Direct verification through the official website of the regulator is the most core mechanism, the top forex regulators globally such as the United Kingdom’s FCA registration number pattern is 6 digits such as 123456, in 2023, it had registered 23% of the applicants, and suspended the entire year for 48 unauthorised platform licenses. The NFA’s BASIC system shows 2.1 million Q1 inquiries for 2024, registration numbers for legitimate brokers’ CFTC registrations are all 8 digits (12345678) and cloning sites often create leading zeros or trailing letters. ASIC Australia’s Professional Registers database, in which a nine-digit ARN code (for example, 123456789) has to be entered on its website, says that 100% of clients’ funds of its licensed brokers will have to be registered by 2025, and the average penalty will rise to AU $2.3 million.
The validation of the information on the website requires cross-checking multidimensionally, and the legal forex platform needs to display the regulatory number (e.g., the CySEC license format 123/456) in a highly conspicuous location at the bottom, and the new EU MiCA regulation in 2024 requires that the number should be connected to the page of the regulator. CySEC figures show that 35% of the fake sites use old or non-existent figures, and its official website enquiry system prevents 12,000 fake license visits per day. In one case, the replicated platform used FCA number 123456 but could not be verified by the Financial Services Register on the FCA official site, its real status was labeled as “unauthorized”, while the status of the original platform should be “Authorised”.
The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) Global Broker Verification System rolled out in 2025 encompasses 89 jurisdictions and returns regulatory status in real-time by using the platform name, and 370,000 verification requests a day among the initial 127 forex brokers to gain access. The MiFID passport inquiry system indicates that EU-licensed brokers can serve 30 nations across the border but must publish their passport numbers on the official site (such as EU.12345), and the 12 fake passport sites seized in 2024 have an average operating cycle of only 4.2 months.
Check on the bank account and the security of funds, the standard forex broker customer account ought to be a segregated custody account, the UK FCA requires that the title on the account has the words “Client Money”, 2025 audit shows that the licensed platform customer funds return rate is 99.3%, while illegal platforms often make use of third-party payment channels for money transfer. FINMA would require licensed brokers to maintain bank accounts in Switzerland and to have the same identical name in the account title as the license name. In 2024, an investor successfully identified a fake Swiss license platform by examining the “SA” suffix of the UBS account (Swiss stock company).
Early warning value regulatory complaint record analysis is, as indicated by the CFTC Reparations program figures, in 2023 that 72% of complaints about forex brokers were for illegal operations, while the average legal platforms processing time was 23 days, while that of illegal platforms was 5.6% resolution. Australian AFCA Dispute data shows that the average annual dispute rate of licensed brokers is 0.17%, significantly less than 19.3% for non-licensed platforms. One investor asked about FCA’s Warning List and found that the target platform was warned seven times in the past three years with an average of 1.2 abnormal customer fund flow records per month.
Utilizing Whois query tools to find domain name registration information on official websites, legitimate forex brokers typically register domain names for more than five years (such as IG Group’s domain name registration in 1999), and 87% of the 23 bogus sites seized in 2024 contain new domain names registered less than six months ago. At the time of SSL certificate verification, the platform in question must have an EV SSL certificate (the company name is displayed in the address bar), the encryption protocol should be TLS 1.3 or later, and the encryption strength of a duplicated platform is only 128 bits, significantly less than the industry standard of 256 bits, due to the use of DV certificates and the vulnerability of SHA-1 signature algorithm being detected by the browser. The EU eIDAS verification system states that the electronic signature of the platform must be in compliance with the QSCD standard. Investors in one case confirmed the validity of the platform by verifying the digital signature hash value (SHA-384) of the contract of the transaction.
