Hong Kong’s securities watchdog has declared broker SBCFX and many of its affiliated entities unlicensed, shortly after a collapse in trading that forced thousands of gold investors to lose their $USDT holdings.
According to the reports, the SFC added SBCFX, Star Bridge Capital Group, Star Bridge Capital Pty Limited, and Topical Wealth International Ltd to its alert list on August 28, alongside the Chinese-language names 星橋資本 and 星橋資本集團. The warning links to the broker’s site, sbcfx.com.
The regulator’s stance is limited yet important because, according to the SFC, none of the identified parties in the case are licensed or registered to perform regulated activities in Hong Kong.
Companies based outside Hong Kong are not permitted to advertise their services to the people of Hong Kong without prior authorization.
The alert does not imply that fraud has occurred nor that the licenses possessed by the group in other jurisdictions are no longer valid. However, it means that HK clients dealing with these entities are not offered the protection normally afforded to SFC-licensed firms.
The London gold blowup that triggered it
The designation came at a time when controversies were brewing around SBCFX. Caixin Global reported on August 22 that investors and the Hong Kong police had gathered at the office of SBCFX in The Center in Central after a severe trading glitch resulted in massive liquidations in gold trading in London and wiped out thousands of retail investors’ accounts.
Caixin estimated that around 3,000 investors from inside and outside mainland China might be prone to suffer losses from the incident.
The services have been impacted in relation to two growing challenges faced by regulators; these two include the use of heavily leveraged algorithmic trading and the increase in deposits in cryptocurrencies in the OTC derivatives market.
Another challenge was determining which entity traders were actually dealing with. SBCFX marketed itself as the online brand of Star Bridge Capital and cites regulatory ties in Australia, South Africa, and Seychelles, per reports.
These include an Australian Financial Services Licence held by Star Bridge Capital Group Pty Ltd and a Seychelles dealer licence held by Topical Wealth International Ltd. The broker says the entity serving each client depends on where that client lives.
It may be difficult to regain those deposits
The nature of operations also makes it difficult to regain those deposits in stablecoins now.
Investors were able to create leveraged positions using $USDT, Tether’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, and stablecoins that are not held in a regulated institution can be difficult to get back once something goes wrong.
A report published in March 2026 by the Financial Action Task Force addressed this issue. Transfers of stablecoins using peer-to-peer technology in unhosted wallets do not involve any regulated Virtual Asset Service Providers between the transacting parties, while issuers sometimes might not be able to monitor transactions across blockchains.
At the same time, the very elements of $USDT that make it suitable for cross-border trading accounts of investors can also complicate the process of asset freezing or tracing in case these individuals might wish to get their funds back.
Even if a stablecoin issuer has the capability to intervene, recovery is not something that just happens. Tether states that it has assisted in freezing assets worth over $4.4 billion while cooperating with more than 340 law enforcement agencies from more than 65 countries.
Cryptopolitan cited a report that looked at 2,955 Tether freeze incidents on August 6. It discovered an average of over two hours from the time a freeze was proposed to when it was executed on-chain. There were about $20.4 million worth of $USDT transferred by over sixty addresses ahead of the freeze, or effectively written off.
For many traders seeking to salvage their assets in foreign accounts, it creates uncertainty about whether their funds can be retrieved. The key point from Hong Kong’s SFC is that none of the four names in its Aug. 28, 2026, alert is licensed or registered with the SFC.
The overseas licenses do not mean the entities were licensed by Hong Kong’s SFC. The SFC’s Aug. 28 alert explicitly says all five names — including SBCFX and the three corporate names — are not licensed or registered with the SFC for regulated activities.
