Clone Firm
Brokers & RegulationA scam that copies an authorised firm's name and licence number behind a lookalike site, so a register check appears to pass. Nothing it takes is covered.
A clone firm is a fraud that impersonates a genuinely authorised business. The operator copies the real firm's name, licence number and registered address, then attaches a lookalike domain, its own phone number and its own bank details. A trader who checks only the reference number finds a valid authorisation and concludes the approach is legitimate.
Regulators treat this as common enough to warrant a dedicated warning category: the FCA, CySEC and ASIC all publish clone alerts naming the impersonated firm and the fake contact details being used. The defences are procedural rather than clever — initiate contact only through the phone number and website recorded on the register, refuse any payment instruction pointing at a personal or third-party account, and treat an unsolicited call about an account you never opened as fraud by default. Money sent to a clone is not covered by the impersonated firm's compensation scheme.