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How can I verify that a broker I found online is legitimate?
(I answered a similar question before.) Essentially, you shouldn't trust a site you find on the Internet merely because it looks professional and real.  Before signing up with any new service provider you found online, you should verify the authenticity of both the organization itself and their web site address. Even if the name displayed by a web site represents a legitimate brokerage firm, any site you happen to come across on the Internet could be an elaborate spoof of a real company, intended to capture your personal details (or worse). First, to check if a brokerage firm is in fact registered to trade securities – in the United States – you can consult FINRA's BrokerCheck online service.  This might be the first of many checks you should undertake ... after you convince yourself that FINRA is legitimate.  A meta-problem ;-) Then, if you want to know if the web site address is authentic, one way is to contact that broker offline using the contact information found from a trusted source, such as the FINRA BrokerCheck details.  Unfortunately, those details do not currently appear to contain the broker's web site URL.  (Else, that could be useful.) Another thing to look at is the site's login or sign-up page, for a valid SSL certificate that is both issued to the correct legal name of the brokerage firm as well as has been signed by a well-known certificate authority (e.g. VeriSign). For a financial services firm of any kind, you should look for and expect to see an Extended Validation Certificate.  Any other kind of certificate might only assert that the certificate was issued to the domain-name owner, and not necessarily to an organization with the registered legal name.  (Yes, anybody can register a domain with a similar name and then acquire a basic SSL certificate for that domain.) FWIW, Scottrade and ShareBuilder are both legitimate brokers (I was aware already of each, but I also just checked in the FINRA tool), and the URLs currently linked to by the question are legitimate web site addresses for each.  Also, you can see their EV certificates in action on secured pages here and here. As to whether your investments with those brokers would be "safe" in the event of the broker failing (e.g. goes bankrupt), you'll want to know that they are members of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (Wikipedia).  (Of course, this kind of protection doesn't protect you if your investments simply go down in value.) But do your own due diligence – always.