Is Hankotrade a scam?

We rate it high risk at 71 percent and would not deposit with it, but we stop short of calling it a confirmed scam. It holds no licence anywhere, the CFTC has named its website since July 2022, and clients report large withdrawals held for months. Against that, it runs a real third-party trading platform and most of its 2,854 Trustpilot reviewers report being paid.

No regulator and no court has found Hankotrade guilty of fraud, so we do not state that as fact. What we can say is that we assess the risk of fraud as high: the CFTC lists the website as an unregistered firm soliciting US customers, the company cannot be found on the Belize registry it points to, and separate clients describe large payouts being obstructed. That is evidence, not a legal finding.

No. It holds no licence from any financial regulator in any jurisdiction, and it does not claim one. We searched the Belize register, the jurisdiction the broker itself names, by company name and by licence number, including non-current records, and found nothing. There is no compensation scheme and no ombudsman behind your deposit.

Many clients do, and quickly. But between August and October 2026 separate clients reported withdrawals of 70,000, 20,000 and 5,000 US dollars held or refused for up to two months behind document reviews, against an advertised payout time of one working day. The obstruction reports concentrate on larger amounts. If you hold a balance, withdraw it in stages and keep records.

It is not protected in any way a regulated broker's would be. With no licence there is no requirement to keep client money separate from the firm's own, no compensation scheme and no regulator to complain to. Because deposits are cryptocurrency only, there is also no card chargeback or bank recall. If the firm does not pay, there is no mechanism that forces it to.

The contracting company is named as Hankotrade Global Markets Limited, with a registered address at Blake Building, Belize City. No company number is published anywhere on the site and the company does not appear on the Belize company registry. The domain's own registrant record gives a different base, Citadel Tower, Business Bay, Dubai, with a UAE phone number, and that address appears nowhere on the website. No named owner or director is disclosed.

The hankotrade.com domain was registered on 2 April 2019 and the site has run under this one brand since at least February 2020, so around six and a half years. Treat that as an upper bound: because the company itself cannot be found on a registry, it cannot be dated, and an established domain can change hands. The broker makes no founding-year claim of its own.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission added HankoTrade, naming hankotrade.com, on 6 July 2022. Its stated reason is that the firm appears to be soliciting or accepting funds from US customers and offering a product within the CFTC's jurisdiction while not being registered with the Commission. The CFTC notes this is not a formal finding of a legal violation, but it is a regulator publicly flagging this exact website.

The broker's own Terms of Use say the company does not accept clients from the USA or the UK, yet its registration form offers both countries in its 233-entry list. We would not open an account from either country: the terms would undercut any later complaint, and the CFTC has already flagged this operation over US solicitation. Many of the reviewers posting about it are US-based.

No. We checked and found no impersonation: no borrowed licence number, no copied legal entity, no stolen registered address and no brand taken from a regulated firm. It does not advertise a licence it does not hold. That genuinely distinguishes it from the cloned brokers that make up most of the cases we investigate.

The broker presents it as lower fees and faster transactions, and its deposit page lists only Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, USDC, LTC, BCH, DOGE and TUSD. The practical effect matters more: crypto transfers cannot be reversed, so there is no chargeback and no bank recall. At a firm with no licence, that removes the last route to getting money back without the broker's cooperation.

Less than it appears. To turn the bonus into withdrawable money you must trade the bonus divided by two in standard lots, so a 1,000 dollar bonus requires 500 lots, roughly 50 million US dollars of turnover. At the advertised commission that costs about the value of the bonus itself, and the balance is tied up while you try. We would not take it.

Three things, in order. Search the regulator's own register for the exact company name and licence number, not the brand. Confirm the company exists on the company registry of the country it names, with a number you can look up. And check that you can fund by card or bank transfer, so a reversal route exists. Hankotrade fails all three.

Put the withdrawal request in writing and keep every date, amount and ticket reference. File a complaint with the CFTC at cftc.gov/complaint if you are a US resident, or with your own national regulator, and report the receiving wallet address to a crypto abuse tracker. Never pay anyone who promises to recover your funds for an upfront fee; recovery-fee operations target people in exactly this position.