Check a Platform

What this checks

One thing: whether a firm appears on a national competent authority’s register of crypto-asset service providers authorised under the EU’s MiCA regime. We hold 128 firms across 20 member states.

Appearing on it is a fact about a public register. It is not our opinion of the firm, and we do not have one.

Why there is no scam list here

We can tell you a firm is on a register. We deliberately do not tell you a company is fraudulent, and it is worth saying why, because most sites in this field do.

We hold a dataset of company names and domains extracted from US court filings. When we read all of it rather than sampling it, most entries turned out not to be the subject of the case at all — they were email providers pulled from addresses in the document, law firms appearing as counsel, and companies that were theplaintiff. One was a blockchain investigations firm that had brought the case.

A record that a company was mentioned in a lawsuit is not a record that the company did anything wrong. Publishing it as though it were would have defamed a series of entirely legitimate businesses, and it would have made this site less trustworthy in exactly the way it is trying not to be. So it is not here, and it will not be until we can establish each company’s role in each case.

Registers worth checking yourself

These are the authoritative sources and they are free. We link rather than copy them, so that what you read is current and is theirs.

• FCA Warning List
  UK. Firms the regulator has warned about, including clones of authorised firms. Searchable, and it has a daily email alert.
• FCA Firm Checker
  UK. Whether a firm is authorised, and what protection you would have if it is.
• CySEC warnings and non-approved domains
  Cyprus. Includes a list of non-approved crypto-asset provider domains.
• ESMA registers
  EU-wide. The route to each national competent authority's own register.
• CFTC RED List
  US. Foreign entities soliciting US residents without being registered.
• IOSCO I-SCAN
  Global. Aggregates warnings from over 150 regulators. Contribution is voluntary, so it is not complete.

The questions that actually protect you

No register catches a platform that was set up last month. These do more work than any lookup:

• Who contacted whom? If they found you — a message, a comment reply, a dating app, a group chat — that is the single strongest signal in all of this, and it does not depend on any database.
• Can you withdraw a small amount, today? A platform that pays out €50 without a new fee is behaving differently from one that does not. A demand for tax, verification or a release fee before you can withdraw is the fraud.
• Which authority, and what is the registration number?An authorised firm answers this instantly and the number checks out on the regulator’s own site. Check the register yourself rather than a certificate they send you — certificates are trivially forged.
• Does the domain exactly match the register? Lookalike domains differing by one character, or by the ending, are the most common single trick.
• Are you being hurried? A closing window, a limited allocation, a price about to move. Urgency is a technique, not a fact about a market.