Beware! Dws Invest 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.
Dws Invest is yet another website that presents itself as a well-established and regulated broker, but is in fact quite the opposite – a scam targeting inexperienced people. In this review, we’ll take a detailed look at the signs that you should by no means trust your money to Dws Invest.
DWS INVEST REGULATION AND SAFETY OF FUNDS
Legitimate forex brokers provide clear and detailed information about the legal entity that owns and operates them, where it is based, what licences it has and which regulators oversee its activities. Lack of such details or improper presentation of them are always a red flag that we are probably dealing with a scam.
Dws Invest doesn’t disclose which company is behind the website, which in itself is a big enough red flag that we’re dealing with scammers. Еven Dws Invest’s Terms and Conditions and other legal documentation don’t mention a company name.
This anonymity means that there can be no truth in Dws Invest’s claims to be based in the UK and regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
A check of the UK financial regulator’s database confirms this. The FCA warns that Dws Invest is not authorised to offer financial services and products.
The home page of the website claims that Dws Invest also has registration in two offshore areas, Belize and Mauritius. A third offshore jurisdiction, Vanuatu, is referred to in the text of the Terms and Conditions as the applicable jurisdiction.
There is no broker in the databases of the relevant financial authorities using Dws Invest’s trading name and domain. There is no room for doubt that Dws Invest is not a licensed and regulated broker.
Before investing your money in financial instruments, it is imperative to make sure you do so through a licensed intermediary and not one of the many scammers lurking online.
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 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.
DWS INVEST TRADING SOFTWARE
Dws Invest has a web-based trading platform, but that doesn’t mean it offers actual trading in financial instruments. Many scammers have trading software to fool their victims that their money is being invested.
While this platform has the basic functionality to place orders, it cannot compare to the capabilities provided by MetaTrader 4 (MT4) and MetaTrader 5 (MT5). It is no coincidence that these platforms have established themselves as the industry standard. 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.
DWS INVEST TRADING CONDITIONS
Dws Invest claims to offer a large number of trading account types. However, the descriptions of these accounts lack information on basic trading parameters such as spreads, commissions, order execution method and list of tradable instruments.
Only a minimum deposit of 250 USD and leverage between 1:50 and 1:500 are specified. This is not a level that you see with regulated brokers. Trading with high leverage allows higher profits, but also increases the risk of sudden and excessive losses proportionally. All leading regulators limit leverage for retail traders. In the EU, UK and Australia the maximum permitted level is 1:30 and in the US it is 1:50. This maximum level only applies to trading major currency pairs, with even more limited leverage for more volatile assets.
Many leading brands in the industry offer beginner traders Micro Accounts with a very low minimum deposit, sometimes as low as 5 USD or even 1 USD.
DWS INVEST DEPOSIT/WITHDRAW METHODS AND FEES
Dws Invest only allows deposit through two shady payment processors – PayPound and Betatransfer. We have only seen these providers being used by fake brokers, not genuine ones.
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 Sofort or GiroPay.
Dws Invest promises that there are no hidden fees or terms for transactions, but we have no reason to believe anything on this website.
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.
