An FTMO customer says the proprietary trading firm banned him from using its services after he raised concerns about an Evaluation and refused to remove or change a negative Trustpilot review, an allegation that could become more significant if the trader produces the underlying correspondence.
The claim appeared in a one-star Trustpilot review posted on October 11 by a UK reviewer identified as Zee. Trustpilot shows the account has posted seven reviews and labels the FTMO review as unprompted.
The customer said he had previously regarded FTMO as one of the industry’s leading prop firms but changed his view after a dispute involving an Evaluation.
According to the reviewer, after he publicly described the experience, FTMO contacted him several times and attempted to have the Trustpilot post “removed or changed.” The trader says he was subsequently banned from using FTMO altogether and believes the exclusion was connected to his refusal to alter the criticism.
That causal link has not been independently established.
The reviewer did not publish the emails or messages in which FTMO allegedly requested changes to the review, nor did he publish the notice informing him that he could no longer use FTMO. Without those records, it is impossible to determine whether the negative review played any role in the exclusion or whether FTMO separately identified a contractual, account-security or trading-related reason for ending the relationship.
FTMO had not posted a case-specific public response beneath the review when it was checked.
FTMO’s Published Trading Rules Allow Account Termination
FTMO does have extensive rules under which customer access can be restricted or agreements terminated.
Its published Forbidden Trading Practices prohibit activity including exploiting pricing or data-feed errors, certain coordinated trading, unauthorized third-party account use, manipulative strategies, excessively automated server activity and practices FTMO considers inconsistent with realistic market trading.
The company states that breaches can result in removal of simulated trades, restricted platform access, disqualification from an Evaluation, forfeiture of potential rewards or termination of agreements.
Those provisions establish that FTMO can exclude traders for rule violations. They do not establish that the October 11 reviewer committed one.
They also do not, on their face, say that leaving a negative public review is a forbidden trading practice.
That distinction is important because the current dispute contains two potentially separate events: a disagreement about an FTMO Evaluation and a later allegation that criticism on Trustpilot led to a complete ban.
Until FTMO identifies its reason for the exclusion, those events should not automatically be treated as causally connected.
The Trader’s Emails and Ban Notice Are the Critical Evidence
This case is unusually straightforward to investigate because the strongest evidence should already exist in writing.
If FTMO repeatedly asked the customer to remove or materially alter the Trustpilot review, the relevant emails, support tickets or chat messages should show exactly what was requested and why.
The language matters.
There is a significant difference between a company contacting an unhappy customer to resolve a complaint and asking whether an inaccurate review can be updated after the problem is solved, and a company telling a customer that criticism must be deleted as a condition of continuing to use its service.
The second crucial document is the ban notice.
If FTMO cited a specific trading violation, account-sharing concern, identity issue or contractual provision, that would provide an alternative explanation for the exclusion. The underlying Evaluation records could then be compared against the relevant rule.
Similar evidence questions have repeatedly appeared in prop-trading disputes. Dave Finances recently examined an Orbit Funded account termination dispute where the allegation could ultimately be tested against timestamps and the firm’s stated 15-minute hedging rule.
A separate FundingPips termination complaint turned on a claimed $7.07 difference between the trader-facing account data and the firm’s backend risk calculation.
The common problem is not necessarily that a prop firm lacks rules. It is that outsiders often cannot determine which rule was actually applied without seeing the firm’s evidence.
One Negative Review Does Not Establish an FTMO Policy
The allegation also needs to be kept in proportion.
FTMO has one of the largest Trustpilot profiles in the proprietary trading sector. At the time of checking, the company had a 4.8 TrustScore from more than 54,000 reviews, with 92% carrying five stars and 3% carrying one star.
Trustpilot also states that FTMO invites customers to review the company whether their experience is positive or negative.
One customer claiming retaliation therefore does not demonstrate that FTMO has a broader policy of punishing critical reviewers.
There would need to be evidence of repeated similar cases, internal instructions, comparable correspondence with other customers or an FTMO policy tying service access to public reviews before making that wider claim.
The current story is narrower: one identifiable reviewer says criticism was followed by repeated efforts to change his post and then by a ban.
Why the Allegation Matters More in Prop Trading
If the trader’s account is supported by the correspondence, however, the issue becomes more serious than an ordinary customer-service disagreement.
Retail prop firms exercise unusually broad control over the commercial relationship.
They create the evaluation, define the trading rules, monitor compliance, decide whether simulated performance qualifies for rewards and retain significant contractual control over whether a trader can continue participating.
As Dave Finances’ guide to how prop firms differ from brokers explains, an FTMO participant is not simply operating a conventional brokerage account containing their own deposited investment capital. FTMO describes its accounts as simulated and its balances as fictitious capital.
That makes access to the program itself economically valuable.
A trader who is permanently banned cannot simply move the same FTMO account to another provider. Any accumulated history, eligibility, program status and future opportunity within that ecosystem disappear with the relationship.
That is why the reason for exclusion matters.
Prop firms need wide discretion to police account sharing, copied strategies, prohibited technology and attempts to exploit simulated-market conditions. Without those controls, evaluation programs would be easy to game.
But broad enforcement power also creates a transparency problem when the company controls both the decision and most of the evidence supporting it.
Review Retaliation Would Create a Different Kind of Trust Problem
If FTMO banned the trader for an unrelated rule violation, the Trustpilot timing may ultimately be coincidence.
If the ban was imposed because the customer would not remove legitimate criticism, the implications are very different.
Online reviews are particularly important in proprietary trading because customers cannot easily assess every risk before paying for an evaluation. They rely heavily on other traders’ descriptions of payouts, rule enforcement, account closures and customer support.
A system in which negative reviewers risk losing future access would distort that information.
It would also make a high aggregate rating less informative because prospective customers would have to ask whether dissatisfied users felt free to describe their experience without commercial consequences.
There is currently no evidence that FTMO operates such a system.
But that is exactly why the correspondence alleged by the October 11 reviewer matters. If it contains an explicit connection between review removal and continued access, the story changes from an unsupported belief about retaliation into a documented customer-conduct issue.
Prop Firm Bans Increasingly Depend on Evidence the Trader Cannot See
The broader industry is already wrestling with this imbalance.
Dave Finances recently reported on a FundedNext trader who said Google Translate contributed to a permanent ban, illustrating how account-access systems can turn apparently ordinary software behavior into a compliance event.
Other disputes involve IP addresses, device identifiers, copy trading, equity calculations, trading correlations and risk-engine data.
The commercial consequence can be substantial even when the underlying accounts are simulated. A customer can lose the cost of an evaluation, access to an account already passed, unpaid reward opportunities and the ability to purchase another account from the same provider.
That makes a clear termination reason valuable to both sides.
The trader should know what conduct allegedly caused the ban. The firm benefits from being able to demonstrate that an enforcement decision came from an objective rule rather than an unrelated disagreement.
The Causal Question Is Now the Entire Story
Four pieces of evidence could largely resolve the October 11 allegation.
The first is the original Evaluation dispute. The second is FTMO’s correspondence concerning the Trustpilot review. The third is the final exclusion or ban notice. The fourth is FTMO’s own explanation of whether the review was considered when the decision was made.
If the ban notice identifies a separate rule violation supported by account evidence, the allegation of retaliation becomes much weaker.
If the correspondence instead shows that continued access was conditioned on deleting or changing criticism, the case becomes substantially more consequential.
For now, neither conclusion is justified.
What is established is that an October 11 UK reviewer publicly accused FTMO of repeatedly seeking changes to a negative Trustpilot review and says he was later banned from the platform. FTMO’s published rules provide numerous legitimate reasons for terminating traders, but the public record does not yet show which, if any, applied in this case.
The next useful development is therefore not another review. It is the documentation connecting—or separating—the criticism from the ban.
Johan Shamshad is a financial markets writer at Dave Finances covering cryptocurrencies, trading platforms, brokers, fintech, financial regulation, and developments across global markets. He previously worked at Gulf News, adding newsroom experience to his coverage of fast-moving financial and digital-asset markets.
His work focuses on identifying market-moving events, company developments, regulatory changes, product launches, and shifts in trading and financial infrastructure.
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