My Forex Funds: what happened and what it means for prop traders

What was MyForexFunds?

Traders Global Group Inc., trading as MyForexFunds (MFF), was a Canadian-registered firm offering retail funded-account challenges: pay an evaluation fee, pass a simulated trading assessment, receive a funded account, and keep a share of the profits. Founded in 2020, it grew rapidly during the post-COVID retail trading boom.

By early 2023, MFF had become the second-largest retail prop firm in the world by active client count, behind only FTMO. The firm claimed more than 135,000 registered traders across more than 150 countries. Its challenge fees were competitively priced, its profit splits were marketed as among the most generous in the industry, and its Discord and social media communities were among the most active in the space.

CEO Murtuza Kazmi was a visible public figure in the prop trading community, featured regularly in promotional content and interviews. The firm's rapid growth was widely interpreted as evidence of legitimacy. In the retail prop space of 2022 and 2023, scale was treated as a proxy for trustworthiness. MFF demonstrated conclusively that this assumption was wrong.

The CFTC and OSC action — 30 August 2023

On 30 August 2023, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Ontario Securities Commission filed simultaneous emergency enforcement actions against Traders Global Group Inc. and Murtuza Kazmi personally. The coordination between a US federal commodities regulator and a Canadian provincial securities commission was unprecedented in the retail prop space and indicated that the investigations had been running in parallel for some time before the filing.

The CFTC's complaint, filed in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey, alleged violations of the Commodity Exchange Act across three main categories.

Fraudulent misrepresentation: MFF allegedly told traders their profits derived from live market participation when the firm was not placing those trades in live markets. Instead, the CFTC alleged, payouts were funded from incoming challenge fees — a structure the CFTC characterised as fraudulent misrepresentation to clients who believed they were participating in real trading activity.

Unregistered operation: The CFTC alleged that MFF operated as a futures commission merchant and commodity pool operator without the CFTC registration that both statuses legally require. Operating in these capacities without registration is a violation of the Commodity Exchange Act regardless of the fraud allegations.

Systematic manipulation: The CFTC alleged that MFF deliberately widened bid-ask spreads on funded accounts during high-impact news events and introduced artificial slippage — specifically targeting the execution conditions that determine whether traders breach drawdown limits — in order to engineer account failures and avoid paying out profits that traders had legitimately earned.

Emergency asset-freeze orders were granted by both regulators on 30 August 2023. By the end of that day, MFF's operations had effectively ceased.

What traders experienced

The asset freeze stopped withdrawal processing without any prior notice to traders. Payout requests that had been submitted in the normal course were suspended. Traders with funded account balances — some in the tens of thousands of dollars — found those accounts inaccessible. Traders mid-challenge lost their fees with no refund mechanism.

The timing was damaging because MFF had grown its funded trader base aggressively in the months preceding the action. The volume of affected traders was large and geographically dispersed, spanning the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and dozens of other jurisdictions.

Official communications from MFF went silent. The Discord server, previously one of the most active prop trading communities online, became a gathering point for traders sharing updates on the legal proceedings and attempting to organise information about claims. Withdrawals were never resumed. No restitution mechanism was announced by the firm.

The immediate human reality: traders who had worked through the evaluation process, traded funded accounts for weeks or months, and accumulated profit balances found that money frozen indefinitely with no clear path to recovery. The challenge fee pipeline — the incoming fees from new and retrying traders — had been funding those payouts, and once the regulatory freeze hit, the mechanism collapsed entirely.

The key allegation: systematic manipulation to cause trader failure

Of all the CFTC's allegations, the manipulation claim is the one that most sharply distinguishes the MFF case from an ordinary business insolvency. A fee-funded payout model has well-understood structural fragility — when outgoing payouts exceed incoming fees, the firm is insolvent. That is a business model problem. Deliberate manipulation of execution conditions to engineer trader failures is a different category of wrong, and the CFTC alleged MFF had crossed that line.

The specific mechanism alleged: widening bid-ask spreads on funded accounts specifically during high-impact economic news events — the NFP print, FOMC rate decisions, CPI releases — which are exactly the moments when spread widening has the greatest impact on leveraged positions. A wider spread during a news spike directly increases the likelihood of a drawdown breach on a position that was sized to be safe at normal spreads.

The CFTC also alleged artificial slippage: fill prices consistently worse than the submitted order price, repeatedly and on the same directional bias. On a leveraged account with tight drawdown rules, even small consistent slippage compounds quickly into material P&L differences.

The significance extends beyond MFF. The entire funded-account challenge model depends on traders believing the rules are difficult but applied fairly. If a firm can alter execution conditions at the infrastructure level, it can sustain an arbitrarily high challenge-fee income while delivering a near-zero payout rate — essentially selling the promise of a payout while engineering the conditions that prevent it. This is what the CFTC alleged MFF had operationalised.

These allegations have not been fully adjudicated as of mid-2026. Kazmi and Traders Global Group deny the claims. However, the emergency asset-freeze orders — which require the court to find that the CFTC has demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits — were granted, and the case has proceeded through the US federal court system.

What happened to traders' money — the legal position in 2026

The CFTC's enforcement action resulted in the freezing of approximately USD $310 million in assets attributable to MFF's operations — a figure cited in the court proceedings covering business assets, not individual trader balances specifically.

CFTC enforcement cases of this nature proceed through asset recovery and restitution proceedings. The timeline is measured in years. The case against Traders Global Group Inc. and Kazmi, filed August 2023, remained in active litigation as of mid-2026. No final judgment and no confirmed restitution distribution schedule had been publicly announced as of this date.

What does this mean for traders with unpaid balances? CFTC restitution proceedings, when they produce distributions, typically pay traders cents on the dollar relative to claimed amounts, and only after the costs of litigation and administration are deducted. Participation in a restitution distribution requires filing a formal claim within the window the CFTC establishes — missing that window forfeits any right to participate.

• Monitor the public docket for CFTC v. Traders Global Group Inc. at cftc.gov for updates on case progress and any claims-filing announcements.
• Retain all records: challenge fees paid (with receipts or transaction references), funded account balance statements, and any payout requests submitted with their dates and amounts.
• File a formal claim if and when the CFTC establishes a restitution process. Do not assume you will be automatically included.
• Consult a solicitor or attorney in your jurisdiction, particularly if you are based in Ontario (where the OSC action runs in parallel) or the United States.
• Do not pay any third party claiming to recover your MFF funds for an upfront fee. Recovery scams specifically targeting victims of financial fraud are well-documented and common.

How the industry changed after MFF

The MFF collapse was a pressure test for the entire retail prop firm model at the moment the industry was at its largest. The consequences reshaped how traders, regulators, and competing firms approached the space.

Regulatory attention increased sharply and permanently. The CFTC's action demonstrated that US federal regulators would act against offshore-registered firms when they solicited US clients, using existing registration and fraud law rather than waiting for bespoke regulation. The OSC action demonstrated Canadian provincial regulators were actively monitoring. Through 2024 and 2025, the FCA and ASIC both signalled heightened interest in the funded-account model, and ESMA continued to apply CFD product-intervention rules affecting how prop firms market to EU retail clients.

MetaQuotes, the developer of MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, withdrew MT4/MT5 licences from an estimated 80–100 prop firms in 2024 — a separate but related disruption that forced surviving firms to migrate to alternative platforms (DXtrade, Match-Trader, cTrader) and closed firms that could not complete the transition. The MT4/MT5 withdrawal compounded the consolidation that MFF's collapse had begun.

FTMO distinguished itself in this period by publishing financial disclosures demonstrating it operated with real capital backing its payouts — not purely fee-funded payouts. This became the transparency benchmark the industry moved toward.

Trader culture shifted. The Reddit r/Forex and r/PropTrading communities moved from predominantly promotional content to adversarial due-diligence discussion. The verified payout culture — sharing payout evidence with transaction references, not just screenshots — intensified as traders recognised that growth and marketing spend were not evidence of legitimacy.

Which prop firms strengthened their position post-MFF

Evaluation fees are at risk at every prop firm — the funded-account product is largely unregulated as a bespoke category and carries inherent counterparty risk. With that caveat, the firms that emerged from the 2023–2025 period with the strongest reputations are those that demonstrated operational continuity, transparent corporate structures, and verifiable payout history through the scrutiny period.

FTMO (Prague, Czech Republic) is the industry benchmark. More than ten years of operation, a publicly verifiable corporate structure, and published disclosures responding to the post-MFF transparency questions. It uses a two-step challenge, a trailing max drawdown that locks at the initial balance once equity rises 10%, and refunds challenge fees on first funded payout. It is the natural starting point for any trader assessing the space.

E8 Funding has generally positive community sentiment as of mid-2026 and a scale-up programme allowing accounts to grow to substantial capitalisation. Its jurisdiction (St. Kitts and Nevis) is less transparent than FTMO; verify the current registered entity independently before committing.

TopStep and Apex Trader Funding (both US-headquartered, futures-focused) operate in the CME-regulated futures space — a materially more regulated environment than spot forex prop firms because the underlying instruments are exchange-listed. For traders whose strategies apply to CME futures contracts, these firms represent the closest available product to a regulated prop trading environment.

The general principle post-MFF: the firms that survive and strengthen are those with long operational histories, identifiable corporate principals, independent community verification of payout claims spanning years, and transparent disclosure of how payouts are funded.

Due-diligence checklist for prop firm traders in 2026

The MFF case illustrates every form of risk in the retail prop model: structural fragility, regulatory exposure, alleged product manipulation, and the total absence of any compensation scheme protecting traders. None of these risks have been eliminated from the industry. The following is the minimum standard of due diligence a trader should apply before paying any evaluation fee.

• Verify the legal entity: find the registered company name and country of incorporation in an official company register. A real registered entity is the floor, not proof of safety.
• Identify at least one named principal officer publicly associated with the business and verifiable by name. Anonymous operations are a disqualifying red flag — MFF's CEO was publicly named, but most genuinely opaque operations are not.
• Confirm how the firm funds payouts. Does it claim real capital backing? Has it published any financial evidence of that claim? FTMO has. Most firms have not. Opacity here is a structural risk.
• Read the execution T&Cs: specifically the clauses covering spread widening, slippage policy, and news-trading execution. If the firm reserves the right to alter execution conditions without notice, that is the MFF risk on paper.
• Find at least five independently verified payout records from traders with posting history — including a firm name, payout amount, and a partial transaction reference. Screenshots alone are insufficient.
• Search Reddit r/Forex and r/PropTrading for the firm name plus 'payout delay' and 'refused' within the last 90 days. A pattern of similar reports is signal, not noise.
• Screenshot and save the version of the T&Cs you accept on the day you pay the fee. T&C changes applied to existing funded traders have been documented across the industry.
• Confirm the challenge fee refund policy: does it refund on first funded payout? Non-refundable fees at any scale of challenge are a higher-cost product — price that into the risk calculation.
• Never pay a challenge fee you cannot afford to lose entirely. There is no compensation scheme covering the funded-account product in any major market.
• Confirm the aggregate funded-capital cap if you plan to scale. Most firms cap total capitalisation per trader — verify the cap explicitly before planning a multi-account strategy.

Sources & further reading

• CFTC Press Release 8762-23 — CFTC Charges My Forex Funds and CEO (August 2023)
• Ontario Securities Commission — MFF enforcement action
• CFTC Enforcement Docket