1Broker is closed

1Broker was active between November 9th, 2012 and September 27th, 2018. The trading platform allowed users to trade on various financial markets (popular stocks like AAPL or MSFT, commodities like Gold, Forex markets, ...) with Bitcoin as the settlement currency.

It quickly became popular in the cryptocurrency community and proved itself to be a stable and trusted service. With more than 70,000 registered users, it was a medium sized business.

US Lawsuits

In September 2018, two US regulators (SEC and CFTC) filed, without any prior communication, civil lawsuits against the company and its CEO, Patrick Brunner. Basically, the lawsuits alleged that 1Broker violated US security laws. The company and the team behind 1Broker did not have any connection with the United States; jurisdiction was claimed because customers from the United States were using our trading platform (less than 20% of our customers came from the US).

On the same day, the internet domain 1broker.com was taken over (civil forfeiture) and redirected to a US government splash page. Customers from around the world were not able to access our website or contact us by email anymore.

Decision to close 1Broker

While our users encouraged us to continue offering our services, shutting down 1Broker was unavoidable. We always operated 1Broker in good faith and were not accustomed to legal issues of any kind - especially not lawsuits from US government agencies.

We simply did not have the resources to handle the legal procedures and continue to operate our services at the same time.

Customers were able to withdraw their funds on the new domain 1broker.io until the end of 2019.

Settlement of US Lawsuits

In March 2019, we settled the lawsuits without admitting or denying the allegations of the complaints and agreed to pay a fine and disgorgement.

The Future

We want to thank you for all the encouraging messages we received over the past months. Rest assured that - in one way or another - we will be back operating services for the cryptocurrency community. Once we have specific news, we will let you know on this page.



Contact

You can continue to contact us by email until the end of 2020: [email protected]

Final Statistics