Beware! KapitalTrade 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.
KapitalTrade claims to be a Europe-based broker that offers forex, indices, shares and cryptocurrency trading. But it’s very easy to uncover that this is just another anonymous website set up to scam you out of your money.
KapitalTrade is not a genuine broker and you should stay away from it.
KAPITALTRADE REGULATION AND SAFETY OF FUNDS
Legitimate brokers are required to provide clear and detailed information on their websites about what licences they hold and what regulatory regimes they are subject to. The KapitalTrade website is completely lacking such information.
Nowhere is there even a mention of the name of the company behind the site – information that is required of any legitimate business, let alone a broker who wants you to trust him with your money.
Contact address in London, United Kingdom is listed on the website:
In order to operate from within the United Kingdom, a broker must be licensed by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The fact that KapitalTrad does not provide a company name or registration number is sufficient evidence that such a licence does not exist. A search of the FCA register for different variations of “KapitalTrade” did not produce any results.
As the website is available in Spanish, Italian and French in addition to English, we also checked the databases of the relevant regulatory authorities. We found a warning in the Spanish National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) that KapitalTrade offers financial services without authorisation. This dispelled any doubts about whether KapitalTrade are scammers:
If you want to start trading on the financial markets and use the services of a European broker, you need to make sure that the company you choose is indeed licensed and supervised by a respected regulatory institution such as Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) or Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK.
As their customer you will enjoy a number of guarantees including negative balance protection and guarantee for your funds if the broker goes bankrupt, which goes up to EUR 20,000 in EU and 85,000 GBP in the UK. Regulations in the UK and EU include some important measures designed to improve investor protection and promote market integrity and transparency, such as transaction reporting. Regulated brokers are also required to segregate their operational funds from the client’s money.
KAPITALTRADE TRADING SOFTWARE
KapitalTrade uses one of the industry’s most popular trading platforms, MetaTrader 5 (MT5). Here is what it looks like:
But that doesn’t make KapitalTrade any more trustworthy. The MT5 platform, which can be downloaded from the KapitalTrade website, is actually configured for another suspicious website, klamite.net, which claims to offer hosting and accounting services.
This website is owned by a Hungarian company, Klamite Kft, whose line of work is not brokerage services, but “consulting activities on business and other management activities”.
The web version of the MT5 platform, for which there is a link on the KapitalTrade website, refers to yet another domain – digibitscrm.com
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.
KAPITALTRADE TRADING CONDITIONS
There is no description of different types of trading accounts on the KapitalTrade website. There is also no information on what the minimum deposit is. In any case, it would be a better decision to approach a licensed broker, many of which offer micro accounts for beginner traders with a deposit of as little as 100 USD or even less.
According to the website, the leverage offered for currency trading is 1:500. The same level is set in the MT5 platform. This in itself proves that KapitalTrade could not be a genuine broker operating from the UK.
The FCA, like EU regulators, limits leverage to 1:30 for trading in major currency pairs and even lower levels for more volatile assets. High leverage creates the opportunity for more significant profit, but correspondingly increases the risk of sudden and excessive losses. All leading regulators therefore restrict leverage for retail traders.
Although the website advertises a spread of “0.0 pips”, the available table for average spreads shows levels of 2, 3 and even 4 pips. In the trading platform, the spread is around 2.7 pips.
In the industry it is rare to see levels above 1.5 pips for benchmark currency pairs such as EUR/USD. Levels above 2 pips are considered too high and unprofitable for the trader.
KAPITALTRADE DEPOSIT/WITHDRAW METHODS AND FEES
As stated, the KapitalTrade does not specify a minimum deposit amount. In the deposit menu the only option available is bank transfer, but this only allows you to enter your own bank details and send a request to KapitalTrade.
Legitimate brokers typically offer clients a wide choice of transparent payment methods, including bank transfer, credit/debit cards and established e-wallets such as Skrill, Neteller or UnionPay.
According to the Terms and Conditions, the minimum withdrawal amount is 200 EUR/USD if a credit card is used and 500 EUR/USD by bank transfer.
In the text of the Terms and Conditions we also see a strangely worded clause that sets very high requirements for the customer to be able to withdraw money from his account. KapitalTrade claims that their anti-money laundering policy requires every customer “to turnover his investment in margin”.
According to the confusing description, this means that if a customer has a 1,000 USD deposit and uses a leverage of 1:500, they must trade 5 standard lots, or 500,000 currency units, before they can withdraw money:
There is also a fee for dormant accounts, amounting to 50 USD/USD, which is activated after 60 days of inactivity.
HOW DOES THE SCAM WORK
Stories of people getting rich from cryptocurrencies tempt many to try their luck in the financial markets. But you have to be very careful not to fall into the clutches of the many scammers lurking in the online space. These scammers only pose as brokers and lure you in with promises to take on the confusing aspects of investing for you.
If you make contact with such scammers they will first convince you to give them a small initial sum of a few hundred dollars. They may even fool you for a while that your investment is generating incredible profits to convince you to give them a larger amount. But your money won’t really be invested. And when you try to withdraw your supposed profits or even your deposit, you will find that it is impossible.
The scammers may tell you that all your investments have been lost by a sudden change in the market. Or they’ll point you to clauses hidden in their Terms and Conditions that say withdrawing your money is only possible after you meet impossibly high minimum trading volume requirements. And they can simply disappear because these scam sites hide behind fake names and offshore companies that are not subject to rules and regulations.
WHAT TO DO WHEN SCAMMED
If you find yourself a victim of scammers, you should inform the relevant authorities in your country and spread the word online to warn other potential victims. However, the chances of getting your money back are not high.
If you used a credit/debit card for the transactions, you could ask for a chargeback. However, such requests can be disputed if you have provided the fraudsters with proof of identity such as a copy of an ID. Under no circumstances should you trust people on the internet who claim they can recover your money for an upfront fee. These too are certainly scammers.