When a broker blocks your withdrawal: the first 72 hours
A "technical glitch." An "account under review." The excuses vary; the pattern does not. The broker is playing for time, and time is working against you. Here is your 72-hour timeline.
Hours 0–3: put everything on the record
Screenshot your account dashboard. Save every exchange with support. Capture your withdrawal requests, with the dates and amounts. Evidence tends to vanish the moment the website does.
At the same time, verify the broker's authorisation directly at source: in the register of investment firms kept by CONSOB, in the CySEC register or in the FCA register — never through a link your account manager sends you. An authorisation issued in one EU member state is valid across the entire Union under the European passport provided for by the MiFID II Directive (2014/65/EU): what counts is who granted the original authorisation, not where the local office happens to sit. That is what determines which compensation scheme will protect you — the Fondo Nazionale di Garanzia, the British FSCS, the Cypriot ICF — or none at all, if there was never any authorisation to provide investment services in the first place.
Day 1: have the supervisory authorities already acted?
Check the notices published by CONSOB, CySEC and the FCA suspending authorisations. If a decision already exists, it does not by itself get your money back — no supervisory authority can order the intermediary to pay you — but it is documentary evidence of the first order and it fixes a firm date. Use it immediately.
No decision yet? Call your bank: the window to recall a SEPA transfer or file a chargeback is far narrower than the supervisors' timelines. Investor compensation schemes guarantee at least €20,000 per investor: that is the minimum threshold applying across the Union (Directive 97/9/EC). In Italy it is the Fondo Nazionale di Garanzia that steps in, paying up to €20,000, and it makes no difference whether you are a client in Italy, in Germany or in any other member state. The scope, however, has to be checked at once: these funds cover only authorised intermediaries that belong to the scheme, and they intervene where the intermediary is subject to insolvency proceedings — not where a withdrawal has simply been refused.
There is no cast-iron guarantee. But there is almost always a way forward.
72 hours: never pay to "speed things up"
Is someone offering to unblock your account for an upfront fee? That is a second layer of fraud. No compensation fund and no authority will ever ask you for an advance payment to get back what is yours.
