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WHAT THE RECORD SHOWED

The most heavily endorsed venue in the industry: stadium naming rights, athlete and celebrity promotion, and a founder who was the sector's public face in Washington. Almost none of that was evidence of anything, and the parts that were checkable, above all the relationship between the exchange and the trading firm beside it, were the parts nobody was checking.

WHAT HAPPENED

Withdrawals halted in November 2022 and the exchange filed for bankruptcy within days. Its founder was convicted in November 2023 on all seven counts he faced, covering wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities and commodities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, and was sentenced to 25 years in March 2024, with $11 billion in forfeiture.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWED

A real business with real students, a large following and a genuine product. It is exactly the profile that a regulation checkbox waves through, because there was no licence to check and nothing obviously fraudulent to point at. What there was, in volume, was earnings claims that could not be substantiated.

WHAT HAPPENED

The FTC sued in April 2022 over those claims. The order required a $3 million payment and barred the unsubstantiated earnings representations that had driven the marketing. In January 2023 the FTC paid out $2.9 million of it to 20,402 people.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWED

The CFTC had listed it since June 2023 as a foreign entity soliciting US customers without being registered. That list is public, free and searchable in under a minute, and for the eight months that followed the firm kept selling challenges and kept turning up in recommendations. Nothing about the check was hard. It simply was not part of anyone's routine.

WHAT HAPPENED

In February 2024 MetaQuotes terminated its MetaTrader licence and every account froze overnight. Three months of restart attempts came to nothing, and in May 2024 the firm closed permanently citing insolvency, with unpaid trader balances reported at around $1.2 million across some 300 accounts.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWED

Not one operation but a family of them: near-identical platforms sharing page templates, payment processors and support scripts, each selling a proprietary model that no buyer was ever shown. The branding was the product. The automation, where anyone looked closely, was a fixed rule set.

WHAT HAPPENED

Between June and September 2025 the FCA put four of them on its warning list inside sixteen weeks: XAI Trading Platform, AI Trader Bot, TradeGPT and Trading AI Tools, each on its own .net domain, none authorised. They surface in waves because they are built from the same kit, which is why the alias trail matters more here than any individual name.