Five firms closed, and their websites are still working: two still take signups, two still draw 13,800 searches a month

We documented five brokers and prop firms that shut down. What happened to client money ranged from a full refund on every account to a domain that now forwards to a competitor's signup page carrying the dead firm's affiliate tracking.

Last verified 7 September 2026 · how we check

Five firms on this site have stopped trading. We documented each one separately, with the date, the notice and the register check. Reading them together shows something none of them shows alone: closing down and going away are different events, and the gap between them is where the money goes.

What each firm actually did

The range in that last column is the whole point. One firm refunded losing accounts. Another left an email address. Nothing in the marketing of any of them predicted which one you were dealing with, and none of the five appears in a register we hold.

The refund that came with a clause

FundingTicks ended better than anything else in this set, and it is worth being specific about how. It refunded active evaluations and funded accounts in full, “regardless of profit or drawdown status”, published the terms, and kept the dashboard open.

Under the FAQ sits the sentence that no summary of this closure quotes:

Any payments made are processed in good faith and as an act of goodwill, without any admission of liability, fault, wrongdoing, or obligation of any kind.

That is the correct legal framing and it is also the point. The best outcome in five closures was a voluntary payment the firm was careful to say it did not owe. Nothing obliged it. A different management would have made a different choice, and the trader had no instrument either way.

Two dead domains still draw traffic

Here is the part that changes what a closure means. We measured organic search traffic to each domain with Ahrefs in early August 2026, months after the firms stopped operating:

Roughly 13,800 people a month arrive at two websites belonging to firms that no longer trade. Some are former clients looking for their money. Most are researching a broker they have heard of, and the brand still ranks because a domain live since 2019 keeps its authority long after the business behind it stops.

Two of the five are still converting

That residual attention does not sit idle.

EagleFX forwards to a competitor. The domain no longer points at LHFX, where the accounts went in March 2025. It now forwards to a Hugo’s Way signup page carrying EagleFX affiliate tracking. Somebody is being paid for every account opened by a person who searched for a broker that stopped existing eighteen months ago.

FundingTicks has a live clone. Search the brand and a copy of the old marketing site appears at fundingticks.netlify.app, still running, still offering “20% off as an existing user, or 35% off if it’s your first purchase”. The firm wound down in January. The discount is still on offer.

So of five closures, two turned into a funnel. One sends traffic to a live broker for a commission; the other keeps selling a product the company no longer operates.

One of them shares a name with a firm that is still trading

MyFundedFX ended as three dead entities: the prop brand, the SeacrestFunded rebrand it became, and Seacrest Markets, the broker behind both. All three domains now serve a closure notice, a 404 or nothing.

MyFundedFutures is a different company and it is still operating. It has no connection to any of those three. The names differ by one word, search engines mix them up, and a person reading about the closure of one can easily conclude the other has gone too, or the reverse.

That is worth a moment because it generalises. Brand names in this sector are close together by design, and the register check that resolves them is the company number rather than the name, which is the second of the four failures we set out in checking a broker on the regulator’s register. Where two firms share a first word, only the company number tells them apart.

What this changes before you deposit

The usual advice is to check the register, and that advice is right; we set out how it fails in four specific ways. This set adds a different check, and it takes one minute.

Search the brand and read what you land on. If the top result is a marketing site, confirm the domain matches the one in the client agreement. Two of these five brands lead somewhere other than the company you think you are dealing with.

Check whether the firm still exists before you check whether it is good. A closure notice ranks as well as a homepage. Reviews written while the firm traded stay online and read as current, including ours, which is why every page here carries the date it was verified.

Assume no obligation to refund. The best closure of the five paid out on an explicit statement of no liability, and it is the only one that paid at all. Where your money sits when a firm stops answering depends on the entity holding it and the regime behind that entity, which is the question our page on what the register can and cannot tell you exists to answer.

Look the domain up in the Internet Archive. It is free and it dates things no press release covers. We fixed the KOT4X closure to a window between 4 and 14 January 2026 from archive captures alone, because the firm made no announcement at all. The same two minutes tell you whether a site that looks established has existed for six years or six weeks.

Keep a dated record from the first day. In four of these five cases the only surviving channel was an email address. A thread with dates, balances and account identifiers is what any later claim rests on, and it cannot be assembled after the portal goes offline.

What we checked, and what we didn’t

Every closure date, notice and register result above comes from our own review of that firm, each linked and each carrying the date it was verified, between 5 and 26 August 2026. The traffic figures are Ahrefs estimates taken on 5 and 11 August 2026 and are estimates rather than measurements from the sites themselves.

We were not clients of any of these firms. We do not know how many traders were paid, how much was outstanding, or whether anyone recovered a balance after the portals closed. Nothing here alleges wrongdoing by any firm: four of the five published a notice, and one refunded every account. The pattern this page documents is what happens to a brand after the business behind it stops, which is a separate question from how the business behaved while it traded.

Sources

• KOT4X: closure notice and archive captures
• OspreyFX: cessation notice dated 6 June 2025
• ASIC Financial Services Licensee Register
• CySEC: register of Cypriot investment firms