Beware! STARINEX 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.
STARINEX is yet another reincarnation of a familiar fraudulent scheme. The website presents itself as a well-established broker offering trading in all asset classes, but with a focus on cryptocurrencies. The reality is that STARINEX has neither the necessary licenses nor the technological capacity to provide the services it claims. This website is not designed to help you get rich, but to cheat you out of your money. You should stay as far away from STARINEX as possible.
STARINEX REGULATION AND SAFETY OF FUNDS
While at first glance the home page of the website contains the necessary disclaimers and information required of true brokers, a closer look reveals that it is missing a company name or address.
The Terms of Use claim that two offshore companies are behind this alleged broker – the Seychelles-based STARINEX Trading Services Ltd. and Prime Technologies Ltd, incorporated in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). According to the text, the laws governing the dispute with the customer are those of SVG. This provides absolutely no guarantees for the rights of the client and the security of his funds. SVG and Seychelles are jurisdictions where no brokerage regulations are in place.
But we have reason to believe that even this information is false. STARINEX is not listed among the companies registered in Seychelles. In SVG there is a company with a similar but still different name – Gifx Prime Technologies Llc. And more importantly, we have come across several fake brokers allegedly owned by Prime Technologies Ltd plus a non-existent company supposedly registered in Seychelles. CryptoXpressTrade and Hugos Trading are just a few examples of this scheme.
If you don’t want to be scammed, 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.
STARINEX TRADING SOFTWARE
STARINEX promises “best-in-class”, fast, safe and reliable trading platform, “suitable for both novice and professional traders”. After registering an account, however, we only get access to a poor imitation of a trading platform that can only fool people without any experience in financial markets.
The “platform” consists of a chart with the price of Bitcoin, taken for free from the data provider TradingView, and a non-functional menu for buying and selling. The platform includes only a small number of cryptocurrencies, although the website claims to offer forex, indices and commodities trading.
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.
STARINEX TRADING CONDITIONS
STARINEX not only lacks the face and software necessary for forex and CFD trading, but does not even provide comprehensive information on this presumptive trading. When you visit the website of a legitimate broker you will find proposals for different types of trading accounts suitable for investors with different preferences, as well as detailed descriptions of trading parameters – minimum deposit, order execution method, tradable financial instruments, leverage, spread, commissions.
On the STARINEX website, we only find a claim that it offers leverage of 1:100 for cryptocurrency trading and 1:1000 for forex. These levels are too high even for offshore brokers. By comparison, EU regulations allow retail traders to use leverage up to 1:30 for major currency pairs and 1:2 for cryptocurrencies.
More information is only available for cryptocurrency trading. The minimum deposit is 0.001 BTC, which at the time of writing this review is equivalent to about 40 USD. For equivalently small amounts you could open an account with many licensed brokers. STARINEX states that it charges a commission of 0.5% per trade. But from everything I’ve seen so far, it’s obvious that the STARINEX offers no real trade.
STARINEX DEPOSIT/WITHDRAW METHODS AND FEES
Quite predictably, the only way to deposit money into the STARINEX is through bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Financial scammers prefer cryptocurrencies because they allow a high level of anonymity, and more importantly, do not allow refunds. More and more licensed brokers are also starting to accept cryptocurrencies, but they do so alongside other transparent payment methods such as credit/debit card, bank transfer or popular e-wallets like Skrill, Neteller or UnionPay.
HOW DOES THE SCAM WORK
With all the buzz surrounding skyrocketing prices of cryptocurrencies, many people are starting to consider investing in the financial markets as a bid to improve their fortunes. Scammers on the internet have taken notice of that and take advantage of the ignorance of the general public by creating countless websites posing as brokers. These websites offer no real brokerage services and only deceive people into believing that their money is really being invested.
If you come across such a scam website and give out your contacts, you will be contacted by experienced scammers who will convince you that they can take on all the frighteningly complex aspects of investing for you. But you will never get any real profits, nor will you be able to get back the money you deposited. The terms and conditions of these websites are riddled with clauses that make withdrawing funds from your account unfeasible – for example, extremely high minimum trading volume requirements or hefty fees of 10%, 20% or even more of the amount.
Scammers hide behind fake addresses and names and operate through offshore companies that are not subject to regulation and scrutiny. So even if all the withdrawal requirements are met, they may simply disappear and move on to their next fraudulent scheme.
WHAT TO DO WHEN SCAMMED
It is very important not to rush into trusting people on the internet who offer to magically refund your money for a fee. These are also scammers, and they may even be the same ones who scammed you in the first place.
If you have made the transfers using credit or debit card, you can claim a chargeback. Visa and MasterCard allow this to be done within 540 days. However, such a request may not be approved if you have given the fraudsters documents such as a copy of an ID and proof of address. This will allow them to claim that the transaction is legitimate and approved by both parties.
