CONSOB stands as the financial regulator of Italy, and has given out yet another announcement. The watchdog revealed that six more websites were deemed illegal, and will be blocked out of the country’s internet access. As is the norm, all six of these websites were busy with the illegal offering of financial services without the proper permissions.

This Time’s Guilty Parties

The official announcement reveals that CONSOB’s grinding out a sizable amount of blocked sites, with 391 websites already being blocked out by the country’s various ISPs by CONSOB’s mandate. These websites had concluded it’s a better idea to operate a trading service operation without the official permissions they are legally mandated to get. CONSOB has been doing this campaign since back in July of 2019, and it noted that, as always, it will take a few days for the websites to be fully blocked by Italian ISPs.

As for the guilty parties in this particular case, that would be Swiss Management Corporation, Nab Europe Limited, FXOptexGroups, Expertsystemfx, QubitTech Corporation, as well as Italiano Investment. Obviously, it’s urged not to make use of these websites in general, seeing as these sites think illegally operating within a country is a sound business strategy.

The Growth Decree Strikes Again

As is the case with every other event like this, CONSOB took the time to cite its new regulatory powers given to it via the “Growth Decree”. This law, Law no. 58 of the 28th of June 2019, allows the watchdog to mandate the internet service providers (ISPs) of the country to restrict access to specified websites. This power was only increased by way of Law no. 8 of the 28th of February, 2020 (Article 4, Paragraph 3).

An Endless Job

This all comes in a bid from Italy’s regulator to try and stem the tide of malicious, illegal financial service offerings within the country’s borders. As long as there’s money flowing in the finance space, and investors either naive or stupid enough to work with these sites without question, there will always be more of these sites, crawling out like cockroaches.

All CONSOB can do is stem the tide, and the regulator’s consistent efforts in blocking out the sites that come to its attention is a testament to this. There will always be more of these sites, however, so the regulator will never run out of sites to block from its nation’s borders.