Chinese brokerages tighten account checks amid regulatory scrutiny

China’s securities regulator just dropped the hammer on unauthorized cross-border trading. The China Securities Regulatory Commission announced penalties exceeding $330 million against some of the region’s biggest online brokers, forcing platforms to freeze new account openings for mainland clients and effectively walling off a popular backdoor into global markets. The targets are familiar names: Futu Securities International, Tiger Brokers, and Longbridge Securities, all of which built massive businesses by making it easy for mainland Chinese investors to trade Hong Kong and US stocks from their phones. That convenience, it turns out, ran afoul of Beijing’s rules on unauthorized foreign trading services. What the crackdown looks like in practice As of June 12, 2026, the affected platforms must stop opening new accounts for mainland clients entirely. No new buy orders. No new deposits traced back to mainland sources. The only thing existing clients can do is reduce or close their positions over a two-year wind-down period. Mainland clients who want to keep trading through Hong Kong now face a gauntlet of new requirements. They must demonstrate that their funds originate from outsid...