The
Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has penalized two offshore
technology firms for building and running the plumbing behind unregistered
platforms that took on American retail traders.
Netrios LP
Ltd. and Red Acre Ltd. agreed to pay a combined $2.5 million to settle the
charges, under an order the agency entered on June 26.
Netrios
will pay $1.75 million and Red Acre $750,000, and both must stop the conduct,
the CFTC said.
Neither
firm admitted or denied the findings. Netrios has long been pitched as a “broker as a service” provider, while Red Acre runs
back-office, compliance, and payments services.
Netrios is
incorporated in Saint Lucia and Red Acre in Malta, and neither has ever
registered with the CFTC, according to the order.
How the White-Label
Operation Worked
The
regulator said Netrios sold a packaged service that gave offshore, branded
platforms everything they needed to offer leveraged trading.
That
included ready-made websites, sublicensed third-party trading software, margin
accounts that held customer money, trade execution and liquidity, and
back-office functions.
The setup
was largely identical across these so-called white-label entities, with only
the branding swapped out, the order said. Netrios controlled the products on
offer, and leveraged forex made up most of the activity, alongside metals,
cryptocurrencies, and equities.
Customers
typically funded accounts with crypto, sending bitcoin, ether, or tether to a
margin account at a gateway and wallet provider that an affiliate of the two
firms partly owned, the CFTC said. Netrios controlled those margin accounts.
None of the
trades for US retail customers ended in actual delivery of the underlying asset
within 28 days. That window matters, because trades settled inside it can avoid
the rules that would force them onto a registered exchange.
The
customers involved were not eligible contract participants, the wealthier or
institutional traders US law allows to trade off-exchange.
Red Acre
handled the customer side. The order said it ran onboarding and screening,
answered technical questions, dealt with complaints, and provided marketing,
while knowing Netrios was facilitating off-exchange trades for retail
Americans.
The Group Behind
TradeLocker and FunderPro
Neither the
CFTC nor the parallel US securities case names the consumer brands tied to the
two firms, but these are not obscure operators.
Netrios and
Red Acre belong to the same fintech
group that owns or co-owns several businesses familiar to prop firms and
offshore brokers.
That
portfolio includes TradeLocker, a trading platform that gained ground among
prop firms after MetaQuotes restricted MT4 and MT5 access in 2024, and
FunderPro, a proprietary trading firm the group runs as a division of Red Acre.
The group
has also been linked to crypto and payments brands including Zeply,
Cryptopanic, and Cryptochill, according to company statements and prior FinanceMagnates.com
coverage.
TradeLocker
has built most of its momentum on the prop side, and its partner network leans
heavily toward prop firms and offshore CFD brokerages, as FinanceMagnates.com reported in May.
FunderPro
has spent the past two years adding platforms and features, including a cTrader integration. The CFTC said the white-label
business at the center of its case stopped operating at the end of September
2025.
A Familiar US Crackdown on
Offshore Operators
The case
fits a long run of US action against firms that solicit American retail traders
without registering. The CFTC keeps a public “RED List” of
unregistered foreign operators, and it has repeatedly added FX and
crypto-linked brands
over the years.
It also
lands in a corner of the market that rarely draws enforcement: the white-label
and broker-as-a-service providers that hand brokers and prop firms a ready-made
business.
Rivals in
that space include Spotware, whose cTrader platform added prop-firm demo
accounts in October 2025, plus MatchTrader and DXtrade, which sell turnkey
setups to new brokers.
The
regulator’s problem was not the white-label model itself but where it pointed.
By letting retail Americans trade leveraged forex and crypto off-exchange, the
order said, the operation carried out business that US law reserves for
registered exchanges.
The
Securities and Exchange Commission brought its own case over the same conduct
the same day, and the CFTC credited the Central Bank of Ireland, the Seychelles
Financial Services Authority, and the Malta Financial Services Authority for
their help.
For Netrios
and Red Acre, the order mostly closes the book on a business they had already
wound down. The firms stopped the leveraged retail commodity activity at the
end of September 2025, the CFTC said, months before the settlement landed.
This article was written by Damian Chmiel at www.financemagnates.com.
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