Beware! KBLFinance 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.
KBLFinance invites you to experience seamless trading while benefiting from low spreads that will maximize your trading. Is this the promised road to riches and can you entrust this broker with your hard-earned money? Don’t raise your hopes too high because you may get disappointed. Here are the facts.
KBLFinance Regulation and safety of funds
First and foremost, a reliable broker should be registered and licensed. However, on the website of KBLFinance, we do not see any information about this broker being regulated by a financial authority. Furthermore, there is no address to show the whereabouts of the company. The only indication of any existing jurisdiction is in the Terms and Conditions document where it states that the governing law for the agreement is the law of the Marshall Islands. If you are familiar with the forex trade, you should know that this jurisdiction is an offshore zone and there is no official regulatory body for forex brokers. What’s even worse is the fact that anyone can register a company on the Marshall Islands via the Internet without having to physically set foot there. This means that KBLFinance is non-registered, non-licensed, and is probably a scammer out there to fleece you.
Finding a legit and reliable forex broker is not that difficult, actually. What you need to do is research some of the well-established jurisdictions, such as the US, the EU, and the UK where the best conditions for forex trade exist and forex brokers are strictly regulated to guarantee the safety of clients’ funds.
First of all, to get their license, these brokers must be well-capitalised. US brokers are on top of the list according to the amount they must invest in the form of an initial capital which amounts to the impressive $20 million. Such a huge amount is required to protect clients in case of unfavorable events as in the US, there are no compensation funds or schemes from which to repay the clients if the broker goes bankrupt.
In the EU and the UK, things are organised differently. EU and UK brokers need to invest only 730,000 EUR initial capital which pales compared to their US counterparts. However, licensed UK brokers are required to participate and deduct funds towards the local Financial Services Compensation Scheme which can dispense up to 85,000 GBP per client if the broker becomes insolvent. On the other hand, EU brokers participate in a local investor compensation fund from which each and every client will be repaid up to 20,000 EUR should the broker go belly up.
KBLFinance Trading software
KBLFinance trades in forex, stocks, cryptocurrencies, and indices. The trading software offered to the clients is a web trader (image below). On the left, you can see the trading product with their bid/ask price, and in the middle of the screen is displayed the chart of one of the trading products, namely the EUR/USD currency pair showing the fluctuation in its price in a given time frame. On the right-hand side are the buttons for placing orders and executing trades. You can also see the leverage.
From the bid/ask price of the same currency pair, we calculated that the spread is 20.4 pips. Do you remember that this broker promised low spreads? Well, we cannot call a spread of 20.4 pips low keeping in mind that the industry average is 1.5 pips. A spread as wide as this one means that the cost of transactions will be extremely high and traders won’t be able to achieve a sustainable profit. The broker, on the other hand, who derives revenue from the spread will have the golden opportunity to fleece its clients to its heart content.
Unfortunately, it is not just the spread that is high. The same applies for the leverage which in the image below is shown to be 1:100 but if you look at the last image with the trading account information, you can see that for the Diamond account it can go up to 1:150. Some traders think that high leverage is good as it increases the chances of making a big win without investing so much of the client’s funds. However, such a notion is misleading given the fact that 70% of traders lose in transactions. So, in case of unsuccessful transactions, the scope of financial loss will be amplified by the high leverage.
It is not by chance that in the well-established jurisdictions that we mentioned above, there is a cap on leverage, and for the EU and the UK, it cannot exceed 1:30 for forex currencies and in the US, the maximum leverage is 1:50. These are measures to prevent clients from entering risky and reckless transactions and to guarantee the safety of their funds.
If you are familiar with trading software, you will realise that although a web trader is simple and easy to navigate, it does not offer much in terms of trading tools and instruments which can provide some advantages to the traders and enhance their trading experience. On the other hand, legit and reliable brokers offer trading software of far superior quality. We are talking, of course, about the MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5 trading platforms that offer a lot of advantages to the trader, such as an auto trading option, trading signals, VPS, code base with customs scripts, an app market, a financial calendar, etc.
We strongly advise you to find a licensed broker that offers either platform so that you can experience its benefits.
KBLFinance Deposit/Withdrawal methods and fees
From the image below, you can see that the trading accounts offered by KBLFinance are 5 – Basic, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond. The minimum initial account for the Basic account is $250. The other accounts start at $2,500, $10,000, $25,000 and $250,000 respectively.
The payment methods which the clients can use to make a deposit or a withdrawal include payments via credit card, Bitcoin, and wire transfer. The withdrawal request processing time depends on the trading account and is opposite proportional to the deposit, i.e., for the Basic account the processing time is 5 business days, whereas for the Diamond account it is only 4 hours.
Trading accounts that stay inactive over a period of 12 months are charged a $30 maintenance fee.
By looking at the trading accounts information, you may have noticed that this broker offers a Welcome bonus which ranges between 10% and 100% depending on the account. Bonuses are typically offered by dodgy brokers as a way of luring more clients. However, you should be aware that bonuses are funds belonging to the broker, not the client, and they are usually accompanied by some hard to meet conditions. In this case, to be eligible to withdraw any funds, the client who accepts the bonus must execute trades equal to 30 times the sum of the deposit plus the bonus amount. This is not something easily achievable even for experienced traders. Also, you must know that legit and licensed brokers are banned from offering any bonuses or incentives 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.
