The RBI Alert List, explained for traders

What the list is

The Reserve Bank of India maintains a public list of entities that are neither authorised to deal in forex under the Foreign Exchange Management Act nor authorised to operate electronic trading platforms for forex transactions. It exists to warn the public, and it is updated over time.

Three things it is not:

• Not a ban. Listed sites are not blocked and using them is not a criminal offence.
• Not a fraud finding. The list speaks to authorisation, not to conduct.
• Not a complete list. An entity's absence is not evidence that it is authorised — check the authorisation directly.

Who is on it

Every offshore binary options and fixed-time platform commonly used in India appears on it. That is the important context, and it is what most affiliate pages omit when they use the Alert List to attack one platform and promote another.

What it changes for you

The practical consequences are narrow but real:

• No supervision. Nobody in India examines the platform's finances, pricing or handling of client funds.
• No redress. A frozen account or refused withdrawal cannot be escalated to SEBI, an ombudsman or, in practice, an Indian court.
• FEMA exposure. Remitting to an unauthorised platform sits outside the permitted framework, which carries monetary penalty risk.
• Payment fragility. Processors handling these flows come and go, which is why a deposit method that worked last month may not work today.

What listing does not tell you is how the platform behaves day to day. A listed platform can process withdrawals reliably for years; an unlisted one could still treat you badly. Listing tells you what recourse you have if something goes wrong — which is none.

How to check for yourself

1. Search the RBI website for "Alert List" and open the current published version — do not rely on a third-party summary, ours included.
2. Check the SEBI intermediary register for the entity name. Absence is the expected result for any binary platform.
3. Note the date you checked. Both lists change.

We re-verify before each update and record the date at the top of the page. If you find something that contradicts what we published, tell us — corrections go in the update log, never a silent edit.