The licence is real — but it is offshore, and that changes your recourse
We started where the money actually goes. Exclusive Markets' own Client Agreement (a 66-page document, the copy we read generated on 17 June 2026) states at clause 1.2 that the company is incorporated in Seychelles and is "authorized and regulated by the Seychelles Financial Services Authority". It names no other regulator. The firm also publishes a licence certificate headed "Republic of Seychelles / Securities Act, 2007", bearing licence number SD031, dated 21 February 2025.
We then checked that claim at source rather than taking it on trust. Exclusive Markets Ltd does appear on the Seychelles FSA's public register of Capital Markets entities, categorised as a Securities Dealer, with Christos Christou recorded as its accredited representative. So the licence claim stands up: this is a registered, licensed firm, and any review site telling you it is simply "unregulated" is overstating the case in the opposite direction.
One limit on that verification is worth stating plainly, because most sites gloss over it. The FSA's register lists entities but does not publish licence numbers or issue dates. So while we independently confirmed that the company is on the register as a Securities Dealer, the specific number SD031 and the 21 February 2025 date come from the certificate the broker publishes on its own site, not from the regulator's database. The certificate is signed by Randolf Samson as FSA Chief Executive Officer, a name and title that match the FSA's own staff listing, which is decent corroboration — but it remains the firm's document. The broker's own paperwork is also inconsistent about the format, writing it as both "SD031" and "SD-031" in different places.
What an offshore licence buys you is the more important question. Seychelles supervision is materially lighter than that of the FCA, ASIC or CySEC: there is no equivalent investor-compensation scheme behind it, and clause 42.1 of the Client Agreement binds clients to the laws of Seychelles and the exclusive jurisdiction of Seychelles courts regardless of where they live. In practice that means a retail trader in Lagos, Karachi or Manila with a disputed balance has no local ombudsman to appeal to and would face pursuing a claim in a foreign jurisdiction. That is the real-world difference, and it is the reason offshore regulation is a genuine trade-off rather than a technicality.
Finally, the registered address is recorded three different ways across three official-ish sources, which is the kind of thing worth asking a broker about directly. The FSA register lists "Office 15 (A), Third Floor, Vairam Building, Providence, Mahé". The firm's own current legal documents give "Suite 18, Third Floor, Vairam Building" — same floor and building, different unit. And the company's Legal Entity Identifier record (LEI 213800IFAMZLSPZGS772, status active, last updated 11 November 2025) gives a different address altogether: "First Floor, Room 12, Kingsgate House, Independence Avenue, Victoria", which is the address the firm used in its 2022 client agreement. None of that is evidence of wrongdoing on its own — companies move and records lag — but a firm's address ought to agree across its regulator, its contract and the global LEI database, and here it does not.
Two regulators have acted — and what that does and does not mean
On 12 March 2026 CONSOB, Italy's securities regulator, adopted resolution (delibera) no. 23915 ordering Italian internet service providers to block access to www.exclusivemarkets.com. It was published in CONSOB's "abusivismo" communication of 13 March 2026, listing eight operators blocked that day. We confirmed the identical entry — "Exclusive Markets Ltd (sito www.exclusivemarkets.com)" — on both the Italian and English versions of CONSOB's own website, two independent official URLs.
Separately, an entity named Exclusive Markets appears on the Securities Commission Malaysia's Investor Alert List, the SC's published list of entities it states are not authorised or licensed under Malaysian securities law, with the reason given as "carrying on unlicensed capital market activities of dealing in securities". We should be straight about provenance here: the SC's own website blocks automated access, so while we located the SC's alert-list page, our reading of the specific entry came via a mirror that names the SC as publisher.
Now the crucial distinction, because a lot of websites get this wrong. Both actions say the firm was offering services into a country where it was not authorised to do so. That is a serious compliance failure and exactly the kind of thing you should know before depositing. It is not a judicial finding of fraud, and it does not mean client money was stolen — plenty of offshore brokers accumulate these listings because they accept clients from jurisdictions whose regulators require a local licence. We searched for lawsuits, judgments, class actions and monetary fines naming the company and found none.
The balance matters too. As at 24 July 2026 we found no warning or alert naming Exclusive Markets from the FCA, ASIC, BaFin, France's AMF, Spain's CNMV, MAS, Hong Kong's SFC, New Zealand's FMA, CySEC, the FSCA, the SEC, CFTC, FINRA or Canada's OSC. Two regulators have acted; a great many have not.
The group's other entities are not what they may appear
Broker groups often present a list of international offices in a way that implies broad regulation. We checked each entity the group publishes on its own corporate site against the relevant register, and the pattern is consistent: the Seychelles entity carries the licence, and the others do not add regulatory protection.
The Cyprus company, Exclusive Markets (Cyprus) Ltd (registration HE 421534), is a real registered Cyprus company, but it holds no CySEC investment-firm licence — we searched CySEC's register of Cypriot Investment Firms and no entity named Exclusive Markets appears. The group itself describes this arm as an "Appointed Independent Representative and Distributor" that is not offering regulated services to the public; its role includes payment processing. The Abu Dhabi entity is described by the group in registration terms only — a company registered in ADGM — which is a corporate registration, not a financial-services licence. The Dubai presence is listed as a representative office, with no regulator and no licence number given.
The group's site also states that its South African entity, Exclusive Markets Pty Ltd, is regulated by the FSCA as a Category I financial services provider under licence number 51492. We were not able to verify that licence number against the FSCA's own register, so we make no claim about it either way — we simply flag it as a claim you should check directly with the FSCA before relying on it.
The practical takeaway is simple: whatever the office list suggests, the entity on the other side of your trade is the Seychelles one, and the Seychelles licence is the only one that governs your account.
What clients report — and where the pattern is
Trustpilot rated Exclusive Markets "Great" when we checked on 24 July 2026 — our snapshot read about 3.9 out of 5 across roughly 195 reviews, and an independent third-party review published a month earlier put it nearer 4.1 on a similar volume. That is a respectable headline score and it deserves to be reported as such. We give it as a range deliberately: Trustpilot refuses automated access, so we could not re-verify our own snapshot from a second direction, and scores move anyway. Look at the live profile yourself.
The headline score is not where the risk is. Reading the one-star reviews from 2026 in sequence, a specific and repeating allegation emerges: traders say that deposits and trading worked normally, but that when they requested withdrawal of profits, the profits were reclassified — described in the reviews as "illicit profit" or abusive trading — and the withdrawal refused, with accounts closed and in some cases only the original deposit returned. Reviews of 25 February, 9 March, 16 June, 19 June and 22 June 2026 describe variants of this, including one alleging a retroactive clawback of gold profits several weeks after the trades had closed.
Exclusive Markets does respond publicly, and its replies are specific rather than boilerplate: it says the accounts concerned were closed under its Terms and Conditions for breaching bonus-promotion rules, and in an earlier cluster of cases involving challenge-style accounts it cited prohibited hedging practices. That is a real, checkable defence and we are not in a position to adjudicate individual accounts. What we can say is that the disputes consistently turn on contractual clauses about bonuses and permitted trading styles — which is precisely why those clauses deserve reading before you deposit rather than after a withdrawal is refused.
There is a common thread worth naming: several of the complaints involve bonus or promotional funds, and the firm's defence rests on those same bonus terms. If you trade here, the single most effective risk reduction available to you may simply be to decline every bonus, so that no promotional condition can be applied to your own capital.
How the rating sites compare — and why they disagree
Third-party broker ratings for Exclusive Markets range from 1.5/5 to 4.6/5, which tells you more about the rating sites than about the broker. It is worth understanding why they diverge before you weigh any of them.
WikiFX, a commercial broker-ratings platform, scored the firm 2.38 out of 10 when we checked on 24 July 2026, with sub-scores of 0.00 for both Licence and Risk Control, and displayed a warning banner. Its regulatory table lists a single entry — Seychelles FSA, SD031, "offshore regulated" — which matches what we found independently. In an article dated 4 June 2025, WikiFX also reported that it sent a team to the registered Seychelles address and could not locate the company there. That is WikiFX's own account of its own field visit; we could not independently verify it, and registered offices in offshore jurisdictions are very commonly service addresses rather than trading premises, so it is weaker evidence than it first appears.
Beware of double-counting. WikiBit publishes the same 2.38 score from what appears to be the same underlying database, and coinspot.io reproduces that figure too — three sites agreeing here is really one source repeated. At the other extreme, TradingFinder displays 4.6 out of 5, but that number comes from a five-vote "rate this post" widget with no written reviews behind it, which makes it meaningless as evidence. 55brokers rates the firm 2/10 and headlines it as "non-regulated" — a characterisation that conflicts with the Seychelles FSA register entry we verified, and which we therefore think overstates the case in the opposite direction.
This is the general lesson, and it applies well beyond this one broker: weight primary evidence — the regulator's register, the warning lists, the signed contract — far above any aggregate score out of ten.
Contract terms worth reading before you deposit
Two features of the Client Agreement stood out on a close read, independently of any complaint.
First, the agreement takes contradictory positions on whether the broker is the counterparty to your trades. Clause 7.1.7 states that "the Company is the sole counterparty to the Clients trades and the sole execution venue for CFD Orders", while the inducements and conflicts-of-interest clause describes an arrangement inconsistent with that. Whether your broker takes the other side of your trade is a fundamental disclosure — it determines whether your loss is its gain — and a contract that answers the question two ways is a genuine defect worth asking about.
Second, the firm publishes two different lists of restricted jurisdictions: the list in the Client Agreement does not match the list in its website footer. If you are in a country that appears on one list but not the other, you would be entering an agreement whose own terms are unclear about whether you are eligible — which can matter a great deal if a dispute later arises.
Separately, and to the broker's credit rather than its discredit: a clone site operating at globalexclusivemarkets.com has been documented as impersonating the licensed firm, copying its branding and regulatory details. If you deal with Exclusive Markets at all, reach it only by typing the official domain yourself, and treat any other lookalike domain as hostile.