These prop firms are excluded from our directories — because they collapsed, changed rules after traders paid, sat on payouts, or borrowed a trusted brand’s name. We document why instead of quietly dropping them, because a list that only shows survivors hides the most useful information you have before risking an evaluation fee. 25 firms are flagged as of September 2026.
Payout fraud or withheld funds
Took evaluation fees or showed approved profits, then froze, denied, or never paid withdrawals.
Alpha Futures
Earned payouts were not honored. On 12 July 2026 Alpha closed its Premium plan and converted pending, already-earned payouts into refunds of the account fee — traders who had qualified were handed their evaluation cost back instead of the money they had made. The same week NinjaTrader terminated Alpha’s contract after Alpha launched its own competing platform, forcing a migration to AlphaTrader; Premium was the second plan retired in roughly ten weeks, after Standard ended on 1 May. Prop Firm Match, PropFirmWise and PickAPropFirm all delisted the firm within days. We removed our affiliate link and do not recommend starting an evaluation here. Refunding a fee is not the same as paying what was owed.
My Crypto Funding
Multiple traders have publicly reported payouts marked approved but never paid since late 2025, with claimed balances from roughly $1,400 to $8,900+. Trustpilot’s moderation has also removed fake positive reviews from the firm’s profile. Approved-payout complaints combined with documented fake-review removal is the governance pattern that preceded other crypto prop collapses. No pricing advantage offsets an account that may not pay out.
Fidelcrest
Flagged in 2025 for retroactively changing rules and withholding payouts without giving traders a route to dispute or appeal. Excluded from recommendations.
The Funded Trader (TFT)
The Funded Trader (Easton Consulting Technologies, CEO Angelo Ciaramello) paused all operations in March 2024 after a wave of payout-denial complaints, freezing roughly $2M in withdrawals during early 2024 while publicly dismissing the criticism. It has since relaunched, but as of 2026 was still clearing an outstanding backlog — reporting only partial completion of payouts and accounts owed, with hundreds of traders still waiting. A firm that froze legitimate profits once and hasn’t fully closed the resulting debt isn’t recommendable until the backlog is settled and a clean post-relaunch payout record exists. Note: this is distinct from My Forex Funds, the separate firm whose CFTC case was dismissed with sanctions.
Impersonation & brand-borrowing
Cloned a trusted brand, or borrowed an unrelated company’s history and payout numbers to look established.
Velotrade
The velotrade.com crypto prop division launched in early 2026 with no verified prop payout history, while its marketing leans on a ‘founded 2016’ date and a multi-billion-dollar payout figure that belong to an unrelated Hong Kong invoice-factoring business of a similar name. Borrowing a legacy entity’s statistics to imply prop-firm stability is a governance red flag, and a brand-new crypto firm can’t be vetted to the standard of established listings. Candidate for re-evaluation once it has an independent, audited live-payout record.
FundedFirm
Exposed in February 2026 for publishing roughly $85 million in fabricated trader-payout figures on a website built as a near pixel-for-pixel clone of FundedNext. No verifiable legal registration. This is an impersonation operation — not affiliated with the legitimate FundedNext.
Collapsed, leaving traders short
Shut down while still holding trader funds, honoring only partial refunds, or after changing rules on paying traders.
FundingTicks
FundingTicks retroactively changed rules in December 2025, breached traders holding legitimate profits, and shut down on January 18, 2026 with only partial refunds. Traders who purchased evaluations under the original ruleset were not made whole. Listed here as a warning because evaluations and ‘accounts’ may still circulate via resellers — do not buy. Same CEO (Khaled Ayesh) as Funding Pips, also on this list.
Skilled Funded Trader
Closed during the 2024–2025 wave of prop firm shutdowns, leaving unresolved trader funds. Do not purchase.
True Forex Funds
True Forex Funds shut down in 2024 in the wave of closures that followed MetaQuotes’ crackdown on unlicensed MetaTrader access for U.S. retail clients. Documented trader losses run to roughly $1.2M across about 300 traders. Listed as a historical warning: the firm is defunct — do not purchase evaluations or ‘accounts’ through resellers.
Ceased operating
No longer running or accepting traders. No major fraud alleged — but no recourse either, and resold evaluations may still circulate.
ATFunded (ATFX)
ATFunded, the prop unit of CFD broker ATFX, suspended operations in June 2026 for a ‘full review of the business,’ less than two years after launching in October 2024. Its CEO departed earlier in 2026 within months of joining, and the parent has been converting prop traders into brokerage customers. A suspended program with leadership churn is uninvestable until it resumes with clear terms and an intact payout pipeline. Candidate for re-evaluation if operations restart on stable footing.
Seacrest Funding (formerly MyFundedFX)
Seacrest Funding — the rebrand of the well-known MyFundedFX — closed its entire prop trading division on February 6, 2026 and pivoted to a pure CFD brokerage. Funded traders were directed to request final payouts and challenge buyers to request refunds. Listed as a warning because the MyFundedFX brand and resold ‘accounts’ may still circulate — do not purchase. Note: this is the forex firm MyFundedFX, not MyFundedFutures (MFFU), the trusted, active futures firm in this directory, which is unrelated.
SurgeTrader
SurgeTrader, the Florida-based prop firm launched in 2021, ceased all operations in 2024 after its platform provider Match-Trade revoked its license — first halting new evaluations, then winding the business down entirely. Listed as a historical warning: it does not offer funded accounts, and any resold ‘access’ should be treated as invalid.
Funded Engineer
Ceased operations. Listed as a warning because evaluations may still circulate via resellers — do not buy.
Can’t be verified
Still operating, but the data needed to trust them can’t be confirmed — manipulated reviews, sub-par ratings, or ownership tied to a failed firm. Not proof of misconduct.
DNA Funded
Only 86 Trustpilot reviews at 3.3 – too thin a record to verify either way. This is not an allegation of misconduct: we simply have no reliable basis for recommending a firm this lightly reviewed, and our floor for firms under 5,000 reviews is 3.8. We’ll revisit once there’s enough of a track record to judge.
Goat Funded Trader
Trustpilot suspended the firm’s rating in 2025–2026 for suspected review manipulation. That isn’t proof of payout misconduct — the firm continues to operate — but when independent review data can’t be verified, the firm can’t be vetted to the same standard as listed firms. Candidate for re-inclusion if the rating is reinstated.
AquaFutures
Launched late 2024 and currently sits around 3.1/5 on Trustpilot — below the floor for a recommendation — with multiple reviews citing payout delays and rule-enforcement complaints. May warrant inclusion in a future quarter if the rating stabilizes and the trader base grows.
Use caution
Still operating, but short of our recommendation bar — demoted partners, payout disputes, or reliability concerns. A “watch your step,” not a fraud allegation.
Funding Pips
Reclassified September 2026. In June the firm’s CEO, Khaled Ayesh, posted that its new Prime account “is and will remain optional.” By August, traders invited by its Responsible Trading Team were being moved into Prime without an opt-out. Prime works by forfeiting the fourth cash payout in exchange for a trading allocation, capped at 10% of the master account size. The firm acknowledged concerns about how the transition was communicated but declined to say whether it was intended to preserve cash. Converting an earned cash payout into something that isn’t cash is the pattern we flag on — the same shape as Alpha Futures converting pending payouts into fee refunds. Funding Pips also shares ownership with FundingTicks, which changed its rules retroactively in December 2025 and shut down in January 2026 with only partial refunds. Still operating, and earlier payouts are still paid in cash.
Phidias
Demoted on our own rating floor: 3.3 on Trustpilot across 326 reviews as of September 2026, below the 3.8 minimum we require of firms with fewer than 5,000 reviews, and down from the level at which we first listed it. Reviews are sharply polarized rather than uniformly poor. The recurring themes are payout caps in early cycles, slower processing than advertised, and a discretionary route to live capital. Gibraltar-registered. Still operating and still paying traders — excluded from recommendations on the rating alone, and a candidate for relisting if it recovers and holds.
BrightFunded
Demoted on our own rating floor: 3.4 on Trustpilot across 570 reviews, below the 3.8 minimum we require of firms with under 5,000 reviews. No payout dispute and no collapse – the score simply fell short of the bar we hold every firm to. We removed our affiliate link rather than keep recommending a firm our own rule excludes, and will relist if the rating recovers and holds.
Lux Trading Firm
Sits at 3.7 on Trustpilot across 640 reviews, just under the 3.8 floor we require of firms with fewer than 5,000 reviews. A marginal miss rather than a serious concern, but the floor only means something if we apply it to firms that fall barely short as well as badly short.
MyForexFunds (MFF)
Reclassified September 2026. MyForexFunds was shut down in August 2023 by an ex parte CFTC asset freeze, and trader payouts stayed frozen for roughly two years. In May 2025 a US federal court dismissed the case with prejudice and sanctioned the CFTC around $3.1 million, after a Special Master found the agency had made false statements in sworn declarations — the transfer cited as evidence of asset dissipation was a legitimate tax payment to the Canada Revenue Agency, which the CFTC held documentation of before it filed. Canadian assets were ordered returned in December 2025, and the firm began contacting traders about outstanding 2023 payouts in April 2026. We previously listed this under withheld payouts. That was wrong: the freeze was imposed by a regulator a court later sanctioned, not by the firm. Two caveats stand — the dismissal was procedural and the underlying allegations were never tried on the merits, and a relaunching firm has no current track record. Kept on the list for historical clarity, because the name is routinely confused with the separate and operating MyFundedFutures, and because a returning firm is unproven by definition.
Blue Guardian Futures
Demoted from the active partner list in June 2026: a recurring ‘shared device’ policy used to confiscate profits and ban accounts even where traders documented a multi-month gap on pre-owned hardware. Still operating, but the payout-denial pattern is a caution and it is no longer affiliate-linked here.
FunderPro
Demoted from the active partner list in June 2026: a recurring pattern of payout denials at the second payout, with profitable accounts flagged for ‘shared IP / shared environment’ on near-identical template emails. Trustpilot has slid toward 3.0. Still operating and many traders are paid, but no longer affiliate-linked here.
Hola Prime
Excluded from the directory.
Closed responsibly
Wound down cleanly — refunds issued, closure handled as a managed event. Listed only because it’s no longer available.
Smart Prop Trader
No longer operating. Unlike most closures, Smart Prop Trader is widely cited as the industry’s example of a responsible wind-down: it issued refunds and treated closure as a managed event. Listed here as closed, not as a scam — but it is no longer available to trade.
Where to look instead
For firms that clear the bar — 12+ months operating, a verifiable trader base, no non-payment cluster, and rule stability — start with the market directories, compare real costs on the Prop Firm True Cost hub, or run two firms head-to-head in the comparison tool.
Common questions
How do you decide a firm gets flagged?
Does flagged mean the firm is definitely a scam?
A firm I use isn’t listed here or in the directories — what does that mean?
Editorial list, not legal advice. Reasons reflect publicly reported events and our own tracking as of September 2026; firm circumstances can change. Verify current status with the firm before acting.
