Is DBG a scam? Real ASIC licence, domains are the problem

DBG’s ASIC licence is real, searchable, and was issued in 2004. Close to ten Vietnamese pages say it is suspicious, but the ASIC register says otherwise.

But on the UK entity’s own site, dbglondon.co.uk, the live price table on the home page is empty: all 21 products, from EURUSD to XAUUSD, show a dash instead of a price.

The worrying part is in the domains: of the addresses carrying the DBG name, two are up for sale and three no longer work.

Two opposing views, and only one can be checked

Type “DBG broker” into Google and you meet two views that contradict each other. One praises the broker for holding licences from three of the strongest regulators in the world.

The other says the ASIC licence is “unclear, suspected to be fake”, and adds that the UK regulator has put the broker on a warning list. Neither view describes a single lookup step, and both copy from each other.

With a specific licence number, checking is not hard.

The ASIC register gives the opposite result

ASIC publishes the entire list of licensees as open data that anyone can download. The August 2026 file records number 247017 as follows:

“DBG MARKETS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD. AFS Licence 247017. ABN/ACN 71091532946. Start date 10/03/2004. Sydney NSW 2000, Australia.”

The licence is real, and it dates from 2004. Not a single line in it says anything about domains.

The licence is real, it is in the right name, and it has existed for more than twenty years.

It is also the only licensee in the register with “DBG” in its name, so there is no room for a mix-up over the name.

The register has one more field, recording what the licence permits. Word for word, it permits advising on, dealing in and making a market in foreign exchange contracts, for both retail and wholesale clients.

If you plan to trade anything other than forex, check whether that product falls within the licence of the entity you sign with, because those are two separate questions.

Type dbgmarkets.com and you land on a domain marketplace

The most obvious domain, the one a Vietnamese trader would type straight into the browser after hearing the broker’s name, does not lead to any broker. It redirects to HugeDomains, a marketplace for buying and selling domains. The name is up for sale. dbgfx.com is the same: also for sale.

So the question is no longer “is the licence real”, but “so where are people actually trading”. Of the eight domains carrying the DBG name, none leads to a page that can be called the genuine one. Two are for sale, three no longer work, two (dbgmfx.com and dbginternational.com) run on the same server at Alibaba Cloud, and one (dbgmarketsglobal.com) does not respond.

This list matches what the UK regulator warned about

This explains why the second view says “DBG has an FCA warning”. The UK financial regulator really has issued warnings carrying the DBG name.

But the URLs of those warning pages show that they are classed as clone of FCA authorised firm: warnings about sites impersonating a licensed firm, not warnings about the firm itself.

It is the same situation as the IC Markets clone covered in our IC Markets cross-check.

The domains named in those warnings are DBG domains from the same group: dbgmarkets-ink.com, dbgmfx.com, dbginternational.com, dbgmarketsglobal.com, dbgforexa.com and dbgmarketltd.com.

The two pieces of evidence match, and they match in the opposite direction to the story Vietnamese websites are telling: the broker was not the one being warned about. Instead, someone had built fake sites carrying the broker’s name, enough of them for the regulator to issue a notice twice.

So what should you do with this information

The sensible move is not to stay away from the DBG name. An entity that has held an Australian licence continuously for more than twenty years is not a setup built to grab the money and run.

Its paperwork is cleaner than many of the names in this warnings section.

The domain situation also has a very ordinary explanation. Firms rebrand, drop old domains, and third parties buy them up to resell at a profit.

This often happens in the industry, and on its own it says nothing bad about the firm. The problem is the consequence: every abandoned name is a place where someone else can put up an impersonation site, and the one who pays is the person typing the address from memory.

So what you need to do is very concrete, and you can do it today. Take the website address from the emails or documents the broker has sent you; do not type it from memory and do not click links in messages.

Open the account opening confirmation email, read the name of the company on the contract, then enter number 247017 on the ASIC search page and see whether it returns that same name.

If it returns a different name, the Australian licence above does not apply to your account. Finally, deposit a small amount and withdraw it straight away. It is the cheapest and most honest test, and it works for any broker, not only this one.

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