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Our Intel Team recently came across a forex and commodities broker called Hot Forex (hotforex.com). Their website shows they have been running a series of trainings in the city of Port-Harcourt since July. This piqued our interest, so we decided to investigate further.
The About page of their websites states “HotForex offers various accounts types, trading software, and tools to facilitate individuals and institutional customers to trade Forex and Derivatives online.” Apart from the trading software and tools, Hotforex also provides a PAMM Program where anyone can sign up either as a manager (in this instance you trade your funds and the funds of others who sign up under you) or an investor (in this instance you pick a manager to help you trade your funds).
While going through their website we came across this notice on the footer:
“HF Markets (SV) Ltd does not provide services to residents of the USA, Canada, Sudan, Syria, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Mauritius, Myanmar, Yemen, Afghanistan, Vanuatu and EEA countries”
The question is why are residents of these countries excluded? For a company that claims to be “the forex broker of choice for traders worldwide,” shouldn’t they be able to meet the regulatory requirements of the above-listed countries? If their service offerings cannot meet the regulatory stipulations of these countries then this is a red flag.
Also on their footer, it states the various companies belonging to the Hotforex group as:
Legal: HF Markets (SV) Ltd is incorporated in St. Vincent & the Grenadines as an International Business Company with registration number 22747 IBC 2015.
The website is owned and operated by HF Markets Group of companies, which include:
At this point, we decided to head over to the OpenCorporates to verify this information and to see what else we could find out. A search for HF Markets Ltd brings up a list of 14 companies, 6 active, 3 dissolved, 1 inactive, 2 live, 2 registered. Of all the listed companies, HF Markets Ltd incorporated in Mauritius is the oldest, it was incorporated in 2010.
The status shows the company is live but it isn’t listed on its website. To confirm that this isn’t some other company not related to Hotforex, we decided to search for the 2010 version of the hotforex website on the Wayback machine, and sure enough, we found it listed and also, the name Kyriakos Kyriakides as its CEO.
A search of the company address “7th Floor, Tower 1, NeXTeracom, Cybercity, Ebene, 72201 Mauritius” shows it belongs to Safyr Utilis, which specializes in providing company incorporation in Mauritius, provision of registered office services, and Directorship services. From these, we can infer that HF Markets (Mauritius) Ltd is being run from a virtual office. This is also the case for HF Markets (SV) Ltd. A quick search of its address “Suite 305, Griffith Corporate Centre, P.O. Box 1510, Beachmont Kingstown, St. Vincent and the Grenadines” shows that it belongs to Griffith Corporate Centre which provides virtual office services.
Moving on, the next thing we did was to examine the source code of the website (hotforex.com). Doing so we found connections to ten other websites listed below:
These websites ranged from cryptocurrency to forex investing, and some were an exact copy of the hotforex.com website with the details changed.
The next thing we did was to check out reviews of hotforex.com on trust pilot. The general review score was poor with some particularly worrying reviews.
Putting it all together; the presence of regional restrictions, virtual offices, bad reviews, and other websites using the same website template, we do not recommend that you invest or trade with hotforex.com
This article if from the Cybersafe Foundation, Nigeria.
