Erscheinung:11.01.2023 | Topic Unauthorised business Trading platform pnladvanced.de: BaFin expands its investigation
On 30 November 2022, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht – BaFin) published a notice on its website to inform the public that it had opened supervisory investigations into the operators of the platform pnladvanced.com. It has since emerged that an almost identical website is being operated at pnladvanced.de. On this website too, the operator is simply referred to as “PNL Advanced” or “PnL Advanced” and no details are given regarding the operator’s legal form. As with the platform pnladvanced.com, the website contains no legal notice and no information regarding the operator’s registered office. In accordance with section 37 (4) of the German Banking Act (Kreditwesengesetz – KWG), BaFin would like to make clear that the operator of the trading platform pnladvanced.de does not hold authorisation under the KWG to conduct banking business or provide financial services. It is still the case that this company is not supervised by BaFin.
The information provided on the website pnladvanced.de and the information and documents available to BaFin give reasonable grounds to suspect that the platform is being used to conduct banking business and/or provide financial services in Germany without the required authorisation.
Companies that conduct banking business or provide financial services in Germany require authorisation under the KWG. However, some companies operate without the necessary authorisation. Information on whether a particular company has been granted authorisation by BaFin can be found in BaFin’s database of companies.
BaFin, the German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt – BKA) and the German state criminal police offices (Landeskriminalämter) recommend that consumers seeking to invest money online should exercise the utmost caution and do the necessary research beforehand in order to identify fraud attempts at an early stage.
