How to Check If a Crypto Platform Is Actually Licensed

Here is a con that keeps working: you take a genuine registered firm, copy its name, its registration number, sometimes its whole website, pixel for pixel, then park the copy on a domain one letter off and start collecting deposits. Britain's financial regulator, the FCA, has warned about these clone firms for years, and they sail past the check most people run because the name checks out and the number checks out. Only the website is fake.

So "is it licensed?" is the wrong first question. The one that pays is: does the register entry match the site in front of me? A public register answers it, free, in about ten minutes. This is a how-to, not financial advice: four steps, no account needed, nothing to install.

Why the footer badge settles nothing

Anyone can paste a regulator's logo onto a webpage. A licence line in a footer is typography, and the clone con above is how far typography stretches. So a footer that reads "fully licensed and regulated" has told you nothing yet. It has told you where to start looking.

A name is cheap, a register is not.

Step 1: Dig out the legal name

The brand on the homepage is rarely the company that holds the licence. The entity you can look up lives in the small print. Scroll to the footer, open the terms of service, and find the line that says "operated by" or "is a trading name of", because that line, and never the logo, names the company the law actually sees. Copy that exact name, along with any company or registration number printed beside it. Numbers make the cleanest search key of all, since numbers do not abbreviate or translate.

Registers file by legal entity, and bigger platforms often run separate companies for different regions, so the terms for your country name the one that serves you. In the EU, where MiCA has applied to crypto-asset service providers since 30 December 2024, register entries name the authorised company, its home country and its permissions. The app name you downloaded may not appear anywhere.

Step 2: Go to the regulator's own register

A genuine claim points somewhere: a country, a regulator, a number, so follow it to the source. "Licensed in the EU" should send you to ESMA's MiCA register, and "registered with FinCEN" points at the US list. Type the register's address yourself and search the legal name on the regulator's own website, not in a screenshot or PDF the platform hosts. And if a site says "fully licensed" while naming no regulator at all, treat that silence as the verdict.

Here is where to look, country by country:

UK: the FCA cryptoasset register at register.fca.org.uk, an anti-money-laundering registration regime running since January 2020.

EU: ESMA's EU-wide register of crypto-asset service providers authorised under MiCA, on esma.europa.eu, updated roughly weekly and listing around 294 providers by mid-July 2026.

US: no single federal licence exists, so check FinCEN's MSB Registrant Search, then your state's money-transmitter licences through NMLS Consumer Access, and New York has run its BitLicense regime since 2015.

Australia: AUSTRAC keeps a register of digital-currency exchange providers.

Singapore: MAS licenses digital payment token services under the Payment Services Act 2019 and publishes a Financial Institutions Directory.

Canada: FINTRAC keeps a registry of money-services businesses.

These sites are mostly grey, slow and government-issue, so use them anyway. If there is no match on the exact legal name, stop. That is your answer.

Step 3: Read what the entry covers

Once you have found the name, read the permissions, because this is the part almost everyone skips. A company can hold a payments or e-money authorisation and still have no permission for crypto services. The entry needs to cover crypto-asset services, not just moving money around. Permissions are listed line by line, so read the lines rather than stopping at the company name.

Mind what "registered" means as well, because on the UK register, registration happens under the Money Laundering Regulations: the regulator has checked the firm's financial-crime controls, which is also why registered platforms run KYC checks on new customers. Nobody has endorsed the business, and nothing about your deposit is insured. An AML registration is not deposit insurance, and no register anywhere protects you from prices falling, from a company failing, or from a buying decision that was yours all along.

Step 4: Check the warning lists, then match the details

Regulators publish the opposite list too: the FCA keeps a Warning List of firms to avoid, and ESMA publishes a register of non-compliant entities flagged by national regulators across the EU. Search both, thirty seconds each, and this is the step that catches what the first three miss.

Then shut the clone-firm loophole: a clone passes a name search because the name is real. The register entry, though, lists the genuine firm's website and contact details, so compare those against the site in front of you before any money moves. Same name on a different domain, and you are standing in the fake. Leave, however polished it looks.

What a clean entry cannot tell you

A licence stops at its border: an AUSTRAC registration says nothing about Britain, and a BitLicense covers New York, so check the register for the country you live in. That is the rulebook that applies to your money. And registers move: ESMA refreshes its list roughly weekly, so a check from last year is stale.

Run the check on everyone, including the plumbing behind the buy button. Banxa is an on-ramp, converting money to crypto and back since 2014, and the four steps above work on us the same as on anyone. People ask is Banxa safe all the time, and the useful answer is never a footer badge, ours included. Go and look.

Ten minutes of register-reading beats any badge ever printed. And a platform that makes its legal name hard to find has already answered your real question.