Validus has received a fraud warning from Belgium’s Financial Services and Markets Authority.

As per the FSMA’s December 14th warning;

The FSMA warns the public against Validus, a platform situated abroad which is selling training in Belgium intended to teach people to trade in complex financial instruments such as forex derivatives.

Anyone who signs up for such training, is given access to instructional videos, webinars and live chat sessions with all sorts of information about how the forex market works.

Apart from the fact that the FSMA has concerns about the quality of these training courses, a number of other issues arise.

First, the FSMA wishes to remind you that distribution of derivative instruments traded on an electronic trading system and involving leverage (including certain forex instruments) is prohibited in Belgium.

Secondly, such training materials are often distributed via a pyramid structure. In general, these are referred to as ‘MLM’ (multi-level marketing) schemes, in which consumers are incentivized to bring in new members.

Such MLM networks appear to be active on social media via countless (private) groups. It appears that these schemes mainly target young people.

There have also been many cases of fraud with these instruments. In a number of cases, it turned out that no actual transactions were ever made by the offeror.

Validus’ forex training is a front for its Ponzi scheme.

Validus solicits up to $10,000 investment in various cryptocurrencies. This is done on the promise of an eventual 300% ROI.

Validus is run out of Dubai by former OneCoin scammers Parwiz Daud and Mansour Tawafi.

In addition to Belgium, Australia and New Zealand have also issued Validus fraud warnings.

SimilarWeb tracked 924,000 visits to Validus’ website in October 2022. In November that grew to 1.6 million visits.

Top sources of traffic to Validus’ website are France (22%), Colombia (12%), the US (8%) and the Netherlands (7%).