9Cents Review: Legit Broker or Just Another Scam?

Today, we would like to tell you about a project whose website assures every trader that they are dealing with “Your Trusted Broker, Trading Side by Side with You”. In our 9Cents review, we will show that there are no grounds whatsoever to trust this company. It was created by scammers, and everything its owners tell you is just tinsel covering up their greed and desire to appropriate users’ funds. It is not difficult to verify this — just take a look at the materials below.

Does 9Cents Show Any Risk Factors?

On almost every page of the website, the broker assures us that it fully complies with the strictest regulatory requirements. However, for some inexplicable reason, it forgets to mention which regulatory authority imposed these requirements and whether the company has a license at all. This is where we began our review.

The footer of the website states that the broker is owned by 9Cents Financials Ltd, registered in Mauritius under number 2024-00422. This statement surprised us considerably: registration numbers in this format are not used in Mauritius; they are assigned to IBCs in Saint Lucia.

What is even more interesting is that, unlike most brokerage firms registered in Mauritius, the platform’s website does not even mention a license from the local regulator, the FSC of Mauritius. We know perfectly well that despite this organization’s relatively lenient approach to relations between brokers and traders and to information disclosure, details about the existence of a license (at least its number) are among the data that must be published.

But that is not all: in its Terms & Conditions, the broker states that the client agreement “shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of United Arab of Emirates”. Such a statement implies, at the very least, regulation by local authorities and their oversight of the platform’s compliance with local legislation while providing its services.

So, who regulates 9Cents and whose license does it operate under? Let us investigate. Naturally, we started with the information about the company in Mauritius. The business register contains information about a legal entity named 9Cents.

It was registered as a GBC (Global Business Company — an offshore firm) on May 6, 2025, under number C221109. As we can see, neither the name nor the registration number matches those provided on the platform’s website. The only match we found is the registered address. The FSC of Mauritius issued this company an Investment Dealer (excl. underwriting) license on May 8, 2025.

So, what did we find? The Mauritius registers contain a company whose name fully matches the broker’s name, which has been operating since May 2025 and holds a license authorizing it to provide brokerage/dealing services.

Does this mean that the platform is legitimate and operates under the supervision of the local regulator? Not at all.

• First, as we have already said, the website provides a completely different company name and registration number. It is difficult for us to believe that the specialists responsible for the content do not know the exact name of the company and its registration details.
• Second, the broker did not provide the license number. Is it because this information is not available in the FSC of Mauritius register? If the project creators used data from the regulator’s public register to conceal their own unlawful activities, this is exactly what we would expect. And, by the way, the company’s registration number is not listed there either, which could well be the reason for the incorrect information on the website.
• The license register also does not specify the website operated by the document holder. Therefore, we found no confirmation that the company 9Cents provides services through 9cents.com.

Let us also say a few words about the registration number displayed in the website footer. We noted above that its format is characteristic of IBCs from Saint Lucia. We checked the register of this Caribbean country. It does indeed contain an entry with the number 2024-00422. It belongs to a company called 9CPT Financials Ltd and was entered on June 17, 2024.

We see a very telling fact: the name of the registered IBC almost completely matches the name of the legal entity published on the website, except that instead of 9CPT, the project owners used 9Cents. We are convinced that they used data from the public register to present the broker as officially registered. It appears that this is not the first time they have used someone else’s corporate details to conceal the illegal activities of their own venture. We believe they did exactly the same thing with the information about the Mauritius company and its license.

Note! The claims about compliance with UAE laws also turned out to be fake. None of the regulators operating in the UAE has issued a license to the company 9Cents.

In light of the above, we became very interested in the platform’s history and online presence. Moreover, the broker did not say a word about when it was established or when it began serving clients. We had to turn to publicly available sources for this information.

According to the information stored by the whois service, the working domain 9cents.com is far from new — it was registered back on July 9, 1998. However, the broker we are discussing started using it much later. The first snapshot on the web archive service featuring the 9Cents broker website appeared on August 13, 2024. In fact, we can consider the summer of 2024 to be the time when the platform began its online operations.

By the way, the snapshot clearly shows that the company details from Saint Lucia were used, but with a distorted name. In addition, an office address in the UAE was provided, where, as we have already established, no licenses were issued. Thus, from the very beginning, the broker provided services without a license, which is illegal in most countries around the world.

At the end of 2024–early 2025, mentions of the UAE office disappeared from the website, and in June, after the 9Cents company was entered into the Mauritius registers, the registered address was changed to a Mauritian one. Only the company’s name and registration number remained unchanged.

Note! There is one noteworthy fact in the domain registration information: its registration expires in 2035. Not a bad claim by the broker to operate for a long time. However, it seems to us that with 9Cents’ approach to official information, this intention will remain unrealized.

So, we have established that the platform has existed for about two years. Quite a substantial period of time to build a reputation online. It turned out that during this period, only 23 comments about its activities were posted on Trustpilot. Moreover, the first 9cents.com review was written in January 2025. The broker actually looks quite good there — 83% of authors gave it high ratings, while only 17% spoke negatively about it.

We analyzed the content of these publications and are convinced that all the positive posts were written to order. This is indicated by their content, which contains no specific facts. The negative opinions are more substantiated: they mention account numbers and the names of company managers whom clients communicated with. The complaints are typical of all scam projects: users are unable to receive either their profits or their deposited funds.

On specialized portals, experts’ opinions of the platform are also far from favorable. For example, its rating on WikiFX is 1.9 out of 10, and traders are warned that there is no regulation. A similar picture can be seen on FastBull.

Let’s Break Down the Jurisdiction

By the way, we decided to remind you that a license from the Financial Services Commission (FSC) of Mauritius does not give a company the right to legally provide services in other countries. Yes, Mauritius has long ceased to be considered a “cheap offshore”. Yes, obtaining a license requires meeting a number of rather strict requirements:

• Mandatory presence in the country. The broker needs a “physical” (by no means virtual) office and 2 residents with confirmed relevant professional experience in management.
• An independent audit must be conducted annually, and financial statements prepared in accordance with IFRS must be submitted quarterly.
• The company must have Unimpaired Capital in an account at a local bank. These funds cannot be used for the firm’s operating expenses, and the amount required for a broker with an Investment Dealer Full Service (excl. Underwriting) license is MUR 1,000,000 (about $22,000).
• Mandatory segregation of client funds and their placement in accounts at reputable banks.
• Purchase of Professional Indemnity Insurance (the coverage amount depends on the volume of transactions and the type of license).

However, the regulator imposes virtually no requirements on trading conditions, does not prohibit the use of promotions and bonuses, or aggressive marketing. Thus, the FSC of Mauritius license is considered to belong to Tier 2 (medium reliability) in the unofficial classification.

However, the regulator’s policy of not imposing restrictions on trading conditions makes documents issued by the FSC of Mauritius attractive to scammers. Those who have no chance of obtaining a license even here buy or rent already licensed companies (local businesses are willing to offer such services).

In fact, a permit from the FSC of Mauritius allows legal brokerage/dealing activities only in countries where registration of a legal entity with local authorities and licensing by the local regulator are not mandatory. There are few such countries left, and servicing clients from others is possible only under the Reverse Solicitation mechanism. This means that the services are legal only when the user personally approached the company and became its client (the mandatory condition is that this is not prohibited by the legislation of the client’s country of residence).

However, in this case, the trader is not covered by the protection measures available in that country: compensation schemes, assistance from the regulator and financial ombudsman, etc. Accordingly, an FSC license merely certifies that the company meets the requirements for obtaining it and can be considered more reliable than an unregulated platform.

What Does the 9cents.com Website Reveal?

It seems that the broker hired unconventional webmasters to work on its official website. Nothing else can explain, say, its rather unprofessional appearance that greets visitors. And it’s not even about the parrot-like design, where almost every color imaginable has been used, although we consider such an approach to be a matter of personal taste.

Things are much worse when it comes to content and functionality: it gives the impression that the “specialists” simply do not know what to write or what to do:

• On the homepage, you can find descriptions of the advantages of working with the broker that every other broker, including scammers, mentions. Moreover, all of this is expressed in general phrases, without facts or figures, which, frankly speaking, is not convincing at all. The same can be said about virtually every page. It seems that the content managers worked on a commission basis and did not have the slightest idea about the specific platform.
• We really wanted to read the official documents governing the relationship between the broker and its traders. However, 9Cents decided that clients should not know too much — their job is to bring money into the accounts. As a result, we got some fragments of a Client Agreement, Privacy Policy, etc., which are also outdated (the mention that the Terms & Conditions are drawn up in accordance with UAE laws is just one example). Only someone who has never seen similar documents from serious regulated brokers could call them “documents”. Moreover, the project staff lacked both the patience and the talent to provide a complete set. For example, we never found any KYC or AML policies. And someone was talking about “strict regulatory standards”.
• The broker also failed to provide detailed descriptions of the markets, complete lists of trading instruments, or contract specifications. However, this no longer surprises us: the website template does not allow for such liberties, and the developer apparently did not even intend to go beyond its limits.
• The same problem exists with analytics (there is not even an economic calendar or news feed) and educational materials. On the page with upcoming webinars, we are promised that they will appear “very soon”, but this message on the page has not changed once in two years.

As for the registration procedure and personal account, all of this turned out to be painfully familiar to us. We have already seen them more than once, for example, with brokers MarketMasterPros and KnightPips. Moreover, no one even bothered to fix the most obvious shortcomings. As before, immediately after registration you are prompted to deposit funds rather than complete verification. The same two deposit methods are still available: Bitcoin and NexusPay, and with the latter you can see any recipient of the funds except the 9Cents company.

In short, even if the brokers were not created by the same team of scammers, they must have bought their personal account from some no-name developer. Judging by its implementation, this software is used only by those who have no intention of dealing honestly with their clients. In any case, we have no doubts about this broker.

Is the Broker Offering Fair or Risky Terms for Traders?

Since we could not find any contract specifications, we tried to assess the trading conditions and account plans based on other materials on the 9Cents website. The account types page lists 3 plans:

• Standard, with a minimum deposit of $100, spreads on currency pairs of 16–25 (what exactly? We assume pips, i.e. tenths of a point) and maximum leverage of 1:400.
• Pro, with a starting amount of $15,000, spreads of 16–25 pips and leverage of up to 1:300.
• ECN, with a minimum deposit of $25,000, spreads ranging from 4–6 pips and a commission of $5/lot, with leverage of up to 1:200.

There are other important indicators in the table that are common to all accounts, for example:

• Zero swaps.
• Minimum trade volume of 0.01 lot.

Instead of other essential characteristics, the platform’s representatives filled the table with optional features. Potential clients are promised:

• Access to an academy (we never found one in the personal account).
• Multilingual support, etc.

All of this is so unimportant that it can only attract the attention of beginners. However, it seems that the company is targeting precisely this audience. It is difficult to imagine anyone willing to deposit $15,000 with this broker when the conditions offered by most licensed companies are several times better, or $25,000 when the spreads on the ECN account are exactly 4–6 times wider than those offered by platforms actually connected to ECN networks.

Finally, we should note that leverage of 1:200–1:400, although not particularly high, carries enormous risks for retail traders, most of whom do not know risk-management rules or know how to apply them. The company does not distinguish between client categories (retail or professional), so for beginners the probability of losing their deposit (even if not within the first couple of trades) approaches 100%.

Technical Support Analysis of 9Cents

One area where the platform does fairly well is contact information. We will exclude the address in Mauritius from consideration, since we do not know whether the company’s registration details actually belong to this broker. Everything else looks quite solid. Users will find:

• A contact form.
• A support email address.
• A phone number with a Mauritius country code.
• An online chat on the website pages.
• A WhatsApp account registered to a UAE mobile number.

9Cents even has social media profiles. However, no one seems to care about keeping the information there up to date. For example, LinkedIn still states that the company is based in the UAE, while on TikTok the company has published just a couple dozen videos over two years, attracting 118 followers and 255 likes.