The Capital Markets Authority has named 15 entities it says are taking money from Kenyans without a licence. Its notice, headed Public Caution Against Investment Scams and dated 11 September 2026, says they “are operating unlawfully and fraudulently soliciting funds from the public”, and that the Directorate of Criminal Investigations is investigating them alongside the CMA and other law enforcement agencies. The notice reached the CMA’s own website on 15 September.
The 15 are:
- Global Investment Group (GIG),
- QVSE,
- Kore Exchange,
- Abacus Wealth Management,
- Brown Advisory Group,
- B Invest,
- Bitblock Capital Limited,
- Maliwave Investments,
- Monetrix Capital Investments,
- Twenty-four Hours Pro expert Trader,
- Wealth Sharing Group (Opticoin),
- CBEX,
- Just Markets,
- Ultima Cryptocurrency and
- Lukman-trust fund.
We published an investigation into QVSE and Global Investment Group on 9 September. QVSE had stopped letting Kenyans withdraw on 4 September. In place of the withdrawal screen, account holders got a notice from a “Market Surveillance Division” citing the USA PATRIOT Act and a FINRA rule that doesn’t apply to it. We pulled its Colorado incorporation papers and its US Treasury registration. One man incorporated it for USD 50 in June 2025, and its only American registration lets it cash cheques and move money. Not trade shares. At that point the CMA had published nothing about either name. Two days later it dated this notice.
CBEX is the name here with the longest paper trail. It collapsed in April 2025 after promising 100% returns in 30 days through what it called AI trading, and Nigeria’s Securities and Exchange Commission said on 17 April 2025 that neither CBEX nor its affiliates had ever been registered there. Kenya’s regulator has named it 17 months later.
Ghana already flagged tw
QVSE and Ultima Cryptocurrency both sit on a public notice Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission issued on 22 July 2026, which lists 23 entities promoting investment products there without a licence. That’s 51 days before the date on the Kenyan notice.
Just Markets
Just Markets is the one name on the list you can look up and find something. JustMarkets is a forex and CFD broker that publishes five licences, from Seychelles, Cyprus, South Africa, Mauritius and the British Virgin Islands. None of them is Kenyan. The CMA’s public register has 14 non-dealing online foreign exchange brokers, two dealing online foreign exchange brokers and three online foreign exchange money managers, and the name appears on none of the three lists.
The notice doesn’t say whether it means that broker or some other outfit trading under the name, and that matters, because the two cases aren’t alike. Running a Ponzi scheme and holding five foreign licences but not a Kenyan one are both unlawful here. Only one of them ends with your money gone.
What the law requires
Section 23 of the Capital Markets Act says nobody may carry on business as a stockbroker, dealer, investment adviser, fund manager or online forex broker, or hold themselves out as doing so, without a valid CMA licence. For anything crypto, section 8(2) of the Virtual Asset Service Providers Act says the same about virtual asset services offered in or from Kenya. Section 40(3) puts the penalty at up to KES 10 million or five years in prison for an individual, and up to KES 25 million for a company.
That Act came into force in November 2025 and its regulations were gazetted in July 2026. Section 47 gives anyone already offering virtual asset services one year from commencement to comply, so the window shuts on 4 November 2026.
The part that affects your money
Kenya has an Investor Compensation Fund, and plenty of people assume it is a general safety net for investors. Section 18(1) of the Capital Markets Act says it compensates investors for losses from “the failure of a licensed stockbroker or dealer to meet his contractual obligations”. Money sent to an entity on this list sits outside the Fund, because none of them is licensed, and the only route left is the DCI investigation and whatever it recovers. EFCC chairman Ola Olukoyede said in May 2025 that his commission had recovered a portion of the CBEX money, and declined to say how much.
So if you have money sitting on any investment platform this morning, the check takes a minute. The CMA’s licensee register is public and free to search by category, and it is the only place the answer exists. If the platform isn’t on it, the Compensation Fund will not help you, whatever certificates the platform shows you. We said this after CBEX, and again on 9 September.
The date to watch is 4 November 2026. After it, every crypto platform serving Kenyans either holds a CMA or Central Bank licence or is committing an offence, and the CMA won’t need a caution notice to act.
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