Is MIDTOU a scam?

E1Bappebti, the Indonesian commodity futures regulator, lists PT. MIDTOU ARYACOM FUTURES with business licence 820/BAPPEBTI/SI/10/2005, alternative trading approval 1143/BAPPEBTI/SP/3/2007, the UOB Plaza Thamrin Nine address, phone (021) 29932111, email support@midtou.com and website www.midtou.com. Name, domain and contacts all match the operation we examined, so the licence belongs to this firm and not to another company.

E2The same register lists eight segregated client accounts in the company's name at BCA, China Construction Bank Indonesia, CIMB Niaga, Bank Mandiri and BNI, in rupiah and US dollars, plus 21 individually licensed broker representatives. Client money is held under a published segregation regime rather than in an offshore or personal account.

E3The Indonesia Commodity and Derivatives Exchange publishes a member page for Midtou Aryacom Futures, PT, company code MAF, repeating Bappebti licence 820/BAPPEBTI/SI/10/2005, exchange membership 084/SPKB/ICDX/DIR/II/2013, clearing membership 060/SPKK/ICH-MAF/VII/2017, the UOB Plaza address and the website midtou.com.

E4Indonesia Clearing House publishes a matching member page for Midtou Aryacom Futures, PT with the same licence and membership numbers, address, phone, email and website, giving a third independent institutional confirmation of the firm's identity and standing.

E5The midtou.com domain was registered on 14 December 2005 through an Indonesian registrar and runs on the company's own nameservers. Together with the October 2005 licence record this corroborates the stated founding on 1 July 2005, so the advertised history is genuine and there is no age misrepresentation.

E6Ombudsman member Yeka Hendra Fatika named PT Midtou Aryacom Futures first among six futures brokers covered by 29 public complaints received between 2021 and 2024, and described the methods as unrealistic profit promises, unclear marketing personnel, false claims of government oversight and managing client accounts without authorisation. The Rp 68 billion figure reported alongside is the combined total for all six firms, not for this one.

E7The Ombudsman's completed examination, press release 016/HM.01/IV/2024 of 1 April 2024, found Bappebti committed maladministration by neglecting its investigative duty and delaying complaint handling, covering 15 complainants with Rp 8.1 billion of losses. It documented six methods: misleading information and fixed-income promises, clients registered by the broker only after transferring funds, losses through an offset-by-system mechanism never explained, mandate and risk documents treated as a formality, demo accounts completed by marketing staff, and margin transferred before clients were registered. None of the complaints reached investigation and the brokers received written warnings only.

E8A detailed public account dated 30 October 2020 states that Rp 600,000,000 was deposited in August 2020 under a promotion offering a car for 5,000 settled lots in six months, and that about Rp 50,000,000 remained three months later. It alleges marketing staff were not licensed representatives, transactions were made without the written authorisation the rules require, risk-disclosure papers arrived after the transfer, and the lot target would generate roughly Rp 3.3 billion in commission for the firm against a car worth Rp 550 million.

E9A client reported in July 2022 that he held only a monitoring account while his main trading account was operated by a sales employee, and that a branch head had given written authorisation for that arrangement. The company's answer was that it never uses client main accounts and that anything else falls outside its responsibility; the sales employee was dismissed.

E10The same client, named as Mulyadi, said in October 2022 that months of meetings had produced no return of his capital and that the complaints staff stopped responding, and that he would take legal action if ignored. This is the same complainant as the July report rather than an additional one.

E11An academic case study of Fabian Buddy Pascoal against PT Midtou Aryacom Futures, filed at the Central Jakarta District Court on 29 January 2016, records allegations of client due-diligence and order-taking procedures that breached the futures rules, misleading information, unreasonable profit promises and unauthorised transaction management by the broker's representatives. The claim was declared inadmissible as premature because the client had not first used the complaint, negotiation and exchange mediation stages, so it is a procedural dismissal and not a ruling on the merits.

E12The company's homepage warns clients that giving their trading login and password to MAF employees is strictly forbidden and that any misuse is then entirely the client's own responsibility. Set against the complaint record, the notice acknowledges that staff do obtain client credentials while placing the consequences on the client.

E13The certifier's own page for certificate ISMS24132 in the name of PT MIDTOU ARYACOM FUTURES prints the client status as suspended, while the broker's homepage continues to display that certificate under its legality heading alongside its genuine licences. It is an information-security certification and not a financial licence, so it says nothing about regulation, but it is advertised as current when the issuer does not treat it as current.

E14The company states on its own legal page that it is a member of the ICDX exchange and ICH clearing house and publishes a complaints unit with a dedicated phone number and email, directing clients to the regulator's complaint portal. It also disavows any affiliation with Midtou Global Finance, Midtou Financial, OTM Trade, OTM FX and OTM Ventures, and states it operates only in Indonesia with no representatives abroad.

E15The client portal at client.midtou.com is live and offers an ordinary registration form for a free demo account with 10,000 US dollars of virtual funds, with a captcha and terms acceptance. There is no pressure funnel, no countdown bonus and no crypto wallet; deposits run through the segregated bank accounts on the regulator's register.

E16The company's LinkedIn page gives its website as midtou.com, its headquarters as Central Jakarta, its founding as 2005 and its size as 501 to 1,000 employees, consistent with the branch network and the regulator's record of a real office and 21 licensed representatives.

E17In the KSPPS MSI cooperative case decided at Magetan in October 2026, two cooperative officials were sentenced to ten and nine years for embezzlement and money laundering after using Rp 4.61 billion of member savings to trade at PT Equityworld Futures and PT Midtou Aryacom Futures through personal and spousal accounts. The brokers were the trading venue and were not defendants, so this is context on source-of-funds checks rather than a finding against this firm.

E18A sweep of the international warning and alert lists, including the IOSCO, FCA, ASIC and CFTC resources, returned no entry naming MIDTOU, PT Midtou Aryacom Futures or midtou.com as of October 2026. The licence also appears on Bappebti's register as current, with no suspension or revocation, while the same regulator has frozen a peer broker's operations.