Disclaimer

Information, not advice

Everything on this site is general information for a UK audience. It is not legal, financial or regulatory advice, it is not a personal recommendation about any firm, product or course of action, and it is not a substitute for advice about your own circumstances. Reading this site creates no professional relationship of any kind.

We do not act for readers

Nobody here will pursue anything on your behalf, contact a bank or a regulator for you, assess whether you have a claim, or estimate what you might recover. We do not refer readers to solicitors, claims management companies or representatives, and we take no referral fees. If someone contacts you claiming to act for this publication in recovering money, they are not: treat it as a fraud attempt and report it.

What the firm checker verdicts mean

The firm checker reports what official UK sources say at the moment you search, and links to each one so you can verify it yourself. Read each verdict narrowly:

• On the FCA Warning List (red). The FCA has published a warning about this name or website. That is the regulator's published view. It is not a criminal finding and not a court judgment.
• Possible clone (amber). The name closely resembles an authorised firm or a warned entry. It means "look harder", not "this is fake" — and the genuine firm being impersonated has done nothing wrong.
• No match found (amber). Nothing official mentions it. This is not a clean bill of health. Unauthorised operations change names constantly and the FCA may not be aware of one yet.
• Appears authorised (green). A matching entry exists on the FCA Register. That is a registration status, not a recommendation, not a guarantee of good conduct, and it does not remove clone risk — the commonest fraud in this space is an impostor using a real firm's details.

The limits of a check

A check tells you what the public record says about a name. It cannot tell you who is actually on the other end of a phone call, an email or a website, whether a bank account you have been given belongs to the firm named, or whether an authorised firm's staff member is who they claim to be. Always contact a firm using details you found yourself on the FCA Register — never details supplied by the person contacting you.

The Warning List archive

Our archive is our own dated copy, kept so that a reader can see when an entry appeared and how it changed. The FCA's own page is the authoritative record and is linked from every entry. An entry the FCA has withdrawn is marked as withdrawn and retained as a historical record; that retention is not an assertion that the warning still stands.

Third-party sources

Warning List entries, register data and company data belong to the organisations that publish them and can be amended or withdrawn at any time. We link to originals precisely so you can read them before acting. We are not responsible for the content, availability or accuracy of any external website.

Logos and identification

Where a logo appears beside a firm it is shown solely to help you identify the organisation being written about. It does not imply any endorsement of, affiliation with, or approval by that organisation, in either direction. Trade marks remain the property of their owners.

Timing and accuracy

Reporting is accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown, and every article carries an updated timestamp and a change log. Circumstances change: a firm may be authorised, warned or dissolved after we publish. Where we get something wrong we correct it visibly and log it on the corrections page.

No guarantee of outcome

Nothing here guarantees that a complaint will succeed, that money will be recovered, or that a bank or an ombudsman will reach any particular decision. Reimbursement rules have conditions and exceptions, and each case turns on its own facts.

Reader comments

Comments are the views of the people who post them, not of this publication. They are moderated, but moderation is not verification: treat an account in a comment as one person's experience, not as an established fact.

Independence

The Fraud Center is not affiliated with the UK Government, the FCA, the police, any bank or any regulator, and does not speak for them. Our funding and commercial position is set out in full on the ownership and funding page.

If you are in immediate danger

If a crime is in progress or someone is at risk, call 999. To report a fraud that is not an emergency, call 101 or contact Action Fraud. To stop a payment or freeze an account, call your bank — 159 connects you to most major UK banks safely.