Beware! CryptoTradeCenter is an offshore broker! Your investment may be at risk.
RECOMMENDED FOREX BROKERS
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Open trading accounts with at least two brokers.
Warning! This broker has been issued a warning from the Luxembourgian Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF)
This warning is enough to dismiss the broker as untrustworthy outright. Despite the claim to be licensed with the agency being prominent on several places on the website CryptoTradeCenter is simply lying to gain your trust. You are better off investing with a broker that is actually regulated for real.
Let’s take a closer look at CryptoTradeCenter and how and why they run this scam.
CryptoTradeCenter regulation and safety as funds
As we established, CryptoTradeCenter is not under the regulation of the CSSF. That means that the restrictions the regulator has put n place to protect retail and professional traders do not apply to CryptoTradeCenter’s client. Some of this legislature is the requirement for brokers to keep their client’s deposits in segregated accounts and participate in guarantee funds that recuperate losses of up to 20 000 euro per trader in the event of broker bankruptcy. Besides there is a minimum capital requirement of 730 000 euro to ensure that only companies that are here to stay can play on the market – in unregulated environments, for example offshore destinations like the islands of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines see a lot of startups that crash and burn within several weeks of being established.
When investing with a broker it is advised that you pick trustworthy and licensed ones because of the reasons outlined above.
Crypto Trade Center trading software
Crypto Trade Center offers its users a web-based platform that they claim is user friendly and intuitive, but how does it hold up to other platforms that brokers provide?
Most reputable brokers go with one of the Metatrader platforms – either Metatrader 4 or Metatrader 5. They are revered in the trading circles for their ease of use – they include plenty of charting tools – the ability to create graphical objects like trend lines and Fibonacci levels as well as the access to hundreds of indicators. They provide trade signals as well, some for free and some paid. What’s worth mentioning as well is the platforms’ sophisticated automated trading capabilities – they allow community members to create and distribute advanced algorithms – the so-called expert advisers that trade on their own based on the way they were programmed. Lastly, MT4 and 5 also have a blog of their own filled with all sorts of relevant articles.
In comparison, CryptoTradeCenter’s platform looks like this:
It is worrying how little features there are on the main screen – the dashboard. It seems to show some basic information about crypto prices and a live graph. What is absent is any ability to actually trade whatsoever. Hard as we tried, we could not find it anywhere on the platform. If we set aside the fact that this is a critical lack of what is perhaps the most important feature of a Forex trading site, we must consider the implication that the broker wants you to invest money with them so they can trade on your behalf. However there is no information on the spreads and leverage they offer anywhere on the platform or the website – the Terms of Service are suspiciously silent about such crucial details. Why anyone would trust CryptoTradeCenter at this point is completely beyond us.
The amount of trading instruments is really low as well – 9 currency pairs and Google stocks is all the range of investments the broker provides. This is unacceptable for what claims to be a professional broker.
CryptoTradeCenter deposit and withdrawal/fees
You would be forgiven for getting confused about how much the minimum deposit requirement the broker imposes is – CryptoTradeCenter claims it is $50 on their homepage, but then gives us another figure in the Terms of Service – that of $100. Additionally, on the discussed previously barren trading platform we can see this chart with account types
The wording is really unclear on several terms – for example there is no clear indication what units the commission is measured in – is it USD, EUR, or Mongolian tugrik – your guess is as good as ours. It could also be a commission based on a percent of the deposit, and although that sounds far-fetched we wouldn’t put it past a fraudulent broker to to use purposefully vague language to confuse its clients and extract more money from them.
Deposits are made in Bitcoin and Bitcoin alone – that is because cryptocurrency has no chargeback policy.
Withdrawals are subject to some ridiculous restrictions – on the Terms of Service we discover the following clause:
Needless to say, imposing that rule on withdrawals is absurd – any amount of money you deposit with the broker still belongs to you and it is up to you to decide if you want to withdraw it and when exactly that is convenient to you. Now imagine our surprise when we stumbled upon the following in the Terms of Service:
Even a 50 euro restriction on withdrawals is a shady practice, as well as completely demeaning to the trader, but $500 is something else entirely. Additionally, there is a fat 5% commission on the amount – that translates to $25 of your hard earned money – consider that there is no good reason for this as you are already paying a commission of a minimum of 50 unidentified units on your deposit, as mentioned above.
Furthermore, it is really unusual that the units of the required minimum changed from euro to USD – in fact this clause is the only place that mentions the European unit of currency. With this many blatant contradictions between the Terms and what the platform actually provides we can only assume they were not created with a singular idea and maybe by two entirely different groups of people.
Finally, we must mention the following clause which is worded pretty vaguely and caught our attention:
The comprehensive list of fees and charges is in fact not on the main website and nowhere to be seen. We shouldn’t have to even say why agreeing to such vague terms is not a smart thing to do.
How does the scam work?
Unfortunately, when we put the pieces together – the absurd withdrawal amounts, the lacking trading platform and last, but definitely not least, the CSSF issued warning we come to the concrete conclusion that CryptoTradeCenter is not a legitimate broker. So what is their scheme? They follow a tried and trusted plan – first getting people to visit their website by running deceptive ads promising quick and easy profits on social media. Then they get their phone number and email in the account creation process and start calling and sending lots and lots of emails. The people who call are cunning and patient – it is difficult to resist them as they know exactly how to sell you on the scam. If you fall for it and decide to deposit money with them you will either see your account balance plummet and get even more calls convincing you to invest more and more, or you will see it soar and get calls of the same intensity that demand a fee under the premise of upgrading your account or something similarly ridiculous. The scammers are after one thing and one thing alone – your deposits, they do not make their profits from the trades that have been performed.
What to do when scammed?
In the case of CryptoTradeCenter you will not be able to file a chargeback, as stated above, but if you have fell pray to a different scammer and have paid them using a method that allows for refunds like credit card or a reputable e-wallet, Paypal for example, it is worth a shot.
Additionally you are advised to change all of the credit cards the scammers had access to – they can and will try to use them to transfer money away from you. On this note also uninstall any desktop sharing software you had put on your PC, for example TeamViewer, as the scammers will use it to snoop around your data.
Finally, watch out for further scams – sometimes the last stage of the scam involves passing your data to a different scammer who will present itself as a “recovery agency representative” and promise to return you your lost capital. They will demand a fee in advance for the service, of course, and if you pay that they will disappear from your life forever.
