Finkea

Is it really possible to comfortably trade cryptocurrencies and other financial assets in a modern terminal with qualified 24/5 support? Yes, claims a CFD broker Finkea, offering to open an account in less than a minute to gain access to thousands of trading instruments. This could seem interesting if the platform genuinely provided brokerage services rather than being focused on collecting and appropriating client funds. More details about this scam project are discussed in our further review.

Overview of Finkea

To obtain complete information about brokers, traders are willing to browse through dozens or even hundreds of pages on the internet. However, in most cases, it doesn’t make much sense, as almost everything can be found on the official website of the platform. Let’s illustrate this with the example of Finkea.

Broker History

Most regulated brokers aim to present as much information as possible on their official websites. They understand that even details from the company’s history or the team’s introduction contribute to building user trust. Do scam brokers face difficulties in this regard? They have nothing to tell about themselves, and experienced traders quickly expose fabricated legends.

On the official website of Finkea, there’s no information about the company. Its creators managed only two paragraphs with a couple of sentences each on “About Us” page. Besides, there are some statistical figures on the homepage. While this approach to disclosing project information doesn’t necessarily indicate fraudulent activity, it does raise concerns, and a thorough check is warranted. We will return to this later.

Finkea.com Website

The creators of the official website made a substantial effort to make it resemble a high-quality informational resource of a reputable CFD broker. In some aspects, they even achieved certain successes. For example, its design is done at a fairly high level. It’s quite fitting for an organization that allows you to:

• Learn all the essential information about the broker directly on the homepage.
• Clarify any information in just 1-2 clicks.
• Experience fast-loading optimized pages.

However, the content spoiled the overall picture. It’s not just about the number of verified users or CHSB token holders calculated in dollars. Something more serious is at play — there’s very little genuinely useful information. For instance:

• We already mentioned that information about the company is condensed into two short paragraphs with a couple of sentences each. Moreover, there’s no mention of the creation time, achievements, or plans of the broker.
• Even less information is provided by the platform’s specialists about the available trading assets. Describing, for example, currency pair trading, they managed to fit everything into just 1 paragraph. Of course, nobody even remembered the contract specifications.
• On pages dedicated to non-trading operations, there’s some progress. The authors bothered to mention the available payment methods. However, the conditions for conducting such operations (timeframes, limits, fees) were evidently deemed unworthy of attention.

Overall, there’s little benefit from such an official website.

Registration Process and Personal Account

To fully start working with Finkea, you can only do so after creating a client account. This is quite simple — you just need to fill out a small registration form.

On this form, prospective clients are asked to provide:

• First and last name.
• Country of residence.
• Email address.
• Phone number.
• Promo code (if available).

Additionally, confirming adulthood and agreeing to the Terms & Conditions text is required. After filling out and submitting the form, an email is sent to the specified address, asking to confirm it by clicking on a link. After this step, your account is considered created, and you can log in.

Here, one of the standard templates used by many scam brokers is employed. It’s believed to implement all the necessary functions for managing the account and performing non-trading operations.

The list of functions includes:

• Managing accounts (editing personal data, changing settings, including security settings).
• Sending verification documents.
• Viewing trade and monetary transaction history.
• Executing monetary transactions (depositing funds and submitting withdrawal requests).

However, not everything is as straightforward as it seems. It turns out that this Finkea module is malfunctioning and doesn’t create accounts. As a result, it’s impossible to see how the functions work (especially concerning monetary transactions). The issue can be resolved by contacting customer support.

We observe that Finkea also employs the standard approach of scammers — only those invited by the company’s representatives or traders who contact customer support and can prove their willingness to transfer money can obtain active accounts.

Trading Platform

We were unable to explore the Finkea trading platform as it also requires details for login. However, there are already several questions for the developers:

• Why is there no provision for a demo account mode, allowing users to familiarize themselves with the platform’s features and functionality?
• Why does the desktop program installation not prompt for anything (such as the installation path) and instead uses default parameters?
• Why are applications designed for such a limited set of platforms – Windows for PC and Android for mobile devices? What led the authors to ignore MacOS, Linux, and iOS?
• Why is the mobile version distributed not through an app store but directly from the website?

The last point is particularly intriguing. It seems that Finkea developers either violated conditions mandatory for app placement in stores, or that the company itself doesn’t meet Google’s requirements. Either way, the app didn’t pass verification, and there are no reviews to be found. Is it safe to install such programs on your devices? Obviously, no.

The desktop application conceals the publisher’s name and other parameters. All that remains is to speculate whether the company is hiding real software developers or has ended up on a list of publishers not to be trusted.

Contacts

However, not all pages on the Finkea website are entirely useless. For instance, “Contact Info” page can be very helpful for traders who need to address issues with the company’s support. The downside is that managers didn’t bother to ensure an adequate number of communication methods. The page presents only 2 options:

• Feedback form.
• Email address support@f-kea.com.

If the project’s management deemed it unnecessary to open a real office, they could have at least considered renting a virtual office with a mailing address and phone number. Especially since the cost isn’t exorbitant — around 150 euros per month. Such expenses should be affordable for a broker with a minimum deposit requirement of 5,000 euros.

Clients may wonder why Finkea doesn’t have any social media presence. Firstly, its owners are accustomed to attracting clients more directly rather than through social media. Secondly, managing groups and channels requires people, which our pseudo-broker likely lacks. Thirdly, it seems that no one expects the project to last more than 3-4 months, so investing time in social media is simply not considered rational.

Analysis of Services Offered by Finkea

After familiarizing ourselves with the official website and the client workspace, we are practically certain that we are dealing with a scam broker. However, this doesn’t hinder us from exploring what Finkea is attempting to offer to traders.

Funding and Withdrawal

We have previously noted that the official website only mentions payment methods available for depositing and withdrawing funds. However, there’s a complete absence of a description of the conditions for non-trading operations.

We hoped to find the missing information in the personal account and see the payment details the company accepts. However, this proved impossible as the broker suggests opening accounts through contacting customer support.

Assessing this platform’s approach, one can confidently assume that both in depositing funds and during other non-trading operations, Finkea uses scam methods. This is inevitable since it is undoubtedly created by scammers aiming to avoid the attention of financial and tax authorities. Cryptocurrency operations, payments using electronic wallets, or transfers from the client’s card to a drop card would be most suitable for this purpose.

Finkea Trading Conditions

Naturally, the primary interest of a trader lies in the trading conditions. Finkea at least tries to give the appearance of making them publicly available. Information can be found on “Account Types” page.

Traders are offered a choice of 5 types of accounts. The list of options includes not only the minimum deposit but also the maximum leverage and minimum trade volume (which is 0.01 standard lots for all accounts, by the way). Other characteristics look as follows:

• Beginner: Minimum deposit €5,000, leverage up to 1:10.
• Trader: Minimum deposit €10,000, leverage up to 1:20.
• Expert: Minimum deposit €25,000, leverage up to 1:30.
• VIP: Minimum deposit €50,000, leverage up to 1:40.
• Exclusive: Minimum deposit €100,000, leverage up to 1:50.

Everything seems to be at an acceptable level and adheres to the rules set by European regulators (Finkea positions itself as a company providing services within the EEA boundaries). However, for example, in the description of currency pairs in “Trade” menu section, visitors are told that they will have leverage up to 1:500. Which data should one believe?

The other options provided in this table may be less interesting for experienced traders, except perhaps for the VPS, which Finkea offers for free in all pricing plans. However, for beginners and traders who hesitate to rely on their own knowledge and experience, services such as a dedicated manager, round-the-clock support, and the ability to receive trading signals look enticing (although this may require substantial payments).

Is Finkea Trustworthy and Reliable

Having examined almost all aspects of the broker’s activities, we only need to conclude our review by examining the legal information. The broker’s disclosure of trading conditions once again convinces us that it is created by scammers who have no interest in revealing even the most crucial information. To confirm this conclusively, we need to check the official details about Finkea.

Assessing Legitimacy

No matter how much we searched on the official website pages and in the documents for information on the broker’s registration and licenses, we could not find them. Only in the personal account, the company proudly announces that it operates within the EEA (European Economic Area). However, to do so, Finkea needs official registration and a license from at least one regulator in the countries it operates in.

However, looking at the registration process and the client portal, we can confidently say that the platform lacks both. Otherwise, the registration process would have appeared more extensive (requiring the completion of a form indicating trading experience and the origin of funds), and clients would have been assigned retail or professional status, affecting trading conditions.

For now, everything indicates that Finkea operates solely online without any legal basis. Naturally, there’s no mention of any real brokerage services; the pseudo-broker only simulates trading, shamelessly appropriating clients’ funds.

Established Track Record

We now need to perform the final check — find out how long Finkea has been in existence online and assess the reliability of the statistics it provided. For this, we will turn to the whois service, where we can easily obtain the domain registration date.

As we can see, Finkea is using a domain registered back in November 2022. We don’t know exactly when this domain was purchased. However, web archive snapshots show that on January 8, 2024, a message was displayed on the website stating that the domain had recently been registered via NameCheap. Thus, we learn that the broker has been actively operating for no more than 2 weeks. It becomes amusing to look at the copyright dates set in the personal account since 2013. The statistics on the main page can also be amusing — 578 thousand clients in less than 2 weeks would likely be an absolute world record for rapid attraction.

Implications for Traders

Finkea is definitely associated with fraudulent projects posing as real CFD brokers. The platform operates without official company registration, lacks a license, and therefore, has no right to provide brokerage services. The statistics on the main page are unreliable, and users cannot independently open an account. The essential trading conditions and non-trading operation indicators are hidden from traders. All of this is enough reason to never engage with this pseudo-company to avoid financial losses.

Strengths and Weaknesses