Scammed out of $11,250 SIM Payout - Bait & Swtch avoid
Avoid Elite Trader Funding, they do not honor qualified SIM-funded payout requests. I just had 5 × $150K accounts cancelled the day after I requested $11,250 in payouts I had already earned. I’m a CPA with nearly 30 years in corporate finance (multiple CFO roles). I’ve taken payouts from Take Profit Pro+, Trade Day, Tradeify, Lucid, Blusky and others. Timeline: 1.) 5/20/26 – Bought 5 × $150K 1-Step Intraday Trail Elite accounts 2.) Passed eval Day 1 (> $9K profit each) 3.) Moved to SIM-Funded and traded the required 8 active days By 6/1/26 every account looked like this: • ~$8,083 profit per account • Total ~$40,500 across the 5 accounts • All consistency rules met (lowest day well above 23% floor) • Well past the $5K buffer 6/1 evening → Payout requests submitted 6/2 → KYC refresh approved (done same day) 6/3 morning → “LIVE ELITE Account Review Notice” email 6/3 same day → ALL 5 SIM accounts suddenly cancelled 6/4 → “Congratulations” email from Risk Team: You’re being moved to Live Elite. All SIM profits wiped. No payouts owed. Options they gave me: A) $2,200 starting live account (max 5 micros) B) One-time “final” payout of ~$1,200 total (instead of the $11,250 I earned) I already had $2,500 in verified live payouts with ETF last fall. When I asked about the delinquent $11,250 request (past their own 48-hour guarantee), support replied: “There is no negotiation in this process once you are converted.” This pattern has repeatedly come up on Trust Pilot and X.com. Hit the 8-day payout window → dashboard briefly shows “Approved” → accounts cancelled → tiny live account offered instead. Their own rules allow it… but that doesn’t make it right. If you’re grinding ETF challenges, read the fine print on LIVE ELITE transitions before you hit payout eligibility. Protect your capital. Trade with firms that actually pay when you win. UPDATE: 6/8/26 UPDATE (June 8): After posting this review, ETF sent an automated email claiming my KYC was pending and threatening forfeiture by 1:13 PM EST today, despite my profile being fully approved by their KYC provider Sumsub on June 2nd. Furthermore, because I declined their forced live-account transition, they attempted to apply a retroactive 2%–5% penalty structure to slash a ~$41K performance balance down to an insulting ~$1200. Absolute bad-faith operation. FINAL UPDATE (June 8): The firm responded to this review and processed a payout of exactly $1,192.36 on an earned performance balance of over $40K across 5 compliant accounts. They will hide behind terms like "discretionary live transition" and "program rules" to justify this, but the mathematical reality speaks for itself: because I declined to transition into a microscopic, highly restricted live account structure, they retroactively slashed my payout by over 90% using an unlisted, predatory sliding scale (5% on the first $12.5K, 2% on everything above it). They also attempted today to enforce an arbitrary 5-day KYC expiration deadline within hours of the dispute, completely ignoring that their own compliance vendor (Sumsub) had already verified my profile last week on Jun 2nd after I submitted my initial payout request. They didn't "honor their terms"; they executed a predatory practice to screw the trader. Consider this a hard warning to the trading community of how the ETF model works when you win. These were some of the toughest accounts in the Futures prop space with Intraday Trail, and 8 days traded for a payout in SIM Funded, the least they could do is honor one legitimate payout request before moving one to Live. I highly advise sticking with the top reputable firms that really honor payouts when you earn it. Many other good choices out there.