Withdrawal block

The point at which the arrangement stops resembling a brokerage. Deposits continue to be accepted and the account continues to display a balance, frequently a rising one, while a request to withdraw produces a delay, then a condition. The condition is a further payment: a tax said to be due before release, a verification fee, a minimum trading volume that has to be reached first, or an account upgrade.

It appears late in the sequence by necessity rather than by choice. The displayed balance is the whole of what keeps a participant depositing, so a block introduced early would end the scheme before it had collected anything. It appears at the point where the operator judges that no further deposit is coming, which is why it so often follows the largest deposit rather than the first.

Two facts settle it without any judgement about tone. No licensed firm charges a fee to return money it holds on a client's behalf, because client money segregation makes that money the client's throughout. And a firm's identity is checkable on a regulator's public register reached through the authority's own site, which is also the check that survives a clone firm. A second approach offering to recover what was lost, for a fee paid in advance, is a separate fraud aimed at the same person.