Plus500 review

The only firm in thirty-odd reviews with an enforcement action on its FCA record: a Final Notice for breaches of SUP 17 and PRIN 3, and a fine of £205,128 for failing to report transactions accurately and on time. Everything else about the registers is ordinary.

Last verified 26 August 2026 · how we check

We have now read the disciplinary history on the FCA record of thirteen brokers. Twelve return nothing. This is the one that does not.

The enforcement action

From the FCA’s own disciplinary history for FRN 509909, quoted in full:

With effect from 17 October Plus500UK Ltd were the subject of a Final Notice in respect of breaches of SUP 17 and PRIN 3 and fined £205,128. The breaches involved a failure to report to the FSA reportable transactions in timely and accurate manner.

Type of action: Fines.

Two things about that text. It names the FSA, the FCA’s predecessor, which places the matter before April 2013. And the field gives a day and a month without a year, which is how the register stores it; we are not going to supply a year the record does not contain.

What the breaches were

SUP 17 is the transaction reporting chapter of the FCA Handbook. Firms must report details of the transactions they execute, promptly and correctly, so the regulator can monitor for market abuse. PRIN 3 is the third Principle for Businesses: a firm must take reasonable care to organise and control its affairs responsibly, with adequate risk management systems.

So the finding was about reporting and systems, not about client money, mis-selling or misleading customers. That distinction matters and it cuts both ways.

It is not the most serious category of enforcement. It is also not nothing: transaction reporting is how a regulator sees the market at all, and PRIN 3 findings are about whether a firm’s internal controls work.

Everything else on the record is ordinary

Companies House number 07024970. The UK entity has traded as “Plus500UK” since 4 January 2022, and under the name “Plus500” from 30 October 2014 to 23 August 2022, which is the fifth renaming we have logged across these reviews.

The Cyprus entry reading No longer authorised on the FCA register while holding a live CySEC licence is the ordinary post-Brexit pattern we set out at Tickmill, not an enforcement event.

The clone warning is the useful one for a reader

The FCA lists p500.io / plus500v.com explicitly as a clone of an authorised firm. A clone entry means somebody has copied the real firm’s regulatory details to look legitimate, which is the most effective form of this fraud precisely because the details check out.

That is the opposite of what the same list does at FP Markets, where the entry names the group’s own domain and carries no clone marking. Same list, opposite meaning, and the difference is one word in the entry.

The defence is mechanical: take the firm reference number from the site you are on and look it up. If it is not 509909, you are not on the authorised UK entity, whatever the page says.

How to weigh a decade-old fine

Honestly, and without either dismissing or inflating it.

It happened, it is public, and it is on the firm’s own regulatory record. No amount of marketing removes it, and any review that omits it has not read the record.

It concerns reporting and systems, and there is no finding here about client money or customer treatment. Those are the categories that matter most to a retail account.

It is old, predating the FCA itself, and a firm’s controls in the early 2010s say progressively less about its controls now. Twelve years of subsequent supervision with no further entry is itself information.

We are not going to convert that into a score. What we can say is that the record contains exactly one adverse entry, it is specific, and you can read it in the same place we did.

The field almost nobody opens

Disciplinary history sits on the same FCA record as the permissions, one click from the status line, and it is free. It is also the strongest fact available about a firm, because of what it is not.

A warning-list entry is usually about somebody else: a clone, or a name-alike, as at Eightcap and CMC Markets. A “no longer authorised” status is usually administrative, as at Tickmill and across three of Swissquote’s Malta entities. Neither says the regulator found anything against the firm you are considering.

An entry in disciplinary history does. It is the regulator recording that it examined this company, found breaches, and acted.

We are writing this at some cost to ourselves. Our own tool pulled this field from the API from the first day and never displayed it, so it was invisible across the whole review series until we noticed it on this record. We then re-ran the check on every firm already published, found nothing new, and fixed the tool. The reviews were not wrong, but they were incomplete on the one field that would have mattered most had anything been there.

If you take one habit from this page, take that one: on any FCA-authorised firm, open the disciplinary history before the marketing.

What the licences cap

Retail leverage is capped at 30:1 on major FX under the FCA, ASIC and CySEC, with lower limits by asset class, per leverage limits by regulator.

Compensation: the FSCS behind the UK entity for eligible claimants, the Investor Compensation Fund behind the Cyprus entity, and no equivalent scheme in Australia.

What to check before funding

Which entity holds your account, from the client agreement rather than the homepage. Three licensed companies appear above and they carry different protections.

The firm reference number on the site you are using, against the register. A clone warning naming two live domains is on the record for this brand.

The all-in cost on your account type. Nothing above touches price, and price is where authorised brokers differ most.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

We read the FCA register record for FRN 509909 including its disciplinary history, previous names and permissions, the entries for the Cyprus company, the FCA warning list, and the ASIC and CySEC registers we hold locally, on 25 and 26 August 2026.

The firm’s site blocked automated access, so account specifics are left unstated rather than taken from third-party reviews. We have not obtained the Final Notice document itself; the text above is the register’s own summary of it, quoted in full.

We have not opened an account, deposited money, or tested spreads, execution, support or withdrawals.

Sources

• FCA — Financial Services Register, FRN 509909, including disciplinary history
• ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register, AFSL 417727
• CySEC — register of Cypriot investment firms