May 2026scam-watch brief.
Three open advisories carry over from April. The thread that connects them tightened: every active issue now lives at the moment a firm owes a trader money.
Five months into 2026, our Scam Watch tracks six entries across three severity tiers: three open advisories, one blacklisted firm, and two defunct firms. May arrives without major changes to the lineup — same three advisories carry over from April, same blacklist, same two defunct firms — but the underlying pattern has tightened. Every open advisory now traces to operator behavior at the moment of payout obligation, not to product quality, marketing, or evaluation rules. Crypto prop firms with viable products are losing trader trust on the operational layer, and that is the risk pattern this edition documents.
Open advisories — three firms, one common thread
Three firms currently sit on open advisory. Crypto Fund Trader applies challenge rules retroactively against a minority of passed traders, citing interpretations not present in the ruleset at purchase time. My Crypto Funding runs a two-to-three-week disbursement gap behind its published 96-hour payout SLA, with no compensation issued and no public response from the firm. Goat Funded Trader delays funded-account activation 48–96 hours past its stated 24-hour SLA — partially offset by a $1,000 compensation clause in the rulebook, which is not auto-paid and must be claimed manually. All three advisories were active before May and remain unresolved. The firms' published positions and the documented incident reports continue to diverge.
Blacklisted and defunct
The Trading Pit remains on the blacklist for rule enforcement against already-passed traders, compounded by a CFD-only crypto product limited to BTC and ETH at 1:2 leverage. Funding Ticks shut down in January 2026; legacy trader balances were not honored, and the only recovery path is card-issuer chargeback within the standard 60–120-day window. Fidelcrest closed in August 2024 after a multi-year termination and indefinite-review pattern. Both defunct entries persist on Scam Watch primarily for search hygiene — outdated listicles and affiliate pages still rank for these brand queries. If either operator relaunches under the same brand, we evaluate it as a new firm.
Pattern of the month — the payout-obligation moment
The connecting thread among the three open advisories is operator behavior at the precise moment a firm owes a trader money. CFT acts at challenge completion. MCF stalls at payout approval. GFT delays at funded-account activation — the gate to the first payout. None of these issues surface during purchase or evaluation, where firm marketing and challenge UX get the most attention; they emerge when the obligation crystallizes. May is, in that sense, the month operators get tested on payout-side discipline rather than challenge-side polish. Three of our six tracked entries are currently failing that test. For traders evaluating new firms, the diagnostic question is no longer 'how good is the challenge?' — it's 'what does the firm actually do at payout?'
How to read this brief
Read the full entries on the Scam Watch index for sources, observable resolution criteria, and the conditions under which we would downgrade each advisory. We update advisories continuously when evidence shifts; this brief snapshots the state of the watch on the first of each month and names the editorial pattern that ties the lineup together. The next edition publishes on 2026-06-01.
Full entries on Scam Watch
Each entry below has full sources, observable resolution criteria, and the conditions under which we would downgrade the advisory.