Afex Markets — Sudden account deactivation and fake clone domains

Be incredibly careful with Afex Markets. I opened an account through their standard portal and deposited €1,500 to try out their commodity leverage pairs. Shortly after executing a few successful positions on gold, my trading platform completely disconnected from the server. When I tried to log back into the website, it kept telling me that my user profile did not exist.

I started looking into it and noticed they are jumping between multiple mirror domains like afexmel.it and afexmarketsltd.it just to keep running ahead of regulatory warnings. They appear to be masquerading as a legitimate, regulated brokerage, but the actual entities behind these specific sites are completely unauthorized.

They completely count on retail users not checking the fine print. Once they take your deposit, they will simply wipe your login credentials from the database and stop responding to emails. If you try to find them, you realize their listed corporate office address is just a virtual mailbox. Complete ghost operation.