Review of AvaTrade
1 star: Bad

THIS IS A SCAM DO NOT FALL FOR IT

THIS IS A SCAM DO NOT FALL FOR IT
THIS IS A SCAM DO NOT FALL FOR IT. Tried to withdraw my money and they only transferred money after I left negative reviews everywhere. AVOID !
I joined beginning of January when they had an offer if you deposit 200, you get 25 on top.
I opened an account, few days later I deposited 200 to an account.
It took them around 3 weeks to check the uploaded documents and i checked the trustpilot reviews which are abysmal as well as I noticed multiple suspicious five star reviews that seem fake as well as multiple FB accounts and Trustpilot accounts for the SAME company which is against FB and Trustpilot policies. That got me worried. I have noticed that there are a lot of scams out there lately to take advantage of the crypto fever so I was concerned.
Fortunately few days later they verified the account and deposited the money but guess what? No bonus.
Here starts the hunt for their support. At that time for some reason they didnt even have a person on the phone, they would just hang up on you. Web page support chat would also never work as its always offline.
I left a review on trustpilot because they would sometimes respond on there.
Got contacted by some "manager" who set up my account and even gave me the promissed bonus.
So 3 months go by and I have been using other accounts to trade so I made only 1 trade on this account because I forgot about it.
They hit me with a 50£ "inactivity fee".
I leave a review on Trustpilot and try calling support - they only have one guy on the phone and any issues have to be emailed in anyways. The reply on trustpilot states that their T&C's say that the fine for inactivity is 25£ for every 3 months. They charged me 50 so I enquired as to why it is double. They send me a reply quoting their "NEW" T&C's saying that now it's 50.

I suspect this is not a serious business. They have lousy support and i find this whole nonsense about inactivity fees to be hard to believe. Their email support statements conflict with their replies on Trustpilot which also makes me suspicious that these guys just can not be trusted for long term investment. As I withdrew the money, they also took back the bonus which is just a bit of a nasty thing to do proving the point that you should avoid these guys for the security of your funds as they use their T&C's as a tool to just empty your account. There's a 50£ fee every 3 months to just hold your money as well as "annual administration fee" every year or something stupid like that also the bonuses they offer will be taken back when you withdraw all the money from your account. A bit of a disappointment really.

Reply from AvaTrade
Hello, Jani!

Thank you for posting your review.

The Inactivity Fee T&C were updated to 50.00 GBP/USD/EUR in the first quarter of 2018, but the duration of inactivity period was also extended from 1 month to 3 months. Regarding the welcoming bonus; a certain amount of volume has to be generated before you can withdraw the bonus, or withdraw funds while keeping the bonus. This was point 5 of the Welcoming bonus T&C. When you register, you are asked to read the Terms and Conditions, and then accept them. Since you have an account with us, we take it that you did read the T&C and you did accept them.

Please provide your account number so an agent of ours can contact you.

Thank you!

Kind Regards,
The AvaTrade Team