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Beware of misleading OANDA bonus offers
OANDA is advertising multiple offers promising $250 to $10,000 for funding a forex account and trading.
OANDA has confirmed that the offer located at https://pages.oanda.com/2022-welcome-bonus-us.html?division=oc expired on January 15, 2023. In fact, it’s still very prominently displayed on the site almost a week after they acknowledged that their team had failed to remove the expired offer that they’re refusing to offer. The first item of the site’s main menu is the “Trading” option, which links to the expired offer. However, the landing page and offer terms do not provide an expiration date.
U.S. customers should also be warned that a larger bonus being advertised at https://www.oanda.com/bvi-en/trading-credits-and-bonuses is not available to U.S. customers. Buried on the offer page is the disclaimer, “The welcome bonus promotion is available only to clients of OANDA Global Markets Limited who have opened but not yet funded a live account as of November 1st, 2022. Clients of other OANDA entities are not eligible.”
After reading that disclosure, if you didn’t come to the conclusion that U.S. customers were excluded from the offer, you’re not alone. It’s not reasonable to assume that visitors of a company’s site would know the difference between the “Global Markets Limited” and “Corporation” divisions. Furthermore, the company only refers to itself as OANDA throughout its site and communications (except at the very bottom of just some pages, where both the Global Markets Limited and Corporation divisions are mentioned. But, it would still be very unreasonable to expect consumers to know the difference between the two business units.
In fact, when attempting to sign up for the offer through the Global Markets Limited offer link, U.S. customers receive no warning that they’re being redirected to, or signing up for, a service under a completely different business unit. If OANDA truly wanted consumers to know who qualified for the offer, they would have referenced the restriction as it relates to the customer’s residency status and not the full legal name of the companies.
OANDA’s word games played with their company names in their welcome offers and their failure to remove an expired bonus offer from a prominent page on their site could lead one to believe that they’re using deceptive marketing tactics.
Some OANDA customers are also having difficulties obtaining their welcome bonus, despite having fulfilled the requirements.
Below are resources to help you file complaints against OANDA.
BBB – Better Business Bureau
NFA – National Futures Association
https://www.nfa.futures.org/ComplaintNET/Complaint.aspx
FINRA – Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
https://www.finra.org/investors/need-help/file-a-complaint
CFTC – Commodity Futures Trading Commission
https://forms.cftc.gov/Forms/Complaint/Screen1
FTC – Federal Trade Commission
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/
SEC – U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
https://www.sec.gov/oiea/Complaint.html
ICPEN – International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network
Trustpilot
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.oanda.com