Alpari Forex Broker: Reviews
Alpari is a fairly old brokerage provider that first appeared in 1998 and gradually grew since then. It’s a Russian trading platform with a fairly decent functional basis. The website has a lot of the neat details, like the currency converter, the latest news on the market, and so on and so forth.
Unfortunately, before actually creating an account here, you can’t fully figure out what the website specializes on. When you sign up, you’re good to go and start tracking finances on Forex and various cryptocurrency markets. There isn’t a clear way to work on CFDs, however.
What is Alpari?
Alpari is a shady website – you can see it from the get-go. There’s very little information on how the brand operates and what its primary instruments are. There’s a hint of secrecy. No wonder. It isn’t easy to realize, but the brand originates from the former Soviet Union (where exactly is hard to understand). It has a reputation of one of the biggest dealing centers in the region.
However, the brand doesn’t promote itself in this sense. Instead, it makes you believe that it’s just another worldwide trading titan. On the ‘about us’ page, for instance, it says that there are more than 2 million active users on the platform. There’s no proof to that.
There’s also no information on the servers location or even where the company is. It’s obviously a Russian brand, but the company is registered in the Caribbean. They just don’t tell you enough to know how stable the website’s going to be.
The work ethic
There are several goals the brand is trying to achieve wherever it operates:
- To each country where Alpari is available the platform is trying to bring all the necessary means to develop Forex trading there;
- The trading literacy is promoted by the brand leadership;
- The company is trying to promote Forex itself by decreasing its image of the shady and insecure way of making money
Let’s see how well Alpari is doing its job.
Reviews in 2020
You can see the reviews on the websites like forex-ratings.com or forexpeacearmy.com without any problems, there is a lot of feedback. But the good thing about the platform is that you can also read the Russian reviews on the Russian websites. And the Russian users aren’t happy. The average rating oevrall is 2.5/5.
Alpari isn’t only shady because it’s location and working. There are reviews that make it a bit hard to believe in the honesty of Alpari’s leadership. There are several reasons for you to start worrying.
It’s very hard to withdraw your money. There’s no point in working with the platform if you can’t withdraw you profit from it or simply take back what you invested. Now, the support says you can do it, but it’s not exactly true.
The websites (both English-speaking and Russian-speaking) are littered with angry reviews of users who wait months upon months for their money to come home. There are several issues (or ruses) with the website the owners use as an excuse to not give you your well-deserved money.
For instance:
- The website can switch the available card types. You can sign up with VISA and then learn that ‘VISA isn’t available for collecting money’. It may be a malfunction, but it’s also possible they say it to stall and for time;
- The cash can travel to your card for a long time (sometimes, several months). When approached with the issue, the support team can inform you of an ‘error’ of sorts and ask you to kindly wait
The popular guess is that they stall for time to eventually make you leave the website empty-handed in your frustration from the ‘poorly coded platform’ that is Alpari.
The technical support is incompetent. It is a reoccurring problem with many modern trading agencies. In case of Alpari, however, it’s too frustrating. Everything bad about the website may just be a constant issue of malfunctioning, but it’s unlikely. The tech support team uses the same excuses over and over again.
If you want to submit a complaint about the trading activity (for instance, if the platform is not responding to your commands or takes too long to figure out what you want from it), chances are – your issues won’t be resolved by the team. The usual flow may continue after a while, but rarely due to team’s interference.
You may be told, for instance, that the liquid provider has disconnected. This way, you may lose your funds, and no one will know where they went, except the platform owners. But they won’t tell you.
It’s hard to track your progress. Some actions, like depositing money or withdrawing them doesn’t register on the dashboard. It’s not as widespread as the calamities above, but it’s still a frequent thing to witness. Therefore, you can’t see when you sent your money either to or from the website. It’s as if you never even had you money in the first place.
It’s impossible to get any useful advice from the support. Sometimes they flat out ignore the user who submitted the complaint, according to the reviews from various websites. The issue itself is probably a malfunction, but the attitude of the tech support is once again proven to be atrocious.
There are advantages, of course. The website truly tries to educate its users about Forex and the trading business. It also provides useful news and information about the recent developments on the market. However, every advantage the website has is outshined by the amount of discomfort the platform is producing.
Conclusion
Alpari is either a poorly-written website, or a massive scam (most review publishers are inclined to think the latter). If you can get around the constant withdrawal issues and live without the tech support, then the platform proves to be decent. It’s mostly stable, helps you keep track of the shares and the currency with utmost efficiency, and so on.
The ugly truth is, however, that there’s probably no way around these problems, and once you’ve made your first deposit it will become the hostage in the hands of Alpari leadership.
