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Regulator watch · updated daily

The regulator warns.
What happens next?

51 %
of the investment websites that financial regulators warned about in the last 30 days still answer today: 277 of 546.

A warning does not oblige a website to close: it says the firm is not authorised in that country. So we check every warned website, every day, and analyse what is behind it.

Data as of 1 Nov 2026

Warned in the last 30 days

still onlineno longer answeringone square = one website

7,379

warned websites tracked

2,248

still online today

59

clones of authorised firms, still online

48 %

still online, warned in the last 90 days

Warned is not the same as fraud

How many were really fraud?

Our verdict on the 6,671 warned websites we have analysed. We only call one fraudulent when there is evidence beyond the warning itself; an unlicensed firm with nothing else against it stays "suspicious". Of the websites still online, 235 are fraud with evidence.

Fraud, with evidence

11.5 % 766

clone of an authorised firm, platform takedown, blocklist or our own findings

Suspicious

76.6 % 5,110

unlicensed in that country, no proof of fraud on its own

Legitimate

0.7 % 49

a real business despite the warning

How long they last

One in 4 is still online a year later.

Share of warned websites still answering, by how many months ago the regulator warned. Hover a column for the figures.

0123456789101112+
Months since the warning

Tap or hover a column

See the data as a table
Months since warningWarnedOnline%
054627751
122411350
230612942
332315247
432812237
547017838
61617748
750210521
85079419
94047920
102225023
113619526
12+3,02577726

What became of them

All 7,379 warned websites, today

Where each warned website stands today, whatever its verdict. Few were blocked by a platform; most of those no longer answering simply disappeared.

Still online

2,248 30 %

answering with a page

Neutralised

268 4 %

blocked by Cloudflare or taken down by their platform

Gone

4,863 66 %

no DNS 2,453 · for sale 406 · parked 560 · not answering 1,444

The life of an unlicensed investment site

Born young, warned, abandoned, resold.

We cross each warning with the domain's registration record. What nobody else publishes is what happens to the name after the warning.

8

months: median age of the website when the regulator warned (4,456 domains with a registration date). 20% were under three months old.

406

warned domains are on sale today, on domain marketplaces such as HugeDomains or Afternic. The scam goes; the name is resold.

912

were registered again by someone else after the warning, a median of 24 months later. Where they are now:

  • For sale 210
  • Parked 88
  • A new website 241
  • Not answering 373

When a warning is older than the domain's current registration, it is about whoever held the name before. We show it, dated, and never use it to accuse the new holder: only what the current website shows counts.

By regulator

Warned, and still online

Bar length: websites each regulator has warned about. In orange: those still answering today.

  • Financial Conduct Authority (United Kingdom)506 / 1,688
  • Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (Spain)290 / 1,002
  • Autorité des marchés financiers (France)188 / 669
  • Australian Securities and Investments Commission (Australia)145 / 545
  • Financial Markets Authority (New Zealand)105 / 484
  • CONSOB (Italy)134 / 479
  • Securities and Exchange Commission (United States of America)95 / 266
  • Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Switzerland)85 / 252
  • Finansinspektionen (Sweden)40 / 226
  • Financial Services and Markets Authority (Belgium)55 / 169

No developer needed

Built with website builders

114 warned websites run on a website builder, some of them AI-powered. A few platforms have already taken theirs down.

  • Webflow27
  • GoDaddy26
  • Wix18
  • Lovable11
  • Framer10
  • WordPress.com6
  • Squarespace6
  • Tilda4

Recently warned, still online

What they look like

A sample of websites warned in recent days that still answer. Each one opens its full report.

How we measure it

Warnings come from the regulators themselves, gathered through IOSCO's I-SCAN alerts network. Every day we request each warned website once. It counts as online when it answers with a page: not a parking page, not a hosting platform's takedown notice, not Cloudflare's phishing block. The headline figures use recent warnings, because a domain warned years ago may have changed hands.

A regulator's "not authorised" warning concerns licensing in its jurisdiction and does not prove fraud on its own. Each website's report says what else we found: clones of authorised firms, takedowns, blocklists.

Registration dates come from WHOIS/RDAP, stored when we analyse each domain; a domain counts as registered again when its current registration is more than 90 days after its latest warning. "For sale" means a marketplace page or marketplace nameservers. Since 21 October 2026 we also keep, per domain, the day it went down or went on sale, so each edition can measure how long they last.

How to cite

Desenmascara.me, Regulator watch, edition 2026-11-01. https://desenmascara.me/unlicensed-investment-sites

The figures on this page are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence: reuse them freely, citing the source. It does not cover the regulators' own warnings, which belong to them.

Researchers and journalists can request the domain-level data for a study. Contact

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