American Future Gate For Money Services Corp.

Currency trading offers often attract customers through advertisements in local newspapers, radio promotions or attractive Internet sites. These advertisements may tout high-return, low-risk investment opportunities in foreign currency trading, or even highly-paid currency-trading employment opportunities. The BCA urges you to be skeptical when promoters of foreign currency trading claim that their services or account management will earn high profits with minimal risks, or that employment as a currency trader will make you wealthy quickly.

Generally speaking, foreign currency futures and options contracts may be traded legally on an exchange or board of trade that has been approved by the CFTC. Even where currency trading does not occur on a Commission-approved exchange or board of trade, the trading can be conducted legally where, generally speaking, one or both parties to the trading is (or is a regulated affiliate of) a bank, insurance company, registered securities broker-dealer, futures commission merchant or other financial institution, or is an individual or entity with a high net worth.

When forex firms do not fall into the categories of regulated entities outlined above and engage in foreign currency futures and options transactions with or for retail customers who do not have high net worths, the CFTC has jurisdiction over those firms and their transactions.

If you are solicited by a company that claims to trade foreign currencies and asks you to commit funds for those purposes, you should be very careful. Watch for the warning signs listed below, and take the following precautions before placing your funds with any currency trading company. Stay away from companies that sound too good to be true. Always remember that there is no such thing as a "free lunch." Be especially cautious if you have acquired a large sum of cash recently and are looking for a safe investment vehicle. In particular, retirees with access to their retirement funds may be attractive targets for fraudulent operators. Getting your money back once it is gone can be difficult or impossible. Be extremely wary of companies that guarantee profits, or that tout extremely high performance. In many cases, those claims are false. Be suspicious of companies that downplay risks or state that written risk disclosure statements are routine formalities imposed by the government.

The currency futures and options markets are volatile and contain substantial risks for unsophisticated customers. The currency futures and options markets are not the place to put any funds that you cannot afford to lose. For example, retirement funds should not be used for currency trading. You can lose most or all of those funds very quickly trading foreign currency futures or options contracts. Margin trading can make you responsible for losses that greatly exceed the dollar amount you deposited. Many currency traders ask customers to give them money, which they sometimes refer to as "margin," often sums in the range of $1,000 to $5,000. However, those amounts, which are relatively small in the currency markets, actually control far larger dollar amounts of trading; a fact that often is poorly explained to customers. Don't trade on margin unless you fully understand what you are doing and are prepared to accept losses that exceed the margin amounts you paid.