Beware! HengryFX 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.
HengryFX presents itself as an award-winning forex broker with more than a decade of experience, who has even played a leading role in “fundamentally changing the online trading industry.” Behind these boasts, however, lies an extremely dubious website full of false and misleading information. HengryFX shows all the symptoms of a typical fraudulent scheme.
At the time of writing this review, the HengryFX’s website appears to be stripped of basic information and functionality. It is possible that this scammer scheme was abandoned because it attracted the attention of the authorities. However, the information available on the website is more than enough proof that HengryFX is not the licensed and regulated broker it claims to be.
It is also noticeable that registration menu asks for an unusually large amount of personal information, including ID number and bank account details.
HENGRYFX REGULATION AND SAFETY OF FUNDS
The website states that HengryFX is a brand of Hengry Global Capital Limited, a brokerage firm licensed in Canada and the United States. The website also shows very low resolution images of the alleged licences:
The listed license for Canada is from FINTRAC, which stands for The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada. But this institution has nothing to do with licensing and regulating brokers. This function is performed by the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC). Hengry Global Capital Limited is not listed among the regulated entities in the IIROC register:
To operate as a forex broker in the United States, a company must be registered as a futures commission merchant and foreign exchange dealer with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and to be a member of the National Futures Association (NFA).
The NFA register shows that although there is a company called Hengry Global Capital Limited, it is not a member of the NFA and is not subject to NFA oversight. This company is only registered with exemptions for commodity pool operator and commodity trading advisor, which prevents it from providing financial services in the U.S.
These attempts at deception by HengryFX are proof enough that this is not a regulated broker, but the legal mess doesn’t stop there.
The only legal documentation that can be found on HengryFX’s website is the Privacy Policy. It lists three completely different companies – HengryFX Financial Services Limited, HengryFX UK Limited and HengryFX Global Markets Ltd. They are allegedly registered in Cyprus, England and Wales and the offshore Bahamas respectively.
A check shows that there is no licensed broker with the name HengryFX Financial Services Limited on the records of the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC). The website of the UK regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FSA), has published a specific warning that Hengry Global Capital Limited and its related sites are attempting to offer British citizens financial services and products without authorisation:
If you intend to start trading on the financial markets, you should be very careful not to fall for scammers like HengryFX. You should only trust legitimate brokers operating in one of the established financial centers in the UK, EU, USA or Australia. There, the activities of brokers are controlled by powerful regulatory bodies such as Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Australian Securities and Exchanges Commission (ASIC). Clients of these brokers receive protections such as negative balance protection and segregation of the client’s funds from the broker’s funds.
In the EU and the UK, brokers must also participate in guarantee schemes that cover a certain amount of the trader’s investment if the broker becomes insolvent. These guarantees amount to up to EUR 20,000 EU and 85,000 GBP in the UK. However, the likelihood of such a bankruptcy is low because regulators also have significant net capital requirements that companies must maintain – EUR 730 000 in UK and Cyprus, AUD 1000 000 in Australia and at least 20 million USD in the United States.
HENGRYFX TRADING SOFTWARE
HengryFX claims to offer one of the most widely used trading platforms in the industry, MetaTrader 5 (MT5). But as there are no download links for the software on the website’s main page or after logging in to the client portal, we cannot confirm whether this is true.
In any case, it is advisable to contact one of the many legitimate brokers that offer MT5 or the still very popular MT4. These platforms have established themselves as leaders because they offer a wide range of features, including a wide variety of options for customization, multiple account usage, designing and implementing custom scripts for automated trading and backtesting trade strategies.
HENGRYFX TRADING CONDITIONS
At the time of writing this review, there is no information on HengryFX’s website about the terms and conditions that this alleged broker offers to traders. There is no information on minimum deposit, spread or leverage, fees, nor whether it protects different account types.
However, there is a “promotions” section on the site which describes various bonuses and rewards. From there it can be deduced that in the past five types of accounts were offered – Standard, Premium, Prime, VIP and SUPER VIP.
The purpose of the described promotions is to attract other people as HengryFX customers, in return for which a referral bonus is awarded. This looks like a typical pyramid scheme. The mere presence of bonuses and promotions is proof that this is not a legitimate broker, because regulated brokers are prohibited from using such techniques.
Тhe only available options for payment methods in the deposit menu are cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Tether and Etherium. While there are legitimate brokers that accept payments with Bitcoin, they do so alongside other options such as bank transfer, credit cards, and digital platforms like PayPal or Neteller. Cryptocurrencies as the only option is a big red flag. Scammers prefer to use cryptocurrencies because these transfers are non-refundable.
HOW DOES THE SCAM WORK
It is tempting to be lured by the promises of easy money that we constantly come across on the internet. But behind the vast majority of these promises, if not all, are scammers. In recent years, many fraudulent schemes have consisted of websites posing as brokers and trying to cash in on the excitement surrounding cryptocurrencies.
If you give your contacts to one of these scammers, they will start convincing you that they will multiply your money, with nothing required of you but to sit back and take profits. If you agree to an initial investment of a few hundred dollars, they will start persuading you to invest more and more.
But you will never get the promised profits or the money you deposited. Scammers have many ways to ensure this. First of all, they are hidden behind offshore companies, not subject to controls and regulations. For the money transfers they use shady payment platforms, direct bank transfers or cryptocurrencies that make recovering money very difficult and often impossible. The terms and conditions are always riddled with traps that also block your ability to withdraw your money, such as prohibitively high minimum trading volume requirements or withdrawal fees amounting to tens of percentages of your funds.
WHAT TO DO WHEN SCAMMED
When you find yourself scammed and seek advice and help online, you are likely to receive offers from individuals and companies who promise to refund your money for a fee that you have to pay in advance. Don’t trust such offers or recommendations from anonymous commentators on the internet – this is also a well established scam.
The best chance to get at least some of your money back is to request a chargeback, but this applies only if the transfer is made via credit card. It is of course advisable to notify the relevant authorities of the fraudsters’ activities and to spread the word online to warn other people who may fall victim to the same scammers.
Linh Le
These people have ignored me for months after investing with them …
Grace
Same here
We need to form a group to hunt them down
Chin-Chen Lee
A lady chatted with me on WhatsApp frequently abd daily to persuade me open an account and expressed her intention is to help me to enhance my financial conditions in order to have enough money traveling with her to enjoy life.
I suspected her easy affection toward me a a stranger chatting on line and never meet each other.
But the web site and MT5 she tried to convince me to be a formal trading platform could not find flaws until I read this article .
Thanks for your information to save me from prey to such a virtually real scammer.
Sincerely,
Chin-Chen