Prop Firms That Shut Down

The domain registration runs to April 2027, so the site was withdrawn rather than left to expire.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in full regardless of performance, and that funded traders would also be paid any profit they had earned but not yet withdrawn.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.

Traders were not left short. Everyone holding an active account received a full refund of their purchase, and funded traders with eligible profits were paid out under the firm existing rules. No unpaid payouts were reported. Senior departures preceded the decision, with chief executive Joshua Dentrinos leaving 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.