Guide
Five checks, in order. Each one can end the deposit on its own — that is the point of doing them before the money moves, not after.
Facts checked on October 22, 2026
Every 'is this broker legit?' answer on the internet rates the brand. Brands do not hold money; legal entities do, under specific regulators, for specific countries. Run these five checks for your country and your broker — or run the pair through our checker, which is these five checks computed.
Open the platform's own restricted-countries list and its account-opening country menu, not a review. eToro does not accept residents of Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Pakistan or India at all, yet affiliate review pages for those countries still run. If your country is not accepted, stop: any workaround (a VPN, a relative's address) puts the account — and the withdrawal — in someone else's legal name.
Scroll to the legal footer of the broker's site and the first page of the client agreement. The company named there — 'Trading Point of Financial Instruments Ltd', 'Exness (SC) Ltd', a St Vincent registration — is your counterparty. If the marketing page shows five regulator logos and your agreement names the offshore one, the offshore one is your broker.
Search the regulator's own register (FCA Register, ASIC's registers, CySEC, the FSCA FSP list) for the entity name, exactly as written. Licence numbers on a broker's own page are claims; the register is the fact. If the entity is registered in St Vincent & the Grenadines, understand that SVG does not license or supervise forex brokers at all — the 'registration' is a company filing, nothing more.
Your home regulator's position decides legality for you. India's RBI Alert List names platforms — including XM, Exness, eToro, IG, Pepperstone and FXTM — as unauthorised for residents. Brazil's CVM has acted against companies behind a top-ranked broker. Indonesia's Bappebti has blocked 1,222 sites. Pakistan routes residents to PMEX only. Check the list before the deposit, because in several countries the breach is the resident's, not the platform's.
The advertised minimum ($5 at FBS and XM, $10 at Exness) is the accepted minimum — the smallest amount the machine takes. The viable minimum is what survives spread, conversion and one normal losing streak: about $200 in most of our countries, printed per country with the local rails (GCash, PIX, M-Pesa, UPI, local transfer) it can actually travel on.
A review page that answers 'is it safe?' with a global star rating is answering a question nobody's deposit depends on. Safety is a pair: your country × this broker. Anything that won't ask your country first is selling, not checking.
The free check gives you the verdict for one country and one broker. The Deposit Safety Kit gives you the complete walkthroughs: how to verify the entity in the broker's own legal footer, where on your regulator's site the register and the warning lists live, how to read a compensation scheme, and the first-withdrawal test protocol — deposit small, withdraw first, then decide.
Included in the $39 Deposit Safety Kit
Sources: the brokers' own legal and entity pages as published on the check date; the Reserve Bank of India Alert List; the UK Financial Conduct Authority Register and Warning List; the Australian Securities and Investments Commission registers; Bappebti (Indonesia) licensed and blocked lists; CVM (Brazil) declaratory acts; the FSCA (South Africa) FSP register; the Capital Markets Authority (Kenya) licensee list; the Securities and Exchange Commission (Philippines) advisory list; SECP/PMEX (Pakistan) membership; SEC Nigeria and Central Bank of Nigeria publications. Affiliate bounty figures from the programs' own published terms (Exness, XM, Plus500, eToro affiliate pages). If a fact has moved since our check date, the regulator's or broker's own publication wins — and write to help@doogex.com so we can correct ours.