The Metaquotes company was founded in the year 2000 (https://tradersunion.com/interesting-articles/what-trading-platform-successful-traders-choose/russian-mt5) by Renat Fatkullin (https://www.forex.in.rs/who-created-metatrader). Originally, the company was known as Metaquotes Software Corporation but following its relocaton (at least on paper) to the island Republic of Cyprus, it is now known as Metaquotes, Ltd. Mr. Fatkullin still maintains majority ownership of the company, and he is a registered Administrator of the MQL5.com website (https://www.mql5.com/de/users/renat).
Although the company's registered address for service of process is now in Cyprus, the company's only paid employee-Moderator is Sergey Golubev in Russia (https://www.mql5.com/en/users/newdigital), Similarly, MQL5.com Service Desk customer support ticket communications show that the company's Support Team is in Russia.
The company's MetaTrader software was banned from mobile app stores due to international Sanctions, and the company's MQL5.com Market was banned by an international credit card processor and PayPal due to Sanctions, Anti Money Laudering laws, and/or excessive chargebacks. Although the nation of Cyprus has had issues with Sanctions (https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/cyprus-russia-eu-secrecy-tax-haven), Cyprus overhauled its Sanctions compliance laws and enforcment in 2025 (https://amc.law/cyprus-sanctions-laws-2025).
The company's software has since been allowed to return to the mobile app stores, but international credit card/PayPal processing remains a problem for customers in some naitons--especially the U.S. If you're a so located a Buyer in the MQL5.com Market, your purchase transaction will simply be declined. However if you're a so located MQL5.com Market Seller, you'll find that your sales proceeds are trapped in the possession of Metaquotes--a much nastier situation.
If you're unlucky enough to find yourself in a dispute with an MQL5.com Market Seller or Buyer, you'll find that your remedy is limited to company-owned arbitration (https://www.mql5.com/en/market/terms/customer). Arbitration is basically ruled by a private judge and prevents anyone from going to court. In a legitmate arbitration, both the Buyer and and the Seller must agree on the individual arbitrator to be used. However at MQL5.com, the very company that accepted a sales commission from the Seller in the dispute also has their own selected arbitrator on the payroll. In most jursidictions/nations, this is unethical, unlawful, and voids any such arbitration process.
Even worse, appealing the crony arbitrator's decision in court is time consuming and ridiculously expensive. Unless a lot of money is in dispute, it simply isn't worth it. A practical preemptive solution for an MQL5.com Market Buyer is to select direct credit card payment as your payment method in the checkout process. In this way, you'll generally have 60 days to request an international credit card chargeback from your credit card company if there is a product defect, scam, or fraud involved. Arbitration cannot prevent chargebacks. Unfortunately, this solution does not work for MQL5.com wallet deposits--which are indirect payments.
The risk of a dispute is real because the company does not verify the backtest reports nor live trading profits of Expert Advisors sold in the MQL5.com Market. Also, specific Expert Advisors do not perform the same accross different markets, brokers, instruments, nor contracts/symbols. Similarly, there is no verification of skills for MQL5.com Freelance "programmers." Again, use your credit card to directly pay for any Freelance work in case a dispute arises.
Before deciding whether to buy anything on MQL5.com, have a look at its independently verfiied reviews on TrustPilot.com (https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.mql5.com). At the time that this Review was posted here, there were 169 TrustPilot.com reviews posted with an average rating of 1.4 of a possible 5 stars. For reviews of the Metaquotes, Ltd. company itself, see the reviews on TrustPilot.com at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.metaquotes.net (66 reviews with average rating of 1.5 stars at the time of this Review).
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The MQL5.com Forum is a rather strange place. If you post anything that shines an honest light on the misconduct of Metaquotes or its business partners, you'll find yourself banned in the blink of an eye. Metaquotes is paid big money by its partner-brokers and even some Market Sellers. Again, keep in mind that the entire MQL5.com website is managed in Russia. If you choose to participate in the Forum, all that I can say is... Act as though you're walking through a crowd full of strangers in Moscow with Russia's limited right to speech. Don't bother looking for an organized set of MQL5.com Forum rules because it doesn't exist. Forum rules are spontaneously created on-the-fly, and "Sanctions" is now a prohibited word there.
A note regarding MT5 and MT4:
Unlike the company and its MQL5.com services, there is much less wrong with the MetaTrader trading platforms. For starters, MT5 and MT4 are free for traders. However the MetaTrader platforms are, and have always been, heavily geared toward automated/algoritihmic trading. If you're a manual trader, then frankly there are many superior feature-rich platforms for non-programmers.
Although some programmers frequently say that MT5 suffers from bugs and memory leaks, those are really just the trade-offs of using the MQL5 C++(like) language. There are 1000 ways to code the same process in MQL5, so you can adjust your code if you know MQL5's limitations. At the end of the day, MQL5 in MT5 is exponentially faster and more expansive than the MQL4 C#(like) language in MT4. Official Metaquotes support for MT4 ended years ago. If you're an MQL5 programmer, the sky is the limit in MT5.
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