TradeInformer understands that police in Malaysia have been cracking down on broker activities over the last few months.
At least five providers have now had their offices raided by local police, with employees often taken to prison afterwards.
According to one source with knowledge of the matter, brokers are being forced to pay police the cost of their ‘food and drink’ for their time in prison, which then leads to their being released.
Another source confirmed that this has been taking place and that brokers are increasingly cautious as to how they run their operations in the Southeast Asian country.
Raids in Malaysia are not uncommon. However, they have usually targeted scam operations.
Over the last decade, operators primarily based in Cambodia have been running large-scale criminal enterprises, targeting victims globally.
It’s worth noting that one of these operators, which was running a so-called ‘pig butchering’ scam, was very likely the reason MetaTrader was removed from the iOS app store in 2022. This activity picked up during the pandemic, because many of the ‘owners’ also run physical casinos that were completely shut down due to covid restrictions.
However, some crackdowns on these scams in Cambodia have meant that the owners have moved operations to other countries in the ASEAN region.
What stands out in the recent Malaysian raids is that they appear to be targeting legitimate brokers.
Because these companies are typically structured properly and in such a way that they aren’t doing anything illegal, the police are unable to actually do anything to them. As a consequence, the police ‘charge’ the companies for the cost of keeping their employees in prison.