Primarkets Review: Warned by the FCA, and Now Hiding From Search
The FCA warned against Primarkets on 9 July 2025 and ASIC lists it on its investor alert list. The site has since moved to a second domain, pri-markets.io, which names no regulator, no licence number and no address, and serves a noindex tag to keep itself out of search. We score it 0.9 out of 10.
Quick facts
| Legal entity | Primarkets LLC / Primarkets.co (no jurisdiction or registration number given) |
|---|---|
| Regulator | Unlicensed |
| Licence number | None claimed anywhere on the site |
| Headquarters | None given. The FCA warning lists Muiderstraat 1, 1011 PZ Amsterdam |
| Minimum deposit | Not published |
| Spread from | 0,4 |
| Maximum leverage | 1:20 |
| Platforms | Not stated |
| Instruments | Forex | Stocks | Indices | Commodities | Crypto |
| Withdrawal time | Not published |
| Segregated funds | Not claimed |
| Website | pri-markets.ionot linked: see our verdict |
Primarkets is the most instructive broker in this batch, because it shows what an operation does after it gets caught.
The warning
On 9 July 2025 the Financial Conduct Authority published a warning against Primarkets, updated the following day. The entry records:
| Website | https://primarkets.io |
|---|---|
| Address | Muiderstraat 1, 1011 PZ Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Phone | 07441901689 |
| Published | 9 July 2025 |
The FCA’s finding: the firm is not authorised, may be providing or promoting financial services without permission, and may be targeting people in the UK. Consumers should avoid dealing with it.
Look at the combination in that table. A Dutch street address, a UK mobile number beginning 07, and a .io domain registered in the British Indian Ocean Territory. Three jurisdictions, none of which supervises anyone here. Primarkets also appears on ASIC’s investor alert list in Australia, under the same primarkets.io domain.
What happened next
The operation is now running at pri-markets.io, a hyphenated variant of the domain the FCA named.
This is worth being precise about, because it is the mechanic that keeps this business alive. A regulator warning attaches to a domain. It ranks in search for the brand name, it gets picked up by warning aggregators, and it becomes the first thing a cautious person finds. Registering the same brand with a hyphen costs about ten dollars and detaches the operation from every one of those results. The brand keeps its recognition. The warning stays behind on the old string.
The site no longer claims a regulator at all
We read pri-markets.io on 10 September 2026. It names no regulator. No licence number. No supervisory authority of any kind. No registered address. No incorporation jurisdiction.
The only corporate identity offered is in the footer, which describes the company as “Primarkets (Primarkets.co / Primarkets LLC.)”. An LLC of where is not stated. There is no company number.
Compared with the other five brokers in this batch, all of which invented a licence, naming nothing at all is a different strategy and arguably a more evolved one. A fabricated licence number is a falsifiable claim, and falsifying it is what regulators and reviewers do. Claiming nothing leaves nothing to check. It is an operation that has learned which specific lie got it listed.
The noindex tag
This is the detail that decided the review. The page serves this instruction to search engines:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
In plain terms: do not list this page in search results, and do not follow its links.
Consider what that means for a business whose entire purpose is acquiring customers. Every legitimate broker on earth spends heavily to be found in Google. This one has instructed Google to ignore it.
There is only one business model that fits. If nobody arrives through search, everybody arrives some other way: a phone call, a message, an advert on a social platform, a link sent directly. The customers are brought to the site by a person, and the site is a landing page for that conversation rather than a shopfront. Staying out of the index also means the site cannot be found by anyone searching the brand name plus the word “scam”, which is exactly the search a hesitant depositor runs.
A broker that does not want to be found is telling you who it wants to be found by.
The tier ladder, and the copyright date
Five account levels are named: Standard, Silver, Gold, Platinum and VIP. No minimum deposit is published for any of them, which means the number is whatever the person on the call decides it is.
The footer reads Copyright © Primarkets.co 2021. On a domain that only became necessary after a warning in 2025, that date came along with the copied template.
What the score is made of
| Pillar | Weight | Score | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulation and licence tier | 30% | 0.4 | FCA warning and an ASIC alert listing; no licence claimed or held |
| Fund safety and withdrawals | 25% | 0.5 | No compensation scheme, no segregation statement, no named entity |
| Cost and execution | 15% | 2.0 | Five tiers with no published pricing at any level |
| Transparency | 15% | 0.8 | Claims no licence, which is at least not false, but publishes nothing else either |
| Complaint record | 10% | 1.5 | The longest documented complaint history of the six, across two domains |
| Platform and support | 5% | 2.5 | Unverified |
0.9 out of 10. Transparency scores marginally higher than the fabricated-licence cases in this batch, for the narrow reason that saying nothing is not the same as saying something untrue. The complaint pillar scores lower than any of them, because this operation has been running long enough under two domains to have left a trail.
If you have already deposited
- Stop, and treat any release fee as the fraud rather than a condition of it.
- Record which domain you dealt with. primarkets.io and pri-markets.io are both relevant, and your bank will need the exact one that appears on your statement.
- Screenshot everything, including the footer and any account page. A site with no fixed identity can change overnight.
- Card payments: chargeback for services not provided, generally within 120 days. Tell your bank the firm is on the FCA warning list and give the date, 9 July 2025.
- Bank transfers: request a recall immediately, and in the UK ask about the Contingent Reimbursement Model.
- Report it to the FCA, to Action Fraud in the UK, to ASIC if you are in Australia, and to your own national regulator elsewhere. The Dutch address in the FCA warning also makes the AFM worth notifying.
- Refuse recovery offers absolutely. Primarkets has generated a large amount of recovery-service content online, and the overlap between people who run broker fraud and people who sell recovery from it is substantial.
The lesson that generalises
When you search a broker’s name and find a regulator warning against a domain that is not quite the domain you are on, that is not a different company. Check the hyphens, the top-level domain and the spelling. Then check whether the site you are looking at wants to be found at all: view the page source and search it for the word noindex. A broker that hides from search is not shy about its marketing budget. It has a different way of reaching you, and it is already using it.
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.