The Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF) and the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR) now list 3,522 unauthorised investment addresses across their six blacklists, and the brand copied most often by the operators behind them is the AMF itself.
In the versions published on 11 September 2026, 336 entries had been added since 1 January, a pace of roughly 483 for the full year against 434 in 2024, the busiest year so far. Each entry carries the date it was added, giving a record that runs back to 2010. FM Intelligence parsed all six lists to compile the breakdown.
Impersonation Dominates the Largest List
The largest of the six lists covers other categories and holds 1,741 entries, of which 1,566 are flagged by the regulators as impersonation of an authorised firm. The AMF's own name accounts for 190 of them, including 65 added in 2025 and 40 so far in 2026. Fake regulator emails, cloned domains and recovery-room operators using the supervisor's letterhead generate more entries than any commercial brand.
Commercial names follow. After inspecting each blacklisted host and discarding word-play domains, FM Intelligence counted 20 addresses carrying Amundi, 10 DEGIRO, seven Trade Republic, six Scalable Capital and four Revolut. Bitpanda, Fortuneo, Boursorama, Binance, Kraken, XTB and SwissBorg appear one to three times each. Those names line up with the asset managers and neobrokers that have spent most on French acquisition, in a market where 1.6 million residents opened their first investment position in the three years to the end of 2025.
Crypto Overtakes Forex
Crypto entries, spot and derivatives together, overtook forex additions in 2024 and have held the lead since, with 108, 100 and 97 crypto names over the past three years against 51, 57 and 51 for forex. The forex list has been flat for four years.
The binary options list holds 341 entries and has not taken a new name since 6 July 2020, four years after France banned electronic advertising for the product and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) capped retail leverage. The file is still republished, but nothing is being added to it.
The point of contact has shifted as well. Email addresses made up 5% of entries in 2020, half in 2022 and 30% in 2026, meaning regulators increasingly blacklist an inbox rather than a website.
Advertising Rules Widen the Gap
France's Sapin II law bars electronic promotional communications for contracts where the client can lose more than the initial outlay, and the consumer code extends that ban to sponsorship advertising the same services, with fines of up to EUR 100,000 (about $113,000). The result is a market in which a licensed broker cannot buy attention through the usual digital channels while an unlicensed clone of its brand can.
In the AMF's 2025 barometer, 16% of French savers said they had already lost money to an investment scam. Both regulators direct savers to the REGAFI register before the blacklists, and both say the lists are not exhaustive.
