Quickcheck: BaFin warns against the website ws-group.info

According to BaFin, the WS Group does not have the necessary authorisation from BaFin for the sale of financial and investment services in Germany. BaFin is the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority and responsible to ensure the proper functioning, stability and integrity of the German financial system. Click here to read the original BaFin warning published on 16/05/2025 (only available in German).

What can we find out about a website in a quick check?

This article describes some results of a forensic analysis of the BaFin warning against ws-group.info. According to publicly available WHOIS information, the Internet address ws-group.info was recently registered on 25/04/2025 and last updated on 30/04/2025. We were unable to find an address or any indication of the company's location on the website. It is therefore difficult to verify the 20 years of expertise advertised on the website.

Many providers of fake investment platforms use the same templates for the publication of their offer under different names and Internet addresses. This means that essential content such as the graphic layout, texts and images are used multiple times on independent websites. For each individual website, only parts of the original design are exchanged. A quick search for websites with similar content on Google leads to the websites of gf-limited.co and quantummarkets.co. The website gf-limited.co was registered on 03/02/2025 and the website quantummarkets.co was registered shortly before on 30/01/2025. All three websites have many similarities in the advertising texts and graphic layout employed. Figure 1 compares the top section of the welcome pages of the three websites with language setting English. For WS Group and GF Limited, the most noticeable changes are different colours and logos. At quantummarkets.co, different images were used in addition to modified colours. All three websites support the languages English and French. Only WS Group and GF Limited offer to view their website in German.

WS Group and GF Limited show the same three mobile phones side by side on the welcome page (c.f. Figure 1). The screen of the three mobile phones displays three views of a user interface for the quotes, charts and trading of different currencies. Enlarging the image as in Figure 2 shows the original source abcbroker.com/terminal for the image. During the preparation of this article, the Internet address abcbroker.com/terminal was no longer available and the provider appears to have ceased operations. According to publicly available WHOIS information, the Internet address abcbroker.com/terminal was last registered on 08/09/2019 and was probably passed on to a trader for the sale of Internet addresses on 21/04/2023.

The backward search of images is another way of analysing websites and finding similar content. The second image on the welcome pages of WS Group and GF Limited differs only in the logo in the top left corner of the depicted trading screen. We were able to find the original image on the long-standing trading platform for cryptocurrencies cex.io. The two variants and the original image are compared in Figure 3. It appears that the screenshot of cex.io was cropped slightly and the original logo was replaced with different logos for the websites of WS Group and GF Limited. The original image of cex.io can be found on a website of cex.io.

Based on the observed similarities and anomalies during this quick check, the following assumptions seem to be reasonable:

• The websites could have been published and advertised by the same provider as part of different campaigns at different times.
• The template for the website, including the graphic layout, texts and images, as well as required technical know how are offered by a technical service provider to different customers and is customised on demand.

Readers should decide for themselves to what extent this speaks in favour of the trustworthiness of the three identified providers (ws-group.info, gf-limited.co and quantummarkets.co) and the security of the advertised products. This article was only able to provide an initial overview of the possibilities of forensically analysing dubious investment opportunities on the Internet. In addition to the analysis options shown, there are a multitude of additional traces and investigation approaches.