A clone firm is a fraud that impersonates a genuinely authorised business. The operator copies the real firm's name, licence number and registered address, then attaches a lookalike domain, its own phone number and its own bank details. A trader who checks only the reference number finds a valid authorisation and concludes the approach is legitimate.
Regulators treat this as common enough to warrant a dedicated warning category: the FCA, CySEC and ASIC all publish clone alerts naming the impersonated firm and the fake contact details being used. The defences are procedural rather than clever — initiate contact only through the phone number and website recorded on the register, refuse any payment instruction pointing at a personal or third-party account, and treat an unsolicited call about an account you never opened as fraud by default. Money sent to a clone is not covered by the impersonated firm's compensation scheme.
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What a Prop Firm Challenge Actually Tests
The profit target gets the marketing and the drawdown rule ends the attempt. What the evaluation is really measuring, which clauses decide the outcome, and how to read a firm's rules before you pay.