In the summer month of August, the Italian regulator issued few warnings and black-out orders. Apparently, this was also vacation time for the Consob staff. Before that, Consob regularly issued its black-out orders on Monday of the week. Today it happened again and the black-out of 10 websites offering illegal financial services was ordered. This means that Consob has already blocked 500 websites since July 2019. Currently, Consob is unfortunately the only EU regulator that can block websites.
We actually strive almost 24/7 to capture the incoming scam messages in our database, analyze them and make the cross-connections. It is almost a Sisyphean task. The number of reported scams that come in every day we can carefully record in our database, but we can't report on every single scam. Today we receive a report from a victim of the illegally operating NATA Trade broker. Allegedly, the broker is operated by NATA Trade Limited. What is certain is that the payment facilitator is once again Ran Cohen's Israeli-Cypriot BridgerPay.
Like every Monday over the last couple of months, the Italian Consob has ordered the blackout websites that illegally offer financial services to Italian consumers and investors. Unfortunately, Consob is currently the only EU regulator to take this effective measure. However, it would be desirable if more member states would create a legal basis for blocking illegal or fraudulent websites. This week, Consob ordered the black-out of the following five websites.