them up in the register they cite.

Can I cancel the purchase and get my money back?

It depends who you bought from and what the contract says. If the seller is subject to Spanish consumer law, a distance sale gives you fourteen calendar days to withdraw without giving a reason, and any clause penalising that right or making you waive it is void. But there are exceptions that apply almost every time in this sector: the right is lost once the service has been fully performed with your prior express consent and, for digital content not supplied on a physical medium, once performance has begun and you have acknowledged that this is why you lose it. If the company sits outside the European Union, the first thing to check is which law and which courts govern the contract.

Why are there so many adverts for this if supervisors have warned about it?

Because the tougher advertising rules are written for something else. Spain's Ley 6/2023 requires search engines, social networks and media outlets to check that anyone advertising financial instruments or investment services holds authorisation and is not on the list of firms warned about, and in 2023 the CNMV banned advertising of CFDs to retail investors, but that ban binds firms authorised to provide investment services in Spain. Somebody advertising a course, a challenge or a piece of software is advertising outside that perimeter. The rule is not failing: that advert is simply not what the rule regulates.

Apply this to this site

A guide about checking who is behind an offer, written by someone who sells something, only holds up if it lets itself be checked the same way.

Check 01 asks you to identify the company behind the website, and this page already gives you the link to the legal notice so you can run it on this one. The other half of that check is who answers with a name, and that is here too: about us. If something is missing when you look, that gap counts here exactly as it would anywhere else.

The rest of the list applies at full price. None of the six checks has a softer version for the house that publishes them, and a guide that left itself off its own list would be no use for the one thing it is for. Asking is free, and anyone who has the answers should not mind giving them.

Continue reading

Three more guides on this, or on what sits next to it.