The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has penalized two offshore technology firms for building and running the infrastructure behind unregistered platforms that took on American retail traders.
Netrios LP Ltd. and Red Acre Ltd. agreed to pay a combined $2.5 million to settle the charges, under an order the agency entered on June 26.
Netrios will pay $1.75 million and Red Acre $750,000, and both must stop the conduct, the CFTC said.
Neither firm admitted or denied the findings. Netrios has long been pitched as a “broker as a service” provider, while Red Acre runs back-office, compliance, and payments services.
Netrios is incorporated in Saint Lucia and Red Acre in Malta, and neither has ever registered with the CFTC, according to the order.
How the White-Label Operation Worked
The regulator said Netrios sold a packaged service that gave offshore, branded platforms everything they needed to offer leveraged trading.
That included ready-made websites, sublicensed third-party trading software, margin accounts that held customer money, trade execution and liquidity, and back-office functions.
The setup was largely identical across these so-called white-label entities, with only the branding swapped out, the order said. Netrios controlled the products on offer, and leveraged forex made up most of the activity, alongside metals, cryptocurrencies, and equities.
Customers typically funded accounts with crypto, sending bitcoin, ether, or tether to a margin account at a gateway and wallet provider that an affiliate of the two firms partly owned, the CFTC said. Netrios controlled those margin accounts.
None of the trades for US retail customers ended in actual delivery of the underlying asset within 28 days. That window matters, because trades settled inside it can avoid the rules that would force them onto a registered exchange.
The customers involved were not eligible contract participants, the wealthier or institutional traders US law allows to trade off-exchange.
Red Acre handled the customer side. The order said it ran onboarding and screening, answered technical questions, dealt with complaints, and provided marketing, while knowing Netrios was facilitating off-exchange trades for retail Americans.
The Group Behind TradeLocker and FunderPro
Neither the CFTC nor the parallel US securities case names the consumer brands tied to the two firms, but these are not obscure operators.
Netrios and Red Acre belong to the same fintech group that owns or co-owns several businesses familiar to prop firms and offshore brokers.
That portfolio includes TradeLocker, a trading platform that gained ground among prop firms after MetaQuotes restricted MT4 and MT5 access in 2024, and FunderPro, a proprietary trading firm the group runs as a division of Red Acre.
The group has also been linked to crypto and payments brands including Zeply, Cryptopanic, and Cryptochill, according to company statements and prior FinanceMagnates.com coverage.
TradeLocker has built most of its momentum on the prop side, and its partner network leans heavily toward prop firms and offshore CFD brokerages, as FinanceMagnates.com reported in May.
FunderPro has spent the past two years adding platforms and features, including a cTrader integration. The CFTC said the white-label business at the center of its case stopped operating at the end of September 2025.
A Familiar US Crackdown on Offshore Operators
The case fits a long run of US action against firms that solicit American retail traders without registering. The CFTC keeps a public “RED List” of unregistered foreign operators, and it has repeatedly added FX and crypto-linked brands over the years.
It also lands in a corner of the market that rarely draws enforcement: the white-label and broker-as-a-service providers that hand brokers and prop firms a ready-made business.
Rivals in that space include Spotware, whose cTrader platform added prop-firm demo accounts in October 2025, plus MatchTrader and DXtrade, which sell turnkey setups to new brokers.
The regulator’s problem was not the white-label model itself but where it pointed. By letting retail Americans trade leveraged forex and crypto off-exchange, the order said, the operation carried out business that US law reserves for registered exchanges.
The Securities and Exchange Commission brought its own case over the same conduct on the same day, and the CFTC credited the Central Bank of Ireland, the Seychelles Financial Services Authority, and the Malta Financial Services Authority for their assistance.
For Netrios and Red Acre, the order largely closes the book on a business they had already wound down. The firms stopped the leveraged retail commodity activity at the end of September 2025, months before the settlement was finalized.
