Prop Firms That Shut Down

The warning was public for almost three years before that. The Financial Conduct Authority added the firm to its list of unauthorised firms on 31 October 2023, named its website and two Discord invite links, and told consumers to avoid it. On 3 September 2025 the company filed accounts declaring itself dormant for the year to 30 September 2024. No refund or payout plan for traders was ever published.

The domain registration runs to April 2027, so the site was withdrawn rather than left to expire. In the weeks before it went dark, traders reported unpaid payouts, including one account of a $10,000 withdrawal that was never settled. No successor firm and no rebrand was found. Our Funded Sports Trader review is kept for reference with the score cut to 1.0 and the outbound links disabled.

The unresolved part is customer money. Rev One sold subscription based one step simulated accounts, so there was a live subscriber base at the point it closed, and no statement was made about active subscriptions, outstanding payouts or any other customer obligation. The website was still reachable when the closure was reported. This is the third prop firm tied to Ciaramello to stop operating, after Leveled Up Society and The Funded Trader.

This is the orderly kind of closure. The firm said every client holding an active challenge, evaluation or funded account would be refunded in full regardless of performance, and that funded traders would also be paid any profit they had earned but not yet withdrawn. Clients were told to expect a secure claim form by email within 48 business hours. Dicks wrote that he was not willing to take payment for an evaluation the firm might not be able to honour.

One practical warning came with the notice. Vault Funder said it will never ask for banking details by email reply, WhatsApp or social media, and that anyone contacting traders for a release fee is running a scam. Closures attract exactly this kind of impersonation, so treat any unexpected payment request as fraudulent and verify through the firm’s stated address, support@vaultfunder.trade.

On the day it paused, ATFunded said every customer with an active account would get a full refund of their purchase and that funded traders with eligible profits would be paid under its rules. That was a promise, and the reports at the time said the process would be explained in the days that followed. We have not found a report since confirming that the refunds or payouts were made. Senior departures came first: chief executive Joshua Dentrinos left earlier in 2026, followed by general manager Connor Mccourt.

Its own site now serves a single page reading Service Closed, which is how we confirmed it. Alongside Smart Prop Trader, this is the second example on this page of a firm treating closure as something it owed its traders rather than something it did to them.

Trader obligations were honoured. Active clients were offered incentives to migrate to FTMO, and those who chose not to move were refunded where applicable. No payout disputes were reported. OANDA continues to operate as a broker and FTMO continues to operate as a prop firm, so neither business failed here. Read it as a brand being folded into its new owner.

Traders holding active, unbreached evaluation accounts could claim a full refund of their fee, and funded traders could request a final payout, both with a deadline of 28 February 2026. Refunds were processed within 30 days of the request. Breached accounts and giveaway accounts were not eligible.

This is a different kind of closure to the rest of this page. The company did not run out of money. It decided a regulated brokerage was a better business than funding traders, which is a decision more firms have been making. Seacrest is still operating, just not as a prop firm.

In January 2026 the firm announced it was winding down, describing it as a strategic decision to focus on other opportunities. Active evaluations and funded accounts were refunded in full regardless of profit or drawdown. This one was not caused by a platform or a regulator. The firm changed the deal after the fact and could not carry on once traders stopped believing it.

Trustpilot now marks the company's website as closed, and protradersfund.com did not load a site when we checked on 24 September 2026. Everything on record comes from traders rather than the firm. That is how most quiet closures look: months of complaints, then the contact channels stop working.

The filings tell the clearer story. Companies House accounts from December 2024 showed the company holding just over 3,000 pounds in assets against more than 150,000 pounds in liabilities, with Ali as the sole employee. Refunds were promised only to traders who, in the firm words, qualify, which left most customers with nothing specific to rely on. Of everything on this page, this is the clearest case of a firm that was already insolvent well before it stopped selling challenges.

There was no closure notice, no refund process and no explanation, and expressfunded.com returned a 404 error when we checked on 24 September 2026. Some traders reported being paid in late 2024, so this was not a firm that never paid. The payouts slowed first, then the site disappeared.

That was a compulsory strike-off, which the registrar starts when a company stops meeting its filing duties, rather than a closure the owners chose. ryze.trading no longer resolves. To avoid a mix-up: ryzefunding.com is now used by an unrelated US business finance company and has nothing to do with this prop firm.

The last complaints, in March 2025, describe emails that nobody answered. Trustpilot now lists the company's website as closed, and fundedprotrader.com no longer resolves. A firm that makes a good review a condition of funding is also telling you its review score cannot be trusted.

Their statement was unusually direct: they said they had misjudged the market and overestimated their ability to build what they had described. It is a small story but a useful one, because it shows how little capital some firms launch with.

This is the one closure on this page we would point to as done properly. Nobody was left guessing. It shows that a firm shutting down does not have to cost traders money, and that whether it does comes down to reserves and intent rather than bad luck.

No date for a return was ever given, and we have found no report that trading resumed. Axe Trader is the plainest example on this page of key-person risk: a firm can look sound and still stop overnight when the business depends on one person.

An acquisition is a softer landing than an insolvency, but the brand stopped operating and traders had to deal with a different company than the one they signed up with.

There is no report that the move was ever completed, and fundedlions.com no longer resolves. The dispute is the firm's own account and Dominion Markets' side was not reported, so treat the cause as one party's claim. The outcome is not in doubt: a seven-day fix became a permanent stop.

No statement, refund process or explanation followed. When we checked on 24 September 2026, bfxfunding.com served only a default server page. The whole record comes from customers, because the firm never said anything.

Traders with active challenges were told they would be contacted and supported. The notice did not say whether challenge fees would be refunded or pending payouts honoured, and we have found no later statement that did. Like several firms on this page, it ran on one broker and one platform licence, and stopped when that single relationship ended.

The migration followed a payout dispute. A data feed issue produced unusually favourable pricing on some accounts, and MyFlashFunding responded by adjusting results and denying a number of payout requests. Chief executive Blake Carter said the feed problem had been fixed and that pending payouts were being processed.

Traders who signed up with MyFlashFunding ended up with a different company holding their accounts, which is the practical risk in an acquisition of this kind. Anyone still searching for MyFlashFunding should look for Sway Funded instead.

PropFirmMatch noted at the time that the firm never stated whether affected traders would be compensated. That silence is the part worth remembering: a firm can close for ordinary commercial reasons and still leave customers with no answer.

The firm said this left it with no liquidity. It is a clean example of the model that killed a lot of small firms in 2024: evaluation fees funding payouts, with nothing in reserve when the numbers stopped working.

On 15 July 2024 it announced permanent closure and said it would file for bankruptcy. Its own statement told traders that outstanding claims would be handled through the bankruptcy process, which it said might take years to settle. That is the bleakest outcome on this page for anyone who was owed money.

Indigo operated as a promoter for broker Eightcap rather than running its own independent book, which is part of why it disappeared quickly once the arrangement ended. The payout position for traders holding accounts at the time was never resolved publicly.

Trader reports told a different story. Multiple accounts described blocked dashboards, denied payouts, and refund promises that were never honoured, directly contradicting the firm's own account of a healthy exit. A company's own closure statement is not independent verification, and this is a clean example of why.

By 6 September 2024 traders reported the website was down, and in January 2025 one said they still could not reach their account or get an email answered. No closure notice was ever published. When a firm deletes every social channel at once while telling customers the business carries on, that is the moment to act, not to wait.

The closure was abrupt by the standards of that year. Traders reported being left without payouts. The lesson other firms took from it was that spreading across two platform providers is not diversification when the pressure on both comes from the same place.

On 13 May 2024 it announced permanent closure and cited financial insolvency. Industry reporting put the damage at roughly 300 traders and about $1.2 million unpaid. That figure originated with a competing firm rather than an audit, so treat it as an estimate. True Forex Funds was the first big name to fall in the platform crackdown, and its collapse set the pattern for the rest of the year.

The only explanation on record comes from a trader, who wrote in July 2024 that the firm had lost its MetaQuotes licence and its liquidity provider. That fits the timing of the MetaQuotes crackdown behind several other closures on this page, but Fidelcrest never confirmed it. Traders reported losing challenge fees with no refund.

On 28 March 2024 it paused all operations. Its broker Eightcap had withdrawn prop firm services at the end of February, creating a migration backlog it could not clear. The firm later moved to the Cayman Islands and restarted in part, reporting by August 2024 that it had processed a portion of what it owed.

We list it separately because calling it closed would be wrong. It exists. It has never returned to the scale it had, and a lot of traders holding denied payouts from early 2024 never got them.

Traders on Trustpilot reported roughly seven months without payouts during the migration period, with some describing Phase 2 credentials that never arrived after they passed Phase 1. The firm's own social posts referenced “regulatory challenges emerging into the prop-firm space” without giving a closure date. Its original domain, aqrefx.com, now redirects to an unrelated casino-review affiliate site, confirming the firm no longer operates there.

The firm matters beyond its own collapse because of who ran it. Ciaramello went on to found The Funded Trader, which paused in March 2024 and appears further down this page, and later Rev One Trading, which closed in August 2026. Three prop firms tied to the same founder have now stopped operating, and in two of the three the payout position was never resolved.

What happened next matters, and most summaries get it wrong. On 13 May 2025 a US federal judge dismissed the CFTC case with prejudice. The dismissal was based on procedural misconduct by the CFTC rather than on the truth of the allegations, and several CFTC staff were placed on administrative leave. The firm was never found liable and was never cleared on the merits. Either way, customers who paid for evaluations before August 2023 did not get a resolution, and the prop business has not returned.

Trader reports describe accounts closed without paid profits, unresponsive support, and funded accounts that went offline entirely, including at least one trader who said they received a funded account only to find the firm gone shortly after. No official closure announcement has been found; this entry rests on trader reports rather than a company statement.