The rules

Why this site exists

Because a casino that kept your losses but voided your wins would be shut down by lunchtime — yet a broker that does the same thing, through a clause that lets it "review" accounts after the fact and a policy of never explaining itself, keeps its licences and its five-star ads. There is often no practical legal route against the offshore entities where this happens; the terms are written so the house cannot lose. What remains is daylight. This site is the daylight: a permanent, documented, searchable record of who plays heads-I-win-tails-you-lose, in their own letters.

What we cover

• Profit confiscation. Winning trades voided after the fact; profits — and sometimes principal — debited under an unexplained "internal review".
• AML/KYC hold. Withdrawals frozen behind a compliance pretext: document demands that never end, no named owner, no ETA — and sometimes money that never comes back.
• Withdrawal obstruction. A withdrawal stalled far past any advertised timescale — no ETA in writing, no named step, excuses that change with each contact.
• Massive mis-execution. A single catastrophic execution failure — positions that could not be closed, a feed that failed at the worst moment — and a broker that refuses to show its logs.
• Prop payout denial. A funded-account payout denied after the win: the rule unnamed, the trades unidentified, the evidence withheld — and the evaluation fee kept.

Each category records its own five questions — every one of them something an honest firm can always answer. What we do not cover: chronic slippage and spread complaints (vote with your feet), and outright scam platforms with no real regulation to speak of — for those, consult the FCA, CySEC and ASIC warning lists directly.

Prop firms: the bar is deliberately narrow

A denied prop payout is a broken promise, not confiscated client money — our entries label the amounts accordingly: fees paid to the firm, and the payout promised and denied. And because some denials are legitimate (exploiting a demo price feed or sharing challenge passes is real abuse), a prop entry requires more: the firm must have refused to name the rule, refused to identify the trades, invoked a rule added after the trading, or denied a payout its own dashboard had confirmed. A firm that answers "clause 4.2, these six trades, here are the logs" has answered — that dispute belongs elsewhere. But note the tell: if a pass was truly obtained by cheating, the honest remedy voids the account and refunds the fee. Keeping the fee while voiding the win is heads-we-win, and it earns an entry.

How a broker is inducted

• A first-person account from an identifiable complainant (a persistent public pseudonym suffices).
• At least one primary document, uploaded as a file: the firm's letter, the statement, the chat log. Links help corroborate, but a link alone is not enough — undocumented reports are not accepted at intake, because accuracy is what makes this site impossible to dismiss.
• Figures are labelled as the complainant's unless independently verified; documents are quoted verbatim; the broker's response, if any exists, is reproduced in full.

The five questions

Every entry answers five questions from the broker's own written justification: which clause was cited; which trades were identified; what criteria were disclosed; whether the client's own capital was returned; and what the broker said in public. These five separate genuine abuse-enforcement from confiscation-by-boilerplate. An honest broker answers all five without breaking stride. A broker that answers none is asking the world to accept "our internal systems decided, and we won't tell you more" as a reason to keep someone's money. We do not accept it, and we publish exactly that refusal.

The burden of proof is the broker's

We take no position on whether a client's trading was clever, reckless, or improper. That is not our question, and we do not pretend to adjudicate it. We hold the broker to one standard, and only one: to confiscate a client's funds, it must state the specific term that was breached and prove the breach. "We know what you did" is not proof. "Reasonable suspicion" is not proof. An "internal review" is not a finding. What a broker privately believes is worth nothing here; what it can put on the table is everything.

And the broker cannot disown the game it dealt. It set the leverage. It offered the protections. It accepted every order in real time and took its commission. A firm that markets aggressive terms to win deposits, and then reaches back to confiscate only the trades that won, is not enforcing a rule — it is keeping the upside of its own product and refusing the downside. If trading genuinely broke a term, the remedy is to name the term and prove it, not to take the money in silence. Prove it, or return it. A broker that proves it earns a resolved mark in its own favour, exactly as described below — and that it took a public register to extract the proof is itself the point.

The discretion clause is not an answer

The smarter letter does cite a clause — the one that says the firm may act "at its sole discretion", or on "reasonable suspicion". That is a power, not a finding. An honest enforcement action names the conduct rule that was broken, the trades that broke it, and the evidence; "we may decide" names none of them — it answers which clause? the way "because we can" answers why? The word "reasonable" only deepens the problem: reasonableness is a standard, and a firm that invokes it while refusing to disclose any basis is claiming a standard it refuses to be measured against. Entries therefore grade such a citation as what it is — a blanket clause only, in red — and reserve a "yes" for a named conduct rule. It is no accident that terms letting one side unilaterally decide breach appear on the indicative unfair-terms lists of UK and EU consumer law: the discretion clause survives only where the referee cannot read it, which is the entity trick restated in contract language.

The entity trick

Broker groups fly their best flags — FCA, CySEC — on every email footer, while the contract that actually binds you names an entity under a regulator with no teeth. Entries therefore record the signing entity with a stated confidence level. Watch this field across cases: confiscations cluster where the referee can't act. The same groups do not run this playbook on their UK or EU clients, because there the clause loses. That selectivity tells you everything about whether they believe their own accusations.

What AML law actually lets them withhold

Anti-money-laundering law does gag a firm on one narrow point: it may not reveal that a suspicious activity report has been filed or that an investigation is under way ("tipping off"). That is the whole of it. No law prevents a broker from naming the document it still needs, stating whether verification is complete, giving an ETA and a responsible owner, pausing its fees while your money is frozen, or returning the money when no action follows. Silence about the reason for a specific hold may be legally compelled; an endless, undocumented verification loop is not. Our AML entries record exactly those answers — the ones a firm can always lawfully give.

Case statuses

• Alleged — a single-source, documented report.
• Corroborated — multiple independent complainants, materially similar conduct.
• Regulator-confirmed — a regulator or ombudsman has made a relevant finding, cited in the entry.
• Resolved — the broker made it right; see below.
• Withdrawn — the report did not survive scrutiny, or its author withdrew it. We say so openly.

How a broker leaves the list

The door out is open and cheap to walk through: return the money, or publish the proof — the clause, the trades, the workings. A broker that does either gets its entry marked resolved, prominently and permanently, with the remedy described in its favour. We are not interested in shame for its own sake; we are interested in making the confiscation playbook more expensive than honesty. Every resolved entry is the site working.

The money

This site takes no money from brokers or prop firms. No advertising, no affiliate links, no paid removal, no "mediation" fees, no verified badges — not now, not ever. An entry cannot be bought off the list; the only way off is the door described above. If this site is ever funded at all, it will be by its readers and by people who use its data — never by the industry it documents. The day that changes is the day this page stops being true, so hold us to it.

Right of reply and corrections

Any named person or firm may respond at any time; responses are published in full, unedited, alongside the entry — and the running tally of broker responses (currently: none) is itself part of the record. Demonstrated errors of fact are corrected promptly and noted. Contact: admin@brokerhallofshame.com.

What this site does not do

It does not assert that any named party has been convicted of a crime, and it does not publish undocumented accusations. It does something worse for them: it reproduces what they wrote, counts the questions they refuse to answer, and keeps the record where search engines can find it.