Is Binomo a scam? Four regulators have warned

Is Binomo a scam? The short, honest answer: no court ruling in Vietnam has found Binomo to be a “scam”.

But it is a binary option (BO) platform, a product already banned from sale to retail investors across the EU and the UK, and it holds no licence from any state financial regulator.

The platform was also at the centre of a wave of “make money at home” advertising that caused public anger in Vietnam. For a beginner, that is more than enough reason to stay away.

What a 90% payout means for your 100 USD

Binomo’s homepage advertises “Get profitability up to 90% for the first deposit”. The same page lists a minimum balance from 10 USD and trades from 1 USD each.

Put 100 USD on one trade. Call the direction right and the account gains 90. Call it wrong and the account loses 100.

What you win and what you lose are not equal. That is the whole problem, and it has nothing to do with licensing.

To break even at a 90% payout you have to be right on 100/190 of your trades, which is 52.6%. At an 80% payout the figure is 55.6%. A coin toss gets 50%.

So to avoid losing money you have to read the market 2.6 to 5.6 percentage points better than a coin, and hold that edge over hundreds of trades. One lucky trade proves nothing.

This is how a casino works, not how investing works.

It also explains why money management and risk management count for almost nothing here: the lopsided payout settles the outcome before you place the trade.

What is a Binomo binary option?

A binary option (BO for short) is a bet with two outcomes.

You pick an asset, such as a currency pair, gold or a stock, then guess whether its price will be higher or lower than it is now at a set moment, usually 1 to 5 minutes later.

Guess right and you get your stake back plus about 70–90%. Guess wrong and you lose the entire stake.

There is no state in between, no stop-loss, and no early exit to keep part of the money.

What sets it apart from ordinary forex trading: you are not buying or selling anything in the market. In forex you hold a position whose value changes all the time and that you can close whenever you choose.

With BO you only bet on a true-or-false question, and the party holding your stake is usually the platform itself. That is why regulators class BO as closer to gambling than to investing.

What is Binomo, and who is behind it?

Binomo is an online binary option platform aimed mainly at users in developing markets (Southeast Asia, India, Latin America).

On the legal side, Binomo shows only its membership of the International Financial Commission (IFC), and that needs to be read correctly:

The IFC is a private organisation that mediates disputes between brokers and their clients. It is not a state regulator like the FCA (UK), ASIC (Australia) or CySEC (Cyprus).

Being “certified by the IFC” does not mean being supervised under any country’s financial law.

The advertising wave that caused an outcry in Vietnam

In 2019–2020, Binomo ads blanketed YouTube, Google and Vietnamese social media with messages along the lines of “earn a thousand dollars a day from home”, alongside images of celebrities.

Vietnamese newspapers (VTC News and several others) ran a series of reports on the phenomenon, openly questioned whether the ads were deceptive, and called on the authorities to act.

Under public pressure the ad wave faded, but the “Binomo” name is still used today by “signal-calling” groups.

The core problem: the BO model, not just Binomo

As we set out in the article on whether binary options are a scam, the problem lies in the product itself:

• You bet on the price rising or falling within 1–5 minutes: win and you take a fixed return, lose and the whole stake is gone.
• A BO platform is usually the “house” on the other side of your bet: your losses are the platform’s revenue.
• ESMA banned BO for retail investors across the EU (2018); the FCA banned it permanently (2019). A product banned in developed markets does not become safe because it is sold in Vietnam.

How do Vietnamese users lose money on Binomo?

On 25/08/2026 the binomo.com homepage was running a campaign called “Become the next Binomo Legend”, from 24/08 to 19/09, with this invitation:

“Trade, collect points, and compete for prizes, including a brand-new car.”

That is how the platform itself describes what you do: a points contest with prizes, not a financial decision. The way money gets lost underneath follows that frame closely.

• The illusion of easy wins: the demo account and the first small trades often win, which creates the feeling that “I have a knack for this”.
• Signal-calling groups: “teachers” set up Zalo or Telegram groups to call trades and earn referral (affiliate) commission on their students’ deposits. The teacher always wins even when the students lose.
• Maths stacked against you: the gain on a win (70–90%) is always smaller than the loss on a miss (100%), so you must win more than 52.6% of trades just to break even, while guessing a 1-minute price move is essentially a coin toss.

Two major regulators banned it outright, and one of them put a number on it

What stands out about binary options is not that “some platforms are bad”. It is that regulators in developed markets banned the whole product type, whichever platform sells it:

When it made the ban permanent, the FCA estimated that it could save retail consumers up to £17 million a year.

That is the scale of harm a regulator believed this product causes in the UK alone, a closely supervised market where users are fully warned.

This is not an allegation against one particular platform. It is a regulator’s conclusion that the structure of the product itself causes systematic harm to buyers. So they chose a ban rather than tighter conditions, which is how they treat other products.

Vietnam has no comparable ban, so these platforms can still advertise.

Not being banned here does not mean being vetted here. It only means nobody has banned it yet.

Should you use Binomo or IQ Option?

The straight answer: the differences between the two are real, but they do not help you.

Both sell the same product that ESMA and the FCA banned, and both are on the list of 92 binary option websites blocked by Indonesia.

In other words, IQ Option does hold a real licence. But that licence belongs to an entity that serves only European clients, and that very entity has been barred by ESMA from selling BO since 2018.

Vietnamese clients sign with a different entity that does not sit under that supervision.

We break this structure down separately in the article on whether IQ Option is trustworthy.

So the right question is not “which BO platform should I pick” but “should I trade BO at all”.

If you want to learn trading seriously, start with the basics and a demo account at a broker with a real licence.

Why we do not put Binomo in the usable group

We do not use the word “scam” in place of a court. But DCTopTrade assesses a trading platform on four criteria: state licensing, supervision, conflicts of interest and transparency.

Binomo, and the BO model in general, meets none of them.

If your goal is to trade seriously, learn the basics and consider only forex/CFD brokers with real licences (FCA, ASIC, CySEC…), which we assess in detail in the broker reviews section.

Where are binary options banned or blocked? (the evidence)

It is no accident that many countries have come down hard on the BO model that Binomo uses:

• European Union (ESMA): banned the sale and promotion of binary options to retail investors from 2018 because loss rates were too high.
• Israel: banned the entire BO industry in 2017 after a string of cross-border fraud cases.
• Indonesia: the commodity futures trading regulator Bappebti blocked 92 unlicensed binary option websites, including Binomo, IQ Option and Olymp Trade. Bappebti classes binary options as online gambling and illegal in Indonesia (KrASIA, 04/02/2022).
• Vietnam: BO is not regulated by the State Bank of Vietnam, and no legal framework protects you in a dispute.

Binomo in particular is also accused by many users of “rigging the chart” so that players lose and the platform keeps the winnings.

Such allegations are hard to prove, but the nature of the model already puts you at a systematic disadvantage. You are not trading against the market; you are betting against the platform itself.

If your money is already in there

If you have already deposited, the three steps below can change the outcome, ranked by how much they help.

Stop depositing more. It sounds obvious, but large losses usually do not come from the first deposit.

They come from the later deposits made to win it back, once the amount already lost feels too big to walk away from.

Complete identity verification, then try withdrawing a small amount. Many withdrawals that hang are held up by an unfinished profile, not by the platform blocking them.

If 20 USD comes out, you know the withdrawal route still works. If it does not, you find out straight away, while the amount is still small.

Save evidence before you complain: screenshots of the balance, transaction IDs, timestamps, and every exchange with support.

Once the account is locked, these are usually impossible to get back.

More detailed steps are in the article on what to do when your account is locked and you cannot withdraw.

One limit has to be stated plainly. Binomo’s entity serving international clients is registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where the authority neither licenses nor supervises retail financial services.

No authority in Vietnam can force them to pay.

Binomo’s own homepage describes it as “a category A member of the International Financial Commission”.

That is a private association funded by its own members, with maximum compensation of 20,000 EUR, quite different from statutory funds such as Cyprus’s ICF or the UK’s FSCS.

Spotted something inaccurate? Tell us and we will check it and publish a correction.