Agreed, you don't have a great deal of recourse with regulated ones anyway. I was just reading about a case where a UK broker (Tickmill) ripped off one of their clients because he had a disagreement with one of their customer service agents. She closed his trades while he was in draw down and all sorts. If you want to take legal action against them you can, but the legal fees and the time it takes you makes it totally not worth it unless you are trading like 100k plus account.
As I understand it is not illegal for you to use an offshore provide, but it might be illegal for a company to accept US clients, so just check on the website of which ever ones you look at, or speak to their customer service department and check. Over here in Australia many of us have gone offshore due to the new leverage laws that came in. I was using IC Markets with 1:500 fx leverage (the normal) but they capped the leverage to 1:30 not too long back, which absolutely sucks for us Aussie traders. Using CedarFX now which is a pretty decent offshore option.
You only need to trade enough to withdraw your initial deposit anyway after that's it's effectively risk free, goes for any broker.