The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued investor warnings against two suspected fund recovery scams; against Trader Recovery (www.traderrecovery.co.uk) here and the National Association of Refund Expert Bureaux a/k/a Refund Expert (www.refund-expert.org) here. The former’s website is currently down. It is a sad fact that there are more and more fund recovery scams that lure even more money out of already damaged victims of scams by promising them to get their money back. Unfortunately, they are nothing but super-toxic. Even worse than the scammers that defrauded the victims.
Often these fund recovery scammers ask for initial payments in the range of several thousand Euros and then recover nothing at all. In quite a few fund recovery scams that we investigated, the very same scammers that have stolen the victims’ money in the first place offered their recovery services afterward. With inside knowledge of these scams they have worked for, they impress their victims and make them believe that they could really get their money back.
An example of the way most fund recovery scams work is the now-closed Israeli Wealth Recovery International (WRI) established by the former binary options fraudster Austin Smith, a US-born Israeli citizen. Before launching his WRI in or around 2017, Austin Smith used to work as a manager for the Israeli Yukom and their binary options schemes. There, being a boiler room agent, he defrauded victims. He then allegedly stole the data of Yukom victims and then used it for his fund recovery purposes. That’s according to his former boss Yossi Herzog, who is wanted by U.S. authorities for binary options fraud and is on the run. He was the beneficial owner of the Yukom scheme.
He was indicted by the U.S. Government, pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, and was sentenced to a 12 months prison-term in the United States for binary options Fraud and his WRI fund recovery scam (read the Stipulation of Facts of the U.S. prosecutors).
