only if they’re brokers who have chosen to be “regulated” somewhere like Vanuatu or the Seychelles or St. Vincent, where there isn’t any proper regulation and the customers aren’t protected at all
this is why it’s SO important to use only brokers who are regulated by ASIC, FCA or CFTC, so that they can’t mess with your funds easily
it’s not about being “regulated”, in other words - it matters where and by whom they’re regulated
but as long as people think it’s a clever idea to be “going offshore to escape the CFTC” (which was set up specifically to protect them!) the horror stories about scam brokers that fill all trading forums will continue for ever
the post linked to just below (and a few posts following it) explain the situation:-
it doesn’t help customers to report things to fake regulators, and unfortunately the world is full of them - brokers choose by whom to be regulated; many of them aren’t real brokers, and many aren’t real regulators either … it’s a great shame, but the reality is that all forex traders need to do, to avoid 99.9% of the disasters that so regularly happen, is to make sure that their account with a forex broker is an account that’s regulated by FCA, ASIC or CFTC - these are proper regulators - it’s honestly not much more complicated than that
anyone who has ever actually worked in the industry will tell you exactly what I’ve said above, but meanwhile there are also countless people posting in trading forums (especially here and at FF) who will tell you that “regulators don’t really protect you” and that “i use an unregulated broker and they’re fine, i’ve never had a problem,” and that “even regulated companies can mess with your funds” … so the bottom line is that it’s like very many other things in life where there‘s conflicting information: we all just have to decide for ourselves whom we believe 