AMF Making ESMA Rules Permanent
France’s financial regulator, the Autorité des marches financiers or the AMF, released their annual report on 2019-05-07. This report lays out how the retail industry can be affected by new products that are unsuitable of toxic for France. It also focuses on how the French are a target for cybercriminals. From all accounts, it appears that the French financial regulator has a harsh stance on retail brokers and that regulation on retail brokers will continually become more severe.
Permanent rules
The report regards regulation, with the AMF indicating that they will be making the product intervention rules & measures implemented by the “European Securities and Market Authority” permanent.
This doesn’t come as a surprise considering that in March 2019, the AMF publically stated that they no longer want to rely on the ESMA and how they change regulation every quarter. The report indicates that these laws will be extended nation-wide by midsummer.
The report also claimed that six broker institutions had not followed the laws implemented by the European Securities and Market Authority. As such, this has caused the ESMA to inform all other regulators in the country. It’s unclear from the report as to who these six regulators are or where they are located in the European Union.
Cybersecurity Scams
The most detailed part of the report issued by Autorité des marches financiers is the cybersecurity section. This section relates primarily to the trading industry, and the report indicates that fraudsters in the trading industry have begun moving away from selling binaries/foreign exchanges to now selling cryptocurrencies.
During 2016 & 2017, the AMF received more than four thousand requests from retail investors regarding binary or FX scams. Back then, there were only eighteen requests from investors about cryptocurrencies. During 2019 & the beginning of 2019, the AMF have received more than 2600 claims from retailers regarding cryptocurrency scams and only 968 FX/Binary complaints.
The AMF in their report made an official statement, reading:
“The rapid and large-scale deployment of these offerings and their impact has led to questions about phishing techniques deployed by networks of clearly structured, organized and agile individuals. Banners on the internet attract users to web pages advertising information on the latest trends in investments but, in reality, their only intention is to collect the personal data of retail investors.”
