Founded in 2021, TradeFills is a forex broker with its headquarters located in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Is TradeFills a scam or legit forex broker? With the multitude of eyebrow raising TradeFills reviews found online, it’s evident why this question weighs heavily on the mind.
Yet, the availability of TradeFills’ address and contact details — in view of the public — could throw some people off on whether TradeFills is a scam or legit forex broker. With its full address placed at Suite 305, Griffith Corporate Centre, P.O. Box 1510, Beachmont Kingstown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, TradeFills is registered with St. Vincent and the Grenadines Financial Services Authority (SVG FSA). However, the SVG FSA does not regulate forex activities. It also publicly displays its contact details as +44 7888 872335 and Support@tradefills.com.
Like many legit and regulated forex brokers, TradeFills also offers the MetaTrader 4 and 5 (MT4, MT5) trading platforms, widely used especially amongst forex retail traders. Furthermore, this broker claims to be the Electronic Communication Network (ECN) kind and appears to be highly accessible to the Asian region with its supported languages listed down as Chinese (Simplified), English, Filipino, Indonesian, Malay, Thai, and Vietnamese.
Additionally, its offering of an Islamic trading account makes it more appealing to a wider range of traders. It stands to reason then why the back and forth in deciding if TradeFills is a scam or legit. Read on to understand the reasonings behind why this broker may or may not be for you.
In doing more research on this broker, it’s worth taking note of its frequent misspellings —TradeFill and Trade Fills.
TradeFills: The Customer Journey from TradeFills Reviews
TradeFills, often also referred to as TradeFill and Trade Fills is an unregulated broker, because although it is registered with the SVG FSA, it’s deemed as an unregulated forex broker because as stated before, the SVG FSA does not regulate forex trading activities and dealings in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. On the contrary, it aims, “to regulate, supervise and develop the non-bank financial services sector in St. Vincent and the Grenadines”.
This only means that since the SVG FSA is not directly in charge of forex dealings in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, it “regulates certain entities and businesses in the financial sector and provides for regulated matters”. This includes ensuring that any financial institution’s partaking in forex trading activities be regulated by the relevant authoritative agencies, which the SVG FSA isn’t. Therefore, for TradeFills to be considered a regulated forex broker, it needs to be licensed and regulated by a recognised regulatory body in forex. Some examples of these regulatory bodies are listed below.
List of Recognised Regulatory/Authoritative Bodies in Forex
- FCA Regulated – Financial Conduct Authority – United Kingdom
- CySEC Regulated – Cyprus Securities & Exchange Commission – Cyprus
- ASIC Regulated – Australian Securities & Investment Commission – Australia
- SFC Authorised – Securities Futures Commission – Hong Kong
- MAS Authorised – Monetary Authority of Singapore – Singapore
- FSA Authorised – Financial Services Agency – Japan
- IIROC Authorised – Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada – Canada
- FINMA Authorised – Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority – Switzerland
- FMA Authorised – Financial Markets Authority – New Zealand
Tradeable Assets and Trading Conditions
This broker offers and provides notable trading instruments and conditions.
Trading Instruments
- Forex
- Indices
- CFDs
- Precious metals and other Commodities
- Cryptocurrencies
Account Types
The account types offered are listed down, below and allow trading in a few currencies: South African Rand (ZAR), Great Britain Pound (GBP), Euro Dollar (EUR), and United States Dollar (USD) depending on which account is chosen.
- Cent – Requires a minimum deposit of 5.0 USD, maximum leverage of 1:1000, and minimum trade volume of 0.01 Lots. Account currency(s): ZAR, USD
- Micro – Requires a minimum deposit of 5.0 USD, maximum leverage of 1:1000, and minimum trade volume of 0.01 Lots. Account currency(s): USD
- Standard – Requires a minimum deposit of 5.0 USD, maximum leverage of 1:1000, and minimum trade volume of 0.01 Lots. Account currency(s): ZAR, GBP, EUR and USD
- ECN – Requires a minimum deposit of 5.0 USD, maximum leverage of 1:1000, and minimum trade volume of 0.01 Lots. Account currency(s): ZAR, GBP, EUR and USD
- Professional – Requires a minimum deposit of 5.0 USD, maximum leverage of 1:1000, and minimum trade volume of 0.01 Lots. Account currency(s): ZAR, GBP, EUR and USD
Navigating the Client Portal
Although now defunct, its website provided a fair client portal experience, that offered swift execution and withdrawals. On the now suspended website, it can be found in the upper-right corner.
Customer support proved to be sufficient in times of unforeseen circumstances. However, incidents reported, such as, the MT4 trading platform ‘hanging’ is cause for concern as a reviewer aptly mentioned. For whatever reason, orders that were put through failed to be executed.
TradeFills User Reviews
Among its many reviews out there, here are some that are most frequently brought up and should be kept in mind.
- Withdrawal Denied – TradeFills users have reported of accounts being locked without any reason as to why. After getting locked out of their TradeFills trading account, clients received either vague emails or no email responses whatsoever. In this instance, clients reported losing both their deposit and trade profit.
- Account Frozen – Another incident involved clients getting a notification from TradeFills stating that their account had been suspended abruptly. No reason was given for the account suspension in which account holders lost all the money (funds) they had invested into the account. TradeFills has not been heard from since.
- Targeting Asian Customers – Clients from Indonesia have made complaints that Indonesian clients simultaneously experienced trouble accessing TradeFills’ portal and platform. In this complaint, the broker’s Indonesian clients experienced not being able to access its website due to a server issue. All local depositors ended up losing their funds.
- Enticing Offers – Using a trick as old as time, a client based in India had lost USD300 after falling for TradeFills’ promotional offer. When this client decided to send a fund withdrawal request, they had been met with no response from the broker. Following this, when the client reached out to customer support, they received an initial, generic response, but later for no reason, found their trading account getting blocked from further trading and financial transactions.
TradeFills Insider Insight
There’s no better assurance than an insider’s point of view. An insider’s insight on what really went on behind a veiled truth couldn’t be any better in affirming a victim’s suspicions.
TradeFills Employee Take on TradeFills Scam
If TradeFills Indonesia, as discussed above, had been facing ethical and possibly legal issues, Malaysia started having their fair share of problems in February 2023. The problems started here with more TradeFills customers complaining about not receiving funds from their approved withdrawal requests. With the increase in complaints, employees of TradeFills Malaysia stepped in by responding with a reply stating, “Estimated losses cannot be estimated because there are too many people and there is no access to internal data to record”.
Of the few reasons that led traders and investors in Malaysia to go with TradeFills was the ample deposit bonus offered by the broker. In particular, on the 6th of March 2023, a trader in Malaysia invested $400 in TradeFills in the hopes of earning the 200% deposit bonus offered. When this trader had made a profit of $820 who then made a withdrawal request, they were rest assured to know that their withdrawal request had been approved on 10th March 2023. However, like many other traders in the same circumstance, this trader has yet to receive any money.
An Employee’s Roadblock
An employee of TradeFills Malaysia has taken the liberty of explaining his side of the story. Starting employment with TradeFills in June of 2022, he and his team were in charge of customer registration in Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia. Named Aizat, the TradeFills employee and his team of five had taken to discussing with TradeFills’ management, on the withdrawal issues faced by clients which started on 7th March 2023. On 8th March, in response, the manager Aizat was in contact with promised a compensation of 300% deposit bonus, on top of all withdrawals being fulfilled.
In turn, Aizat rebuffed the management with the statement, “We unanimously disagree, because of the greater risk to the client, the risk of not being paid and others”. In addition, he insisted that TradeFills repay the current payment owed to its clients before launching another promotion.
Not long after, Aizat discovered from the TradeFills Whatsapp business group chat that the TradeFills CEO, Zaid Sidat and its other executive, had exited the group chat. This had resulted in Aizat and the rest of his team not being able to access the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. What’s more, Aizat and his team members later did not get paid their February salary and commissions.
The CEO and executive’s departure from the group chat seemed to be triggered by further enquiry from Aizat and team on their salaries and commissions. Aizat and his team were also fired soon after from TradeFills without any explanation.
As of March-April 2023, TradeFills and the TradeFills MT4 platform were still accessible and still promoting their deposit bonus on social media. However, as explained, TradeFills customers saw no deposit bonus even after account sign up; something to be very wary of.
Verdict on TradeFills: A Scam or Legit Broker?
From one TradeFills review to the next, it is clear that TradeFills is an unregulated broker leaning towards being a scam more than being a trustworthy forex broker. Their official website which may have been accessible before has now been suspended.
Among several promises by TradeFills to their customers is their withdrawal processing time. TradeFills gives a withdrawal processing time of 24 hours which may take up to 5 days for payment to reflect in customers’ accounts. Although it’s not unusual for forex brokers to process withdrawals within 24 hours, but it must be kept in mind that with unregulated forex brokers, there’s a high chance that customers won’t get their money back.
As customers have testified in many reviews, they never got their funds from TradeFills.
A regulated and real broker should be transparent from the outset. ZFX (How to make a withdrawal? – Zeal Capital Market (zfx.com)) is an example of a regulated broker providing thorough instructions on their website on the fund withdrawal process.
Lost Funds Recovery
Usually, forex traders fund their accounts either via credit or cash transfer. In either case, a trader needs to file a complaint or report to the relevant party. For credit cards, a payment dispute can be made, and for cash transfers, a report can be made to the authoritative body for forex.
- Payment Dispute – Should you ever find yourself in the unfortunate situation of falling prey to a forex scam, the first step should be to immediately contact your bank or credit card provider to dispute the payment. Next, you will need to describe in full your experience with the unregulated forex broker. For the rest, your bank or credit card provider will instruct you on next steps.
A payment dispute is probably the next best thing to directly nabbing an unregulated forex broker. With enough payment disputes made against them, this broker will soon find itself blacklisted by their payment service providers, making it difficult to run future scams, let alone operate a business. - Reporting to Authorities – Reporting to the relevant authorities is a method that can also be used for credit card payments. However, this method of fund recovery is the only possible way for cash online transfers. Every country has its regulating agency that oversees and monitors forex brokers.
For reporting a scam forex broker to a regulating agency, an email or formal letter explaining the incident in detail can be sent to them. An initial step could be, to first contact the forex broker and show them the email or letter that you intend to send to the regulating agency. You might still stand a chance of retrieving your money. If all else fails, the next step would be to contact the regulating agency with the email or letter you’ve prepared.
Conclusion
TradeFills is an unregulated forex broker known to have conducted forex fraud and scams. Forex in of itself is legal, and a real and legit means of trading. However, the scores of scams and unregulated brokers have contributed to the bad reputation associated with forex.
At the end of the day, it falls on the trader to choose a broker best suited to them. Starting with, of course, a regulated broker. As explained in this review, TradeFills has a history of forex scams. Hopefully, this review helps in deciding if TradeFills should be your broker of choice.
FAQs
- Is TradeFills regulated?
From one TradeFills review to the next, it is clear that TradeFills is an unregulated broker leaning towards being a scam more than being a trustworthy forex broker. Their official website which may have been accessible before has now been suspended. - How long does it take to withdraw money from TradeFills?
TradeFills gives a withdrawal processing time of 24 hours which may take up to 5 days for payment to reflect in the customer’s account. - Who is the CEO of TradeFills?
The CEO of TradeFills is Zaid Sidat. - How do I know if Forex is legit?
Forex in of itself is legal, and a real and legit means of trading. However, the scores of scams and unregulated brokers have contributed to the bad reputation associated with forex.
