Beware! Trade Momentum 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.
Trade Momentum is a scammer par excellence. This is visible right away as this broker greets you with a welcome to the binary options website, a source for traders to have a successful binary options trading experience. Here is more information on why you should not trade with this broker.
Trade Momentum Regulation and safety of funds
From the footer of the Trade Momentum interface, we find out that the address of the company is in Liverpool, UK. As the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is the official regulator for forex brokers in the UK, we searched its register to find out whether the company is legit. As you can see from the image below, the company is not found in the register which means that it is non-registered and non-regulated. Besides, as you already saw, this broker offers binary options trade which is banned in the UK and the EU.
Our advice is to stay well away from Trade Momentum for the safety of your precious funds.
You should know that FCA is a strict regulator and forex brokers must meet some stringent requirements. First of all, they must invest a substantial amount of money in the form of initial capital which is 730,000 EUR. This amount, among other things, serves as a barrier against scammers. As you can well imagine, they will never invest so much money just for the benefit of looking legit. In addition to that, UK brokers must keep their clients’ funds segregated from their own with tier-1 bank establishments, report transactions on a regular basis, keep low leverage, allow for external audits, etc. One of the biggest perks in trading with UK brokers is that they participate and deduct funds towards the local Financial Services Compensation Scheme from which clients can get repaid up to 85,000 GBP per client if the broker becomes insolvent.
Similar to UK brokers, EU brokers must meet the same requirements. The major difference is that they participate in the local investor compensation funds which can dispense up to 20,000 EUR per client if the broker becomes insolvent.
We do recommend exploring the list of legit brokers from these jurisdictions to find the most suitable one for your trading needs.
Trade Momentum Trading software
As per the information provided on the Trade Momentum website, the trading products consist of forex, shares, futures, indices, metals, and energies. However, after registering and opening a trading account with this broker, the list of forex currencies was not available on the web trader which is the trading software offered at clients’ disposal.
The image below shows what the web trader looks like and in fact, it is a crypto-trading platform that allows the trading of one digital currency for another. The order book that this platform offers contains a list of orders and records the interest of buyers and sellers in the particular crypto exchange which is valuable trading information and helps the traders to decide which order they can execute. Although it has its benefits if you are looking for trading with other traders rather than brokers, it has its limitations as well as it does not allow you to make a crypto exchange with fiat currency.
Even if the trade with forex currencies was available on the trading platform, the leverage shown on the company’s website was given as 1:500 which will expose clients’ funds to the risk of losing big way. The ESMA regulations by which UK and EU brokers must abide has imposed a cap on leverage that cannot exceed 1:30. This is one of the measures to guarantee the safety of clients’ funds.
In principle, a web trader is a cheap trading software with limited functionalities. On the other hand, the MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 can do a lot more. They give you the option to diversify your trading and the excellent package of trading tools and instruments they offer will enhance your trading experience. We advise you to look for a licensed broker that will offer either MT4 or MT5.
Trade Momentum Deposit/withdrawal methods and fees
Trade Momentum offers 5 trading accounts – Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and VIP (image below). The minimum initial deposit for the Bronze account is $100.
The deposit and withdrawal methods include payments via Bitcoin wallet. Why is this method not suitable regarding your chargeback options is explained in the last section of this review.
What is strikingly unrealistic in those accounts is the fact that the broker promises a very high percentage of ROI for each account ranging from 1,000% for the Bronze account and steadily increasing to 20,000% for the VIP account, each time! As nothing comes from nothing, this looks like a high-yield investment program which is a type of Ponzi scheme where an investment scammer promises unsustainably high return on investment by paying previous investors with the money invested by new investors. As you can imagine, such a scheme may collapse at any moment and your precious money will go down the drain. We don’t need to tell you that such type of investment contains huge risks and to worn you stay away from such schemes.
By looking at the image with the trading accounts, you may notice that there are also bonuses offered by this broker that range from 10% to 30% depending on the deposit. The higher the deposit, the higher the percentage of the bonus. What you need to know is that bonuses are funds belonging to the broker, not the client, and they carry a certain set of conditions that have to be met in order for the trader to be eligible to withdraw the bonus amount. Unfortunately, these conditions are missing from the Terms of Use document. Accepting a bonus without having a clear idea about what the conditions are would be a very foolish thing to do. Also, you should know that the legit brokers in the EU and the UK are banned from offering bonuses and this is how you can differentiate them from the scammers.
How does scam work?
Scam works in different ways. It could be either that you receive an unsolicited telephone call or you see one of these flashy ads on the Internet or the social media promising you a quick and easy profit. Scammers will promise you the sky and the earth until you give way to temptation and deposit money. Once you give them money you get caught in the scammers’ mousetrap and the cheese in the shape of a big fat money fall is gone! It may take some time before you realise that you are being scammed. Scammers are smooth talkers and they are masters of deception. They will give you some excuses as to why the big profit hasn’t come yet and will try to lure you to make even a bigger investment because according to them, the more you invest, the more you profit. After you have been waiting for a while and you finally come to your senses, you realise that you are being scammed. All you want now is to get your money back and get out of there. However, the scammers won’t make it easy for you! They will try to delay you so that you miss the deadline for applying for a chargeback.
What to do if scammed?
There are a few things that you must do immediately – file for a chargeback if you have paid using a VISA or MasterCard. Those two payment providers allow you 540 days time frame within which you may file for a chargeback.
However, the chances are grim if you have used bank transfer or Bitcoin as a payment method. There is no chance you’ll be able to recover your money.
In such a desperate situation, some so-called ‘recovery agents’ may approach you with offers to recover your money for a fee. Be cautious as you may be dealing with another type of scammers. Always check the information about the recovery agency – make sure it is legitimate and transparent in the public eye. Also, some scammers publish personal comments after our review about how they have been scammed and how they found a recovery agent who helped them get their money back. Do not trust such comments and do not use the published contact info in them as it will lead you to another scammer!
And lastly, a reminder to cancel your credit card if you have given your CVV code to the scammers and erase any software from your PC that gives the scammer access to your personal data.
