Quickcheck: BaFin warns against the website castilage.com

What does BaFin report?

According to BaFin, the supposed trading platform at castilage.com (formerly distinction.info), run by the Castilage Investment Company with an alleged registered office in Frankfurt, does not hold the licence required to offer financial and crypto-asset services in Germany. BaFin is the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority and, as such, responsible for licensing and supervising banks, financial service providers, insurers and securities trading. Here is the original notice by BaFin of 22 May 2025 (in German).

Always check a website's certificates and quality seals carefully

To make the services they offer appear more trustworthy and secure, commercial projects on the internet often use external quality seals, certificates or similar. Such seals and certificates do not always guarantee high quality, trustworthiness and security, since some can be obtained simply by paying a fee and require no particular review by the issuer. Potential customers of an online offer should therefore always check carefully whether such promises on a website have a real and reliable basis or are merely for show. This is not always easy.

Prompted by the BaFin warning, we briefly reviewed the content of the castilage.com website and came across a certificate (“Certificate of Registration”) of the “Company Register” bearing the German federal eagle (Fig. 1). The image of the certificate is displayed on the website. Clicking on it opens a linked PDF file with a company profile of Castilage. The certificate can be found on the last page of the PDF.

According to the certificate, CASTILAGE was registered in Germany at the address “Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage 36/Ground floor, 60325 Frankfurt am Main”. The registration is said to have been made through the Bundesanzeiger Verlag under the registration number “CVR-nr. 31159857” on 18 January 2017.

The Bundesanzeiger Verlag, publisher of the German Federal Gazette, does indeed operate a company register (“Unternehmensregister”, in English “Company Register”) at www.unternehmensregister.de. According to its website, it is a central platform for access to mandatory information about companies. The data of the Company Register come from various sources and are not created or managed by the Company Register itself. It is not possible to register directly with the Company Register of the Bundesanzeiger Verlag. The registration shown in the CASTILAGE certificate therefore cannot have taken place in this form.

The Company Register of the Bundesanzeiger Verlag can be searched free of charge. A possible entry for CASTILAGE can be checked quickly, and at the time of writing there was no entry for the search term “CASTILAGE”.

An attentive look at the “CASTILAGE” certificate reveals further peculiarities:

• At the time of writing (May 2025), the logo used on the English website of the Company Register differed from the logo in the certificate: the official logo showed “Company Register” with the subtitle “The central platform for making company data accessible”, while the logo used by CASTILAGE carries the subtitle “The central platform for the storage of company data”. However, this difference is not a sign of forgery: until 2022, the Company Register did use a logo with the subtitle “The central platform for the storage of company data” (a view of the Company Register of 25 May 2022 can be found, for example, in the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive). The subtitle was probably changed because, contrary to the old subtitle, the Company Register does not store any company data itself.
• Giving the official address of the Bundesanzeiger Verlag, Amsterdamer Str. 192 in Cologne, as the “mailing address” of CASTILAGE makes no sense.
• The registration number carries the prefix “CVR-nr.”. The CVR number (Central Business Register number) is used in Denmark to identify companies and is not used in this form in Germany.
• The address “Langelinie Allé 17, 2100 København”, given below the registration date, is the address of the Danish Business Authority, which operates the Danish company register. The Danish Business Authority has no connection to the Company Register of the Bundesanzeiger Verlag.
• A warning of the Company Register of the Bundesanzeiger Verlag about unfair providers was copied into the certificate (today the warning is on the English and the German start page of the Company Register, under “Beware of unfair providers”). It would be surprising for an official register document to contain such a warning.

Further certificates with similar content

A reverse image search leads to further, similarly designed certificates on the websites of supposedly German or Danish financial companies. Unlike in our previous quickcheck on ws-group.info, however, the content of these websites varied more. Figure 2 compares the certificates of various online offers with very similar content. They include the following offers:

• BLAZE MARK TRADES at blazemarktrades.com (allegedly from Germany),
• BONDKAPITAL at bondkapital.com (allegedly from Germany),
• CAXAMIN at caxamin.com (allegedly from Germany),
• PRIME FUND CONCEPT INVESTEMENT [sic] at primefundconcept.net (allegedly from Germany),
• UTILITY SCHEME at utilityscheme.com (allegedly from Germany), as well as
• QUANTUM AI TRADE HUB at quantumhubtrader.com (allegedly from Denmark) and
• RICHA WEALTH at richawealth.net (allegedly from Denmark).

It is striking that for the German offers, only the company name and the address were changed in each certificate. For the Danish certificates, logos of the Danish Business Authority were used. Since the address of the Danish Business Authority was carried over, it seems likely that the certificates were first created for Denmark and later adapted for Germany.

What should you look out for?

The forged certificates are a clear sign that the offer is a fraud. We have repeatedly come across similar documents from a wide range of issuers over the years. Sometimes invented institutions with official-sounding names are used. Their own fictitious certification bodies allow fraudsters to issue certificates with any content they like. A thorough check must therefore cover not only the financial platform itself but also its certificates, including the issuing institutions. When in doubt, attach little importance to certificates and seals of quality and check whether entries exist in the official, state-regulated company registers of the country concerned. A search is possible and useful on the following platforms, for example:

• Search the official register portal of the German federal states (Handelsregister)
• Search the Company Register of the Bundesanzeiger Verlag
• Search commercial providers of company information such as North Data
• The European Union provides an official list of the business registers of the individual member states on European e-Justice; there you will find, for example, the database of Danish CVR numbers.

An official entry for a company, for example in a commercial register, is a positive sign but does not rule out an attempted fraud. Some fraudsters register a new website using the details of a legitimate company without its knowledge and so borrow a reputable identity. Further factors such as age, addresses, contact details and additional external sources should then be included in the check.

The creativity of fraudsters knows no bounds. So check carefully before you invest. The analysis of a company certificate presented here is only one of many possible methods for examining an investment offer. We will be glad to advise you on technical methods of checking, if required.