The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced on Friday that it will block access to the website of brokers OctaFX and XM.
In a statement, the regulator said that an investigation by local police had determined that both companies marketed their services to clients in the country without holding a local license.
The company said that the OctaFX site was onboarding Singaporeans via entities in the Comoros and Mauritius. XM was accepting Singaporean clients using its regulated entity in Belize.
To be fair to both firms, companies get web traffic from all over the world and so you can end up in a situation where you onboard clients via reverse solicitation, rather than you marketing to them.
However, MAS noted – emphasis is ours -that the ban on non-locally licensed entities taking customers from Singapore “extends to entities operating outside Singapore, when the entities solicit or advertise products or services that are targeted at Singapore persons, or if there is a substantial number of Singaporeans using a foreign entity’s products or services.“
That would imply that even if a company was not doing anything wrong in terms of breaching marketing rules, just taking on too many customers (and probably having too many complaints) means being shut out of the market.
The ban will see the two IPs of the brokers being blocked by authorities in Singapore. However, both firms operate a bunch of different URLs and also just offer customers VPN. The result? An IP block will probably be annoying but won’t make much difference in the long-run.
