RETINARXIV Review: Four Regulators Claimed, Not One Licence Number
RETINARXIV claims regulation by four authorities: the CSSF, the FCA, the DFSA and the VFSC. It publishes no licence number for any of them. On 22 July 2026 the DFSA said the firm was never authorised and had linked to a cloned copy of the DFSA's own public register. We score it 0.8 out of 10.
Quick facts
| Legal entity | None. The 46,000-character user agreement defines the Company as simply "Retinarxiv" |
|---|---|
| Regulator | Unlicensed |
| Licence number | None given for any of the four regulators claimed |
| Founded | Copyright claims 2017; the site claims DFSA approval obtained in 2019 |
| Headquarters | Av. Pueyrredon 1595, Buenos Aires, Argentina (the only address published) |
| Platforms | Terminal |
| Withdrawal time | Not published |
| Segregated funds | Not claimed |
| Website | retinarxiv.netnot linked: see our verdict |
Most unlicensed brokers invent a licence number, because a number looks checkable and most people never check it. RETINARXIV went further in one direction and, oddly, not far enough in another.
Further: according to the Dubai Financial Services Authority, it built a copy of the DFSA’s own public register and linked to it as proof. Not far enough: on the site’s own licences page, across four claimed regulators, there is not a single licence number to check.
What the DFSA published
On 22 July 2026 the DFSA issued an alert titled “False claims by RETINARXIV Brokers that it is regulated by the DFSA”. Its finding:
The DFSA confirms that RETINARXIV BROKERS is not, and has never been, authorised by the DFSA to provide Financial Services.
The alert goes on to describe the method. The site “includes a link to a cloned version of the DFSA’s Public Register”, and that clone lists “Retinarxiv Limited” as a Non-DIFC Company authorised to provide the Financial Services of “Investments” and “CFDs”. The site also claimed DFSA approval obtained in 2019.
Read what that involves. Inventing a licence number takes a minute. Standing up a counterfeit copy of a national regulator’s register, with an entry formatted to match the real one, is a deliberate piece of construction whose only purpose is to survive the one check a careful person performs. It anticipates the reader who does not take the claim on trust, and it is built for them.
By the time we read the site on 12 September 2026, the link to the cloned register was gone. The DFSA claim is not.
Four regulators, zero numbers
The licences page, at /license, presents four authorities:
| Claimed regulator | Jurisdiction | Licence number given |
|---|---|---|
| CSSF | Luxembourg | None |
| FCA | United Kingdom | None |
| DFSA | United Arab Emirates (DIFC) | None |
| VFSC | Vanuatu | None |
Each gets a logo and a paragraph explaining what that regulator does. None gets a number, a register link, or the name of the entity said to hold it.
That combination is the tell. A page titled “Licences” that describes regulators rather than naming licences is not making a claim so much as arranging an impression. Copy explaining that the FCA “protects clients and ensures the honesty of operations” is true about the FCA and says nothing whatever about this broker.
The four do not sit together either. Luxembourg and the UK are tier-one regimes with capital requirements, reporting and compensation schemes. Vanuatu is an offshore licence with no compensation scheme at all. A firm genuinely holding all four would hold them through four separate entities, and it would name them, because that is the entire point of having them.
There is no company
The user agreement runs to roughly 46,000 characters. It defines the counterparty like this:
“Company” means the company Retinarxiv. […] The Company is to be understood as Retinarxiv.
That is the whole of it. No Limited, no LLC, no country of incorporation, no company number, no registered office. A document of that length that never once names a legal person is not an oversight. If your withdrawal is refused, the agreement you accepted identifies nobody to pursue.
The legal documents are deliberately unsearchable
This is the finding that decided the rating, and it is checkable by anyone with a browser.
The Russian text of the user agreement is written with Latin characters substituted for the Cyrillic ones they look identical to. In the phrase quoted above, the word for “company” is spelled Кoмпaния. The К, м, п, н, и and я are Cyrillic. The o is U+006F, the Latin letter O. The a is U+0061, the Latin letter A.
It is not one word. We counted roughly 3,300 words in that single document containing at least one Latin character inside an otherwise Cyrillic word.
Latin a c e o p x y and A B C E H K M O P T X are visually indistinguishable from their Cyrillic counterparts at reading size. Swapping them changes nothing a human sees and everything a machine does:
- Search inside the page stops working. Press Ctrl+F, type the Russian word for company, and the browser finds nothing, because the string on the page is not that word.
- Search engines cannot index the text properly, so the agreement will not surface for anyone searching a phrase from it.
- Duplicate-content matching fails. If the same template is deployed on ten other domains, nobody can find the other nine by searching a distinctive sentence.
- A client who suspects the agreement is boilerplate cannot prove it. That is the check this defeats.
Across 26 previous broker investigations we have found thin terms, missing terms and terms in the wrong language. We have not before found a broker that took the trouble to make its own contract unsearchable. There is no legitimate reason to do it. It is a measure taken against the reader.
A Russian site with an Argentine phone number
The site is in Russian throughout. The contact page gives:
- Office address: Av. Pueyrredon 1595, C1118AAF, Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Phone: +54 11 5938-1427, an Argentine landline
- Email: a support address on the domain
Nothing in Dubai, London, Luxembourg or Vanuatu. The four regulators are claimed in four places the firm does not appear to be, and the one address it publishes is in a fifth country whose regulator it does not claim at all.
The contact form is a callback booker
Worth quoting the fields, because they describe the business better than anything in the marketing copy. Alongside name and email, the form asks for:
- Your phone number, marked required
- Your Skype
- Your Telegram
- A date
- A convenient time for a call
- Your time zone
- Your preferred language
That is not a support form. It is an appointment scheduler for a sales desk, published openly on the contact page. Everything else on this site exists to make the person who fills it in feel safe about the call that follows.
What the score is made of
| Pillar | Weight | Score | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulation and licence tier | 30% | 0.1 | Four regulators claimed, no numbers, and a regulator alert describing a cloned register |
| Fund safety and withdrawals | 25% | 0.3 | No named counterparty, no compensation scheme, no segregation claim |
| Cost and execution | 15% | 2.0 | No published fee schedule to check |
| Transparency | 15% | 0.1 | Legal documents deliberately obfuscated against search |
| Complaint record | 10% | 2.5 | Regulator alert present; individual complaint history still thin |
| Platform and support | 5% | 3.0 | Unverified; support is a callback form |
0.8 out of 10. Transparency is the lowest we have scored any broker on any pillar. Publishing nothing is opaque. Publishing a contract engineered so it cannot be searched is a step past that, and the scale should say so.
If you have already deposited
- Stop, and treat any payment demanded before a withdrawal as the fraud itself. Tax, commission, compliance fee, margin top-up: no licensed broker withholds your money pending a new payment.
- Save the evidence today. Screenshot the licences page and the contact page, and save the user agreement as a PDF. The cloned register link has already disappeared once.
- Card payments: ask your bank for a chargeback under services not provided, usually within 120 days of the transaction or of the date the service was due.
- Bank transfers: request a recall immediately and ask your bank to contact the beneficiary bank. Speed matters more than anything else.
- Crypto: not reversible, but record every receiving address for the police report.
- Report it to the DFSA, whose alert already names the firm, and to the regulator where you live. Reports are what turn one alert into an enforceable pattern.
- Refuse recovery offers absolutely. An approach promising to recover the funds for a fee, arriving shortly after the loss, is the second half of the same operation.
The check that would have caught this in a minute
When a broker names a regulator, do not follow the link it gives you. Type the regulator’s own address into the browser yourself and search there. A cloned register only works on somebody who clicked through from the broker’s site, and it is defeated entirely by opening dfsa.ae, fca.org.uk or cssf.lu directly.
Then look for a number. A licences page with four regulator logos and no licence numbers has told you the answer already.
The wider pattern, and the three other firms the DFSA caught doing the same thing in the same three weeks, is in our investigation into the cloned DFSA register. How we score is at our scoring method.
Answered in detail
Safer alternatives
Rated Trusted or Neutral against the same six pillars. These link to our own reviews, not to the brokers, and no broker can pay to appear here.