The Financial Conduct Authority warned about crypto-equities.co on 3 January 2023. Read that address again. It ends in .co, not .com — and that single missing letter is one of the oldest tricks in online fraud.
What the FCA published
A plain unauthorised-firm warning, first published and last updated 3 January 2023. The FCA’s wording: “We believe this firm may be providing financial services or products in the UK without our authorisation.”
Recorded against it: the website www.crypto-equities.co, an email address, and a UK address at 227-229 Niddrie Mains Drive, Edinburgh, EH16 4PA. No telephone number is listed.
Why .co does the work
.co is the country domain for Colombia, sold worldwide as a general-purpose alternative to .com. It is entirely legitimate — real businesses use it.
It is also the closest thing to .com that exists. People do not read domains letter by letter; they recognise the shape of a familiar pattern and move on. A brand followed by a dot and two or three letters registers as “a website” and nothing more. If you were told about a firm called Crypto-Equities and then saw crypto-equities.co, nothing would feel wrong, because nothing looks wrong.
That matters more than it sounds. Someone who checks the address they were given, sees it load, sees a professional-looking site, and concludes the firm is real, has performed a check that confirmed nothing at all.
The same principle runs through every case we document. Vision FS Ltd worked by abbreviating a real firm’s name until it stopped being checkable, and the Five Rings clone added one hyphen to an authorised firm’s domain. None of it is sophisticated. It relies on reading speed.
An Edinburgh address and no phone
The notice gives a street address in Edinburgh but no telephone number — so there was no way to test the address against a voice, and nobody to ask where the office actually was.
A UK address on an unauthorised firm is worth less than it appears in any case. It does not create UK regulatory protection, and it does not mean anyone is there. What creates protection is authorisation, and this firm did not hold it.
The domain is now dead
We checked crypto-equities.co on 11 September 2026. It returns DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN — no DNS record exists. More than three years after the warning, the address has been abandoned.
Anyone who dealt with it has no access to the Financial Ombudsman Service and no FSCS protection. Those schemes cover customers of authorised firms only.
Verified evidence — checked 11 September 2026
- FCA warning against CRYPTO-EQUITIES, first published and last updated 3 January 2023. Plain unauthorised-firm warning, not a clone alert.
- FCA wording: “We believe this firm may be providing financial services or products in the UK without our authorisation.”
- Details on the notice: www.crypto-equities.co, an email address, and 227-229 Niddrie Mains Drive, Edinburgh, EH16 4PA. No telephone number listed.
- The domain ends in .co — the country domain for Colombia — not .com.
- No authorised firm of this name appears on the FCA register.
- crypto-equities.co is now dead — DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN, no DNS record. Verified 11 September 2026.
- Not authorised: no Financial Ombudsman Service access, no FSCS protection.
Our verdict
Read the last three characters of any address before you trust anything on the page. .co, .cc, .pro, .live — all legitimate, all cheap, and all frequently chosen because they sit close enough to .com that nobody stops.
Then ignore the domain entirely and check the firm reference number on the FCA register. That is the only test that cannot be gamed by a well-chosen web address.
If you sent money to crypto-equities.co, report it to your bank and to Action Fraud. Payment routes remain traceable long after a website is gone.
Sources: FCA warning notice for CRYPTO-EQUITIES, published 3 January 2023, read directly at fca.org.uk; DNS lookup on crypto-equities.co, 11 September 2026.
