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Breaking News – SEC files complaint against white-label broker hub SpotOption and its owners

SEC complaint against SpotOption
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The Israeli broker white-label operator SpotOption is related to the Yukom Case. Today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it charged Spot Tech House Ltd (d/b/a SpotOption) and two of its former top executives, Malhaz Pinhas Patarkazishvili (a/k/a Pini Peter) and Ran Amiran, with running a multi-million dollar fraud scheme deceiving U.S. investors out of more than $100 million through fraudulent and unregistered online sales of risky securities known as binary options.

According to the SEC’s complaint, SpotOption – under the control of Pini Peter, the founder and former chief executive officer, and Ran Amiran, the former president – defrauded retail investors worldwide through a scheme involving the sale of online binary options. The SEC has previously charged several entities and individuals connected with their involvement in the sale of binary options using the SpotOption platform, including in the SEC v. Banc de Binary, SEC v. Beserglik, and SEC v. Senderov cases.

The SEC claims that the defendants licensed their products and services to entities they called “white label partners,” who directly marketed the binary options. According to the complaint, SpotOption instructed its white label partners to aggressively market the binary options as highly profitable investments for retail investors. 

As alleged, investors were not told that the defendants’ white label partners were the counter-parties on all investor trades and profited when their investors (client-victims) lost money. To ensure sufficient investor losses and make the scheme profitable, SpotOption allegedly, among other tactics, instructed its partners to permit investors to withdraw only a portion of the monies the investors deposited, devised a manipulative payout structure for binary options trades. It designed its trading platform to increase the probability that investors’ trades would expire worthlessly.

 According to the complaint, the defendants’ deceptive business practices caused U.S. and foreign investors to lose a substantial portion of the money they deposited to their trading accounts. The defendants allegedly made millions of dollars as a result.

Stay tuned for a more detailed analysis of this landmark case!

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