Verification is a five-minute job that most landing pages hope you skip. Do it anyway.
Step by step
- Open the broker’s legal documents or account form and copy the company name exactly.
- Open the public register for the regulator that is supposed to cover you.
- Search the name and, if listed, the licence or reference number.
- Check status: authorised, restricted, warning, or not found.
- Match the permissions to what you were sold (CFDs, retail, professional).
Red flags that show up here
Clone sites reuse a real firm’s name. A warning list entry with a similar URL is not a licence. A “we are regulated in [country]” line with no number is incomplete.
If chat support cannot give you the entity on the contract, do not fill the gap with hope. Peak Pips takes corrections when a page here looks wrong — send a register link, not a slogan.
Next: use the broker shortlist only after the register search, not instead of it.