Beware! W7BT 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.
W7 Broker and Trading (W7BT), an offshore forex company, allegedly offer ECN market access to its potential clients. There are three different account types depending on the trader’s experience and financial funds.
To open a demo account, you need to register and provide some basic information, such as name, email address, phone number and a password. After you fill out the information, the company sends you login details. The same goes for the live account but you need to provide more information for the registration, such as annual income, trading experience, trading frequency, income source, etc. To open both accounts you also need to agree to the Terms and Conditions.
W7BT Regulation and safety of funds
From the company’s website (please see the screenshot below), we immediately noticed that this company’s address is in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. You should know that St. Vincent and the Grenadines is an offshore zone and the Financial Services Authority of this country do not regulate forex and CFD brokers. Using a broker company from an offshore zone may present some risks as there are no safety precautions to protect the trader’s funds.
On the other hand, we would like to mention that there are a lot of forex companies legitimately registered and regulated in the well-established jurisdictions of EU, UK and USA. It is easy to check and verify the company’s legitimacy if you use the links provided here. This way you’ ll be able to avoid taking unnecessary risks with your financial funds as these companies need to meet strict requirements in order to be registered. For example, in EU and UK, broker company must register a capital of 730,000 euros and have compensation funds amounting to 20,000 euros for brokerages regulated by CySEC and 85,000 pounds for brokerages regulated by FCA. As you can see these broker companies are better equipped to provide protection to the trader’s funds and are more secure to trade with.
W7BT Trading software
As we mentioned before, W7BT offers the powerful MetaTrader5 trading platform. Just like its predecessor MetaTrader 4, MT5 offers a lot of tools and instruments for forex trade, such as a financial calendar, app market, trading signals (for a subscription fee), VPS and code base with customs scripts. Both platforms also offer a demo account which gives the opportunity to the new or inexperienced trader to have some practice before starting trading for real which is a huge plus.
We opened a demo account (screenshot above) and you can see that the spread on it is 0.3 pips, no commision whatsoever. The spread on the demo account is much better than the one of 1.5 pips (or 2.2 pips if we add the commission fee) advertised on the homepage. It is much easier to make profits with lower spreads, so trading on W7BT’s demo account can be misleading, especially for inexperienced traders.
It is also important to note that the leverage of 1:200 is rather high. Please note that legitimate and regulated broker companies in the well-established jurisdictions will have a cap on leverage, i.e., for USA it’s 1:50, for EU it’s 1:30. High leverage is not something negative in itself and Australia, which is a well-established jurisdiction in forex trade, does not impose leverage caps. However, you should bear in mind that it can be quite risky because you can make profits with leveraged trading but you can also lose quite a lot, sometime even more than initially invested. So, our advice is to look for legit forex companies that offer a lower leverage cap, especially if you are new in the forex trade.
W7BT Deposit/withdrawal methods and fees
The minimum initial deposit is $100.
To fund your account, the company offers a variety of payment methods according to its website, such as bitcoin, Neteller, SEPA Transfer, as well as bank transfers.
We noticed that while the initial deposit for the standard ECN account is not high, the same doesn’t go for the other 2 accounts where the initial deposits are respectively $10,000 and $100,000. Although the account information specifies that these are for traders with experience and money, we still find the amounts too high.
Whereas withdrawals are concerned, we found out that the time for processing a withdrawal request may take up to 5 business days. This is a rather too long processing time and normally should not take more than 1 business day. This may inconvince traders who need their funds.
On a positive note, the Terms and Conditions document doesn’t mention inactivity fees, bonuses and withdrawal conditions which can often become traps for the unsuspecting traders.
How does scam work?
First, we want to point out that nobody is immune to scam. Scammers are masters of deceit and manipulation and they know many persuasive techniques in order to scam you out of your money. So you may have seen an ad on the Internet or the social media (placed by scammers), promising a quick and easy profit and of course you are tempted (who wouldn’t be?). And you think that depositing $100-200 wouldn’t be such a big risk. However, once you make a deposit, which by the way goes as a commission to the scammer, you start sinking deeper and deeper into the scammer’s clutches. They will try to lure you to invest more money promising you bigger profit and will try to persuade you that any day now you will become rich. At some stage, however, their promises start to sound hollow and you realise that you are being scammed.
You will desperately try to get out of the scam but the scammers will not let you go so easily. They will try again pulling wool over your eyes saying that with a bit more patience the big profit will come to you any day now and that you don’t want to miss it. If this manipulating technique doesn’t work, they will try to delay your filing for a chargeback by asking for this and that document.
What to do if scammed?
We strongly advise you to immediately file for chargeback if you have used a credit card for your deposit. The good news is that Visa and MasterCard give you now 540 days in which to file for chargeback. There is some hope that you will be able to get your money back.
However, the situation is not so optimistic if you have used bank wire or bitcoin for your payment.
We also want to warn you to be very cautious when being approached by the so-called ‘recovery agents’ because it is just another form of scam and you will not get anything back.
W7BT
W7BT is a broker built by Brazilian traders, tired of being in the hands of brokers controlling and manipulating their trades. Even well-known FCA regulated brokers have disappeared, leaving costumers at a loss.
W7BT is an offshore broker and there is no problem about it. That is why this information is very clear on the website. Nothing to hide. Additionally, W7BT has its own MT5 license, meaning that it provides a powerful tool free from manipulations with full independency from third parties.
With the purpose of being clear about the rules and conditions, the spreads and fees are fare and also clearly presented and applied.
W7BT believes that leverage has to be the trader’s choice. One can choose 1:30, 1:50, 1:100 or 1:200.
W7BT offers no bonus. No persuasion techniques! Traders can freely choose to open their accounts based on their investment’s capability. No tricks here.
All seven broker owners can be contacted directly. W7BT has contact channels via social media or by e-mail [email protected]
In summary, W7BT is an honest, transparent, easy to use broker, built by traders, with the purpose of providing a powerful straight trading tool to traders who want to rest assure that their investments are safe and free from manipulations.