Beware! Vlom 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.
Vlom is a broker that pretends to be a legitimate one really hard with its sleek and colorful website. However, there are cracks in this facade that were disappointingly easy to discover – first off, a legitimate broker would never allow their account creation page to be broken as it leaves a poor first impression – we were met with the following screen when we tried to make an account
There are a lot of promises that Vlom makes that we just cannot verify because we cannot make an account. We had to gather our information on the broker in more cursory ways, something that would never happen to a legitimate one.
Vlom regulation and safety of funds
Vlom operates from the island republic of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. So much is evident from the following address they had listed on their website:
Of course, St. Vincent is an especially notorious offshore location due to the fact that their Financial Service Authority has come forth with the statement that it does not regulate Forex trade whatsoever. This has turned it into a popular destination for scammers and fraudulent companies that dissolve within weeks of being created. We cannot stress enough how important it is to trade with a licensed broker – this means that you would be under the protections that different regulatory bodies extend to you. For example, the Financial Conduct Authority, which operates in the UK has strict requirements the brokers must clear if they are to operate on the territory of the country – first off, they must have more than 730 000 pounds worth of capital and keep their clients’ funds segregated to ensure that the company is not going to go under within a short time of starting up its operations. Secondly, they must undergo constant supervision and report trade activity on a daily basis to prevent foul play and platform manipulation. Finally, to ensure an amount of traders’ investments are restored in the event of bankruptcy the regulator makes brokers participate in guarantee funds. The recovered amounts in such an unlikely eventuality are up to 85 000 pounds per person.
Vlom trading software
Vlom makes the claim of providing its traders with access to the Metatrader 5 platform. If that were true, which we cannot say for sure, since making an account is something that was too much to ask of Vlom, it would definitely grant it some credibility it clearly lacks. The platform has established itself as the industry standard for its ease of use – there are plenty of useful graphical features and charting tools one can make use of – for example there are hundreds of indicators readily available and the creation of graphical objects like trend lines and Fibonacci levels is as easy as a click of the mouse.
The platform is also noteworthy for its integration of automated trading via advanced algorithms – the so-called “Expert Advisers”. These bots are entirely community-developed and distributed on a marketplace that the platform hosts as well.
Finally, Metatrader also has a very in-depth forum where all manner of trading-related topics are discussed – from basic terminology to advanced strategy, the forum has a wealth of information that can sate the hunger for knowledge of any trader.
Of course, we cannot know if the broker even provides the platform and if it does how many of the features are actually in it – as Metatrader is a white-label piece of software, most brokers develop it to their needs and often take out features that they don’t deem important.
Of course, the inability to make an account means that we cannot know what the actual leverage the broker offers is. We also cannot know what the spreads are. There is a little button on the website that gives us some information and we hope it is not actually true, because it shows a spread of 3 pips for the most common currency pair – EURUSD.
Vlom withdrawal/deposit methods and fees
Vlom has a minimum deposit requirement that is actually relatively in line with the industry average – $100. There are, of course, brokers that require much less – for example check out XM if you are interested in micro trading, as their minimum deposit sits at the low $5.
What is interesting about Vlom’s account types is how immodest the other tiers are – you have the basic account, which has a minimum of $100 as previously stated, and the next tier is the plus account, which takes that up to $20 000. Needless to say this is very steep.
The payment options that Vlom accepts are credit cards and bitcoin. It is advised to stay away from the latter, as payments with it are final and not a subject to any sort of refund policy.
The withdrawals under Vlom’s Terms of service are plagued by long delays of 1-5 business days
If the broker keeps to the low end of that time frame it will be in line with its more respectable colleagues, which process withdrawal requests within the day. However, if services them later rather than sooner, that would be a sign of it acting in bad faith and deliberately obfuscating tings.
Furthermore, there is a withdrawal minimum of $50. This is unreasonable, because whether your account balance is $51 or 49$ the money is still yours and what to do with it should be entirely up to you.
There are vaguely defined penalties for underachievers as well –
We do not know what these “statistic requirements” are, nor how big the fee is. The situation with inactive accounts is much similar with the following clause:
It states that an undefined maintenance fee will be charged upon a year of inactivity. Of course, charging such fees is not unheard of, but they usually are well-explained. When that year passes Vlom might decide to charge you as much as it pleases and you cannot do much about it.
How does the scam work?
The many suspicious details in the Terms lead us to the inevitable conclusion that Vlom is more likely than not a scam broker. This type of broker is, sadly, a much too common sight in the community and they all follow a similar scheme – they buy some ad space on social media platform and run little creative writing exercises promising a newfangled way to play the markets and get rich quickly or something similarly abstract and occult. When a would-be victim stumbles upon these ads they are taken to a website much similar to Vlom’s that tries to present itself as legitimate as possible. If the viewer buys it and registers they give their contact information, usually a phone number and an email. They then get assaulted with tens of calls from “account managers” or other such authority figures that demand one thing and one thing alone from them – to deposit money. In fact, this is the only thing the scammers care about – your deposit. It, and not any trades they might perform, is the source of revenue for them.
What to do when scammed?
The first thing you must do is try to recover your deposit by filing a request for a charge-back. Now, if you have payed via card you are in luck MasterCard and Visa accept such requests within 540 days of the transaction. If you have paid using a less reputable e-wallet or cryptocurrency you will not have such an option, sadly.
The next thing you should do is secure your credit cards – change any you have given the scammer the details to. While doing this you must also secure the privacy of the files on your PC – if you have been forced to install some sort of desktop sharing software like TeamViewer or AnyDesk immediately remove it as the scammers will try to use it to snoop around your computer.
Finally, watch out for further scams – you can easily be tricked by another cell of scammers that has received your information from the one that took your money. This new cell will present itself as a recovery agency of some sort and promise you to restore lost investments at the cost of an advance fee. As you can imagine this is not going to happen – if you agree to it your losses will only increase.
