Beware! TNTROYAL 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.
TNTROYAL presents itself as a safe and established broker, but does so very unconvincingly. The website does not look like a platform for a legitimate financial services provider, and fact checking shows without a doubt that TNTROYAL is not one. It is highly advisable to avoid such anonymous websites, no matter how generous their promises of easy profits.
TNTROYAL REGULATION AND SAFETY OF FUNDS
The website’s home page claims that the company behind this alleged broker is TNT ROYAL LTD, based in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG).
This in itself is a sufficient argument not to trust TNTROYAL with your money. SVG is an offshore area notorious for its lack of regulations on brokers. As soon as you open the website of the local regulator, the Financial Services Authority, you see a warning that the institution does not license forex and other types of brokers and does not supervise the activities of International Business Companies that are engaged in such activity. But TNT ROYAL LTD is not even listed among the companies registered with the SVG. It is quite possible that this company does not exist at all. Therefore, it is not actually clear who the real owner of TNTROYAL is.
The text of the Terms and Conditions does not mention the name of a legal entity and does not specify which jurisdiction governs the agreement with the client. The Terms and Conditions in question are also too brief and generic, and do not contain the necessary specific information.
You should only trust legitimate brokers operating in one of the established financial centres like the UK, EU, USA or Australia. There, the activities of brokers are controlled by powerful regulatory bodies such as UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in US or 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 20 000 EUR in the 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.
TNTROYAL TRADING SOFTWARE
TNTROYAL promises “Industry-leading features for an industry-leading platform”, but like everything else on this website, this is also a lie. After registering an account, we get access to a “trading area” which has only a poor imitation of a trading platform. This imitation consists of a simple chart with current asset prices, taken for free from the data provider TradingView, and an inactive buy and sell menu. So not only does TNTROYAL not have the legal authorization to offer financial services, it also does not have the necessary software to do so.
Legitimate brokers offer clients a wide selection of trading software, including desktop, mobile apps and web-based platforms. The most widely used platforms in the industry are MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5). These platforms have established themselves as industry standard because they offer a wide range of features, including a variety of options for customization, multiple account usage, designing and implementing custom scripts for automated trading and backtesting trade strategies.
TNTROYAL TRADING CONDITIONS
TNTROYAL claims to offer trade in Stocks, Indices, Commodities and Cryptocurrencies. But we don’t find any specific information about the terms of this trade on the website. Given the lack of a license and trading platform, even if such information were available, it would have no real meaning.
TNTROYAL claims to offer three types of accounts, but their description only includes one specific parameter – a huge minimum deposit of 3,000 USD. According to the FAQ section, the minimum deposit is 250 USD, but again this is too high. Many licensed brokers allow you to start trading with amounts of 100 USD, 50 USD or even less.
TNTROYAL DEPOSIT/WITHDRAW METHODS AND FEES
We see Visa and MasterCard logos on the website, but there is no option to use credit cards in the deposit menu. There we see three options – Cashier, Wire Transfer and the iDeal e-wallet. The first two options show an error message and the third one redirects to a cryptocurrency purchasing website, Bitonic. So TNTROYAL is really only using cryptocurrencies, which is typical for this type of fraudsters.
Scammers prefer cryptocurrencies because these transactions are not subject to refunds. While there are some legitimate brokers that accept Bitcoin, they do so alongside other transparent payment methods such as credit/debit card, bank transfer or popular e-wallets like Skrill, PayPal or Neteller.
The minimum amount set in the system for deposit is 250 USD, for withdrawal – 25 USD.
Transaction fees and additional conditions are not specified. But given the obvious fraudulent nature of TNTROYAL, you can expect hidden fees and other traps.
HOW DOES THE SCAM WORK
Unfortunately, the internet is full of scammers. In the age of cryptocurrencies, many of them pretend to be brokers and take advantage of people’s desire to get rich easily through financial instruments they don’t really understand.
Fake brokerage sites lure you in with promises to take on all the difficult and confusing aspects of investing for you. If you make contact with such sites, they will first convince you to make a small, “risk-free” investment of a few hundred dollars. Experienced scammers will then begin to persuade you to “invest” more and more money, and will even deceive you into believing that your initial investment is generating incredible profits.
But you will never see those profits or the money you deposited. These scammers hide behind fake names and offshore shell companies that are not subject to oversight and regulations like regulated brokers. They use cryptocurrencies or other shady payment methods that make refunding money difficult or often impossible. The terms and conditions of these sites are riddled with pitfalls that block withdrawals with impossible-to-fulfill conditions for minimum traded volume and extremely high fees reaching 10, 20 or more percent of the amount.
WHAT TO DO WHEN SCAMMED
If you find yourself in such a situation, you should be very careful not to fall into the clutches of other fraudsters while trying to recover your money. Offers from people on the internet who promise to get you your money back from scammers for an upfront fee are also one hundred percent scammers.
If you used a credit or debit card for the transactions to the scammers, there is some chance you can get your money back by requesting a chargeback. Visa and MasterCard allow this to be done within 540 days. But such a claim can be challenged if you have provided the scammers with documents such as a copy of your ID and proof of address.
