The Funded Trader review

The Funded Trader went dark once before, in March 2024, with numbers and a reason attached. This time the site just stopped loading, behind a hosting bill its own founder didn't mention when he announced, weeks earlier, that he was done with prop firms for good.

Last verified 27 October 2026 · how we check

The Funded Trader has gone dark before, and that time it explained itself. In March 2024 the firm froze payouts, admitted a dollar figure, named a cause and came back five months later. This time, as of this writing, there’s no notice at all: just a hosting error page, left up since early September 2026, on a site whose founder had already told the public, weeks before that, that he was finished with prop firms entirely.

What the site shows right now

thefundedtrader.com has returned a “payment required” error from its hosting provider since early September 2026. That specific message is a hosting-platform notice for a lapsed or exceeded plan, not a message the company wrote; it says nothing about the business, and nobody at the firm has said anything else publicly since. The trader dashboard is unreachable along with the rest of the site. No closure notice, no wind-down instructions, no statement on outstanding balances has appeared anywhere.

The first time it went dark, there were numbers attached

The Funded Trader, founded in May 2021 by Angelo Ciaramello, grew into one of the largest firms in the sector, reporting more than 80,000 funded accounts at its peak. In March 2024 it suspended payouts, citing a self-imposed internal audit, and the CEO went public with a specific account: just over $2 million in denied withdrawals against more than $17 million paid out in January and February 2024 alone, a denial rate the company itself put near 10% of that period’s obligations. The stated reasons were KYC failures, suspected fraud, credit-card fraud and prohibited trading strategies, not an inability to pay.

Ciaramello initially called the wider complaints about delayed and denied payouts “propaganda,” then the company suspended payouts anyway days later, an inconsistency that outlasted the audit itself. PropFirmMatch, a listings site most of this sector depends on for referral traffic, suspended The Funded Trader’s listing over the volume of Trustpilot and social-media complaints, independent of whatever the internal audit found.

Why that crisis happened: a platform migration that didn’t work

The underlying trigger wasn’t trading losses. Eightcap, the broker providing MetaTrader infrastructure behind The Funded Trader’s accounts, withdrew its prop-firm services at the end of February 2024 under pressure from MetaQuotes, which was cracking down on MetaTrader licences used by prop firms serving retail US clients without the underlying broker holding the right authorisation for that activity. The Funded Trader tried to move its accounts to DXtrade instead. That migration failed to work as planned, and the combination, lost MetaTrader access plus a broken replacement, is what forced the firm to pause payouts and then, on 28 March 2024, all operations.

The relaunch didn’t close the file

The Funded Trader came back online roughly five months later, in August 2024, though Finance Magnates’ own coverage at the time questioned whether it was “fully operational” rather than treating the return as a clean resumption. That caution held up: by March 2025, roughly a year after the original freeze, an estimated 1,272 traders were still waiting on payouts tied to the 2024 disruption, according to Finance Magnates reporting cited independently by a 2026 status review. A firm can resume taking signups and running evaluations while a specific, counted group of people from its last crisis are still owed money from it.

The founder’s pattern, not just this firm’s

Rev One Trading, a futures prop firm also founded by Ciaramello, shut down in the week before 21 August 2026. His own announcement was direct: “We built an amazing product but did not have a top platform option which hurt our ability to scale.” In the same statement he said he was retiring from prop firms altogether to focus on prediction-market products.

Rev One Trading is the third firm tied to Ciaramello to stop operating, after The Funded Trader’s 2024 crisis and Leveled Up Society, a firm run through the same Easton Consulting Technologies entity, which closed earlier over what Ciaramello himself described as “overall misalignment” among management, explicitly not a liquidity problem. Three closures under one founder, across forex and futures prop trading, is a pattern a single bad quarter doesn’t explain.

His August 2026 retirement announcement never mentioned The Funded Trader by name. He confirmed Rev One Trading’s shutdown and his own exit from the sector in the same breath, without saying a word about the firm that made him known in it, its site, its dashboard, or anyone still owed a payout from 2024. Weeks later, that site went dark too, with no statement from him or the company either time.

The sequence, dated

Which register would even apply

The Funded Trader sold evaluation and funded accounts on simulated balances, the structure covered in full in futures prop trading firms: a firm selling a paid attempt at a profit split on an account that never touches a real market isn’t, on the sector’s own standing legal argument, offering a financial service that requires a licence from ASIC, CySEC or the FCA. No register search was ever going to return a result for this firm, and the current silence doesn’t change that; it was never inside the perimeter that register checking covers.

If you’re still owed a payout

Do not assume the March 2024 episode is the one affecting your balance. If your funds are tied up from 2024, that is a separate, already-aged claim from whatever the current outage means for anyone trading there more recently; keep records for both periods distinctly if you have exposure to either.

Save everything you have now, while you still can. Statements, payout confirmations, evaluation results, any email from the company. A hosting error page is not a data breach notice, but a site that stops resolving entirely removes your ability to pull anything from it after the fact.

Don’t expect Ciaramello’s retirement announcement to double as a wind-down notice for this firm. It wasn’t written as one and didn’t name The Funded Trader at all; treat the two as separate questions until the company says otherwise.

Treat silence past 60 days as the practical answer, even without a formal notice. The firm has gone dark and come back once already, so a short outage isn’t unusual for this specific name. A hosting lapse that nobody at the company has addressed for two months, while its founder has publicly said he’s leaving the business entirely, is a different kind of silence than a server hiccup.

The difference between the two times it went dark

The 2024 freeze came with a number, a reason and, eventually, a return date. Whatever else is true about how that crisis was handled, including a public statement dismissed as “propaganda” days before the company suspended payouts anyway, it was handled in public. The current outage has none of that: no figure, no stated cause beyond an unpaid hosting bill, and a founder who announced his exit from the entire business model weeks earlier without mentioning this firm at all. A site that goes quiet with an explanation is a company managing a crisis badly. A site that goes quiet with nothing is a question nobody with authority to answer it has chosen to address, and the roughly 1,272 traders still waiting on the last silence are the reason that distinction isn’t academic.

Sources

• FinanceFeeds — The Funded Trader shuts down, claims relaunch in April, March 2024
• Finance Magnates — CEO discloses $2M+ in denied withdrawals against $17M paid, March 2024
• Finance Magnates — The Funded Trader resurfaces five months after pausing operations
• Finance Magnates — TFT founder closes futures prop firm Rev One Trading, August 2026
• Finance Magnates — Leveled Up Society closure, management misalignment
• bestpropfirms.com — The Funded Trader 2026 status, offline since September, checked 27 October 2026
• Our review — futures prop trading firms, the simulated-account legal structure