Investment scams cost Australians A$837.7 million in 2025, the largest category of fraud losses in the country, according to the National Fraud Centre. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has opened a registry of licensees’ website addresses, inviting more than 6,500 companies to list sites that consumers can trust.
The move upends the regulator’s recent business logic, which has relied on removing counterfeits after they appear. ASIC removed 11,964 investment phishing websites in 2025, an increase of 90% on the previous year and Approximately 32 sites daily.
New FM Intelligence analysis questions whether authenticating real sites could do what these takedowns did not, and bring down loss figures. Read it on the FM Intelligence portal here.
From shredding fake products to authenticating the real ones
Rather than chasing copies as soon as they appear, the regulator now wants to give the public a reference point for what the real address of a licensed medium looks like, a change that covers FM when ASIC first pointed to the register.
the cloning
The problem actually falls heavily on the brokers themselves. Pepperstone said so Remove fake versions from their site About to get a full-time job for its fraud team, the company purchases domain variants to stay ahead of impersonators.
The three conditions that determine the reward
The analysis concludes that the impact of the record will depend on three things. The first is the number of licensees who sign up while participation remains voluntary. The second is whether advertising platforms check submissions against the listing. The third is how ASIC It deals with authorized representatives who operate under another company’s license and sit outside the scope of the register.
Each gap points to the same risk: that a partial list makes consumers more confused rather than better protected. The regulator has already warned that scammers are making their own clones Moneysmart consumer websiteA reminder that even official titles are copied.
What the UK and Italy show
Other regulatory agencies have come up with side-by-side tools with varying results. In Britain, the Financial Conduct Authority pairs a long-term register with a public warning list, and in December 2025 added a consumer verification tool called Fixed checker.
However, around 800,000 people reported losing money to investment and pensions scams during the previous year, and the UK Treasury estimated investment fraud losses at £144.4 million in 2024.
Italy went a different way. Consob, the market regulator, has had the power to order ISPs to block illegal financial websites since July 2019, and by April 2026, it was still… In addition to a balance exceeding 1000 domains. Blocking cuts off access, while whitelisting in Australia attempts to establish trust on the other end.
Singapore has shifted the blame itself, with overall fraud losses mitigated only after holding banks and telecommunications companies partly responsible for compensating victims. The Australian registry requires brokers to sign up rather than charge fees to platforms that carry ads, a distinction the analysis considers key to whether losses are reduced.
FM Intelligence’s full analysis breaks down the 2025 loss profile by age, gender and state, identifies fundamental, bull and bear predictions for 2026, and compares Australia’s whitelisting with Italy’s domain blocking and UK registration verification.
Read the full analysis on the FM Intelligence portal: After 12,000 takedowns, ASIC switches to whitelisting licensed brokerage sites in Australia
This article was written by Damian Schmil at www.financemagnates.com.
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