Well this is what a friend of mine recently told me, that if a broker is offering valid payment methods, card payment for example, or wire payment or any other type of valid and worldwide accepted methods; the broker can be almost trusted, do you agree?
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The straightforward response is no, you cannot assess the legitimacy of a broker based on their payment methods; instead, you might want to conduct your research on brokers and refrain from heeding your friend’s advice.
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While valid payment methods are a good sign, they don’t guarantee that a broker is trustworthy. It’s important to also check other factors, like the broker’s regulation, customer reviews, transparency, and their track record.
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No - your friend is actually very mistaken. 
What normally happens is that big brokerages have a kind of “holding company” which owns their various branches. That company typically starts off with a brokerage in a well-regulated jurisdiction like Australia, anywhere in the European Union, Switzerland, the UK or North America. They apply to Visa and Mastercard and are usually accepted on the basis of their banking history, backers, clean financial record, and so on.
They then later (often only slightly later), using the same business name, of course, open other branches in other jurisdictions that don’t have proper regulation, but can still take cardit-card deposits through their “holding company”.
That’s how the industry works.
The key point to understand is that while lack of a credit-card facility is a sure sign to avoid a broker (if Visa won’t do business with them, why would I want to?), its presence doesn’t demonstrate that they’re trustworthy.
An example of the above is the one called “Fusion Markets”. The Australian, ASIC-regulated branch is great, safe to use, and a nice broker (like hundreds of others - there’s no lack of choice of good brokers!) but the offshore, high-leverage branch is in Vanuatu and not properly regulated and everyone tells me it’s a disaster and a nightmare and the customers have no protection at all.
This kind of thing is normal, and common.
So - as others have rightly said, above - a broker’s ability to process credit-card payments is NOT an indication of their trustworthiness.
In practice, what most people need to know is what so many experienced members here keep pointing out all the time: a high-leverage broker cannot, by definition and by law, be properly regulated. If people understood this one, simple point clearly, at least 90% of all the “broker problems” discussed in trading forums on the web would never arise at all. 
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Thanks - just what I was always told, too.
In a trading context 
I look at this logic as being similar to backtesting your system. If you don’t backtest it properly, you can be pretty sure it isn’t profitable, but successful backtesting alone doesn’t guarantee that it will be (still it would be silly not to).
I certainly wouldn’t be assuming a broker’s safe just because it can take credit-card payments, though. Banks are alerting us all the time, these days, to the prevalence of all kinds of scammers and credit-card payments.
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No - not at all. 
I always think trading’s mostly about “getting the odds in your favour”.
Broker selection is just yet another example of that. And not a difficult one!
Using, for example, a high leverage one that you know can’t really be properly regulated is obviously taking an unnecessary chance, regardless of how they can accept deposits and what kind of banking/credit-card facilities they might have. There’s no need to take extra chances you can easily avoid. To me, that would just feel “a bit silly”.
I also think you only need to look around a few trading forums to see very easily how erroneous your friend’s impression is. It rapidly becomes very clear that forex traders have had countless problems with dodgy offshore brokers (even ones that can accept deposits by all sorts of “worldwide accepted methods”).
By comparison, though, you really do see very few bad allegations or horror stories about well-regulated brokerages. And heaven knows there are enough of them to choose from without unnecessarily creating additional worries! 
It’s good to see that the excellent Babypips course is steering people in the right direction, on this point.
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Such great replies above that it’s hard to add much other than the obvious comment that your friend’s truly very, very mistaken about that! 
(And the thread would perhaps be better placed in the “Brokers” forum?).
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Thanks, well spotted (have moved it to “Broker Discussion”).
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You can also have a legitimate broker but engage in questionable business practices, such as price manipulation, fake spikes, platform freeze at the wrong time, etc.
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Thank you for the information, actually the only comment with actual information is yours!
It is like the 1000th time I am asking you, do you believe almost all of the brokers are scams and cheaters?
No; I’ve never said that, or anything like it. On the contrary, as so many people here have tried to explain to you for so long, there’s absolutely no shortage of perfectly reasonable, honest, longstanding, well regulated brokers for anyone to choose from.
Any broker regulated in the UK, in Switzerland, anywhere in the European Union (that alone covers many hundreds!), by ASIC in Australia, by CFTC/NFA in America, etc. - these are all safe to use, they segregate client funds (they have to), they have their accounts and websites checked carefully, and so on.
Indeed, the fact that there are so many of them that aren’t scams and cheats is what makes it so very inadvisable and unnecessary to use offshore, unregulated and high-leverage ones.
I see huge numbers of experienced members both here and in every other trading forum explaining this all the time, but there’s also always a small handful of people who seem not quite to appreciate its significance, often until they have some entirely foreseeable and avoidable “accident”.
What’s all this rudeness about, @FranziskaSchulz ?
Shall we try to be polite to each other? I think the forum might like that, and other readers might like it too, don’t you?
All that happened here, really, was that you started a thread to report what a friend had told you and ask if people agreed, and seven other members explained how very mistaken your friend’s assumption was, and some people even explained why, in some detail.
So it’s actually turned into a rather good and helpful thread:
Babypips at its best, really (apart from the rudeness, maybe?).
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It’s definitely that.
Everything about validating brokers and checking where your account’s regulated just can’t be stressed enough. In financial safety terms it’s about the most helpful and important thing there can ever be, for beginning traders. The Babypips School also makes a pretty good job of it.
No way a broker’s ability to take deposits by c-card indicates they’re “safe”!
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Most of them also have different rules and bigger leverage for clients out of EU, and as you say this means that they are actually handling more than one company under the name of one company, and this is a total cheat if being correct; so, I ask again, do you believe most of the brokers are cheaters?
It isn’t necessarily a “total cheat” at all.
Some excellent brokers, for example Oanda (now owned by the very successful prop-firm FTMO but run as a completely separate company) is set up that way, and has been for decades.
The US regulator, CFTC, allows them - obviously very legitimately and lawfully - to offer 1:50 leverage in the US, which is much higher than the 1:30 the Australian, British, Swiss or any of the European Union regulators allow them to offer their customers. So they have a separate company for their big and growing US market. As some others do.
That company naturally has to comply with US law and regulations.
Their other companies don’t. They have different compliance needed.
There’s nothing wrong with that at all.
No criticism implied, but you really do seem to have a lot of misunderstandings around this issue, and at the same time quite some determination not to have any of them corrected?
I’d guess that many here are wondering what that’s all really about (and when - if ever - it might stop)?
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Hi Franziska, how are you today? A little less confrontational, I do hope?
You keep asking the same question, however; but the answer doesn’t change, and it won’t, either: there are so many hundreds of perfectly safe, perfectly respectable, perfectly well-regulated brokers for anyone to choose from that nobody should need to use an unregulated or barely regulated one with some peculiar “license” or pretend “regulation” from some Caribbean or Pacific country most people couldn’t even label on a map, where the alleged “regulator” has never actually ruled in any customer’s favor in any dispute in history, but has always taken the side of the broker paying them a hefty annual membership fee, often with a government also taking a cut of that. 
However many times you ask this same question, Franziska, the answer’s both immutable and really important for beginning forex traders to understand clearly, because it’s terribly easy for people with little experience to make all kinds of mistaken assumptions. 
This is exactly why the Babypips School explains the matter so clearly, so that at least people starting out here will appreciate its huge significance, right from the outset.
As so many members keep explaining, every single, unending time you ask this and/or virtually identical questions, there are loads of good brokers about, without anyone needing to take completely unnecessary risks. And a very good thing, too.
By the way, I commented here, also -
Edited addition: sorry, I was typing this post while @Jimmy_Thucydides posted above, so I hadn’t read his reply, with which of course I totally agree (as will many other members, doubtless!).
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wrong information again
you probably know what leverage they offer when margin percentage requirement is 0.25 dont you? also this comment you posted is against every information you previously mentioned about brokers with high leverage! just in case you dont know, when the margin percentage is 0.25 the leverage is 400! and you are saying that brokers with high leverages are fraud and you are saying Oanda is a fine broker; make your self clear! this such conflicts in your comments are the reason I sometimes get mad, specially when you insist on being totally honest and totally right despite such big misinformation in your comments! (you also asked me why I get angry, I am answering)
Thank you for keeping the language polite but bro, my friend, my darling, my beloved babypips mate, a high leverage solely cannot mean that a broker is fraud I have traded with honest brokers offering a leverage of 1:1000, I have also worked with fraud brokers which are actually very well known too, offering 1:50 leverage who stole my money! No regulation no leverage no nothing can tell if a broker is fraud but their clients experience no matter how hard they try they always get negative comments and valid negative comments they cannot answer!
check my previous comment above too.