Regulatory Warning List

Alongside the register of authorised firms, supervisors publish a warning list: firms observed offering regulated services without permission, entities impersonating licensed businesses, and websites the regulator has been asked about often enough to name. It is the negative counterpart to the register, and checking it takes about as long as checking the register does. Use it with its limits in mind. A name absent from every warning list is not thereby approved — the lists lag, and a new domain will not appear on one for months. Lists are national, so a firm flagged in one country may be untroubled in another, which is why the international lists that aggregate national warnings are worth a second search. And a warning attaches to a name and a domain, both of which are cheap to change: a flagged operation typically reappears under a new brand. Search the entity name, the trading name and the domain separately, and treat any hit as final rather than as something to be explained away.