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November 26, 2020

CySEC confirms crypto regulation – What it means for Maxigrid and BitandBuy!

Maxigrid Ltd is a regulated Cyprus Investment Firm (CIF) and has made its crypto platform - as well as its bank accounts with GlobalNetint - available to scammers and acted as a payment processor for them. The Financial Ombudsman Service of the Republic of Cyprus purported that the CySEC would not regulate crypto assets. Apparently, it does. The CySEC has issued a guideline on how CIFs should deal with crypto.

October 11, 2020

Lessons from BitMEX Case – Arrests, warrants, and bribing regulators with coconuts

The U.S. Prosecutors charge the BitMex founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, Samuel Reed along with the senior manager Gregory Dwyer with (a) violating the Bank Secrecy Act and (b) conspiring to violate the Bank Secrecy Act, by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an anti-money laundering (“AML”) program at the crypto exchange or BitMEX. The charges each carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

October 9, 2020

Maxigrid Case – Open Letter to CySEC chairwoman and Europol

FinTelegram and EFRI have sent an open letter concerning Maxigrid and the related broker scams like RoyalsFX or LincolnFX (to name only two) to Demetra Kalogerou, chairwoman of CySEC, and Europol. The claim of The Financial Ombudsman Service of the Republic of Cyprus that CySEC would not be responsible for the crypto activities of the investment firms they regulate is wrong in our view. In addition, Maxigrid also handled bank deposits for scams hance was involved in fraudulent FIAT transactions too.

October 8, 2020

Maxigrid Case – Cyprus Financial Ombudsman confirms regulatory violations but doesn’t care!

Cyprus is really dark territory within the regulatory regimes in the EU. In plain sight, CySEC-regulated investment firms operate scams and/or facilitate them with their financial services. As in the case of Roy Almagor's Maxigrid and its meanwhile vanished BitandBuy crypto investment platform. Even the Financial Ombudsman Office has found that Maxigrid has violated regulatory requirements. However, the office does not feel responsible for customer complaints for very strange reasons.

September 25, 2020

CySEC Tourism – More scams and victims of Maxigrid’s BitandBuy fraud facilitator identified

Sometime in April 2020, the discussion with Maxigrid started. A customer lost several hundred thousand Euros via the broker Scam RoyalsFX. He had made the deposits on the instructions of RoyalsFX via the BitandBuy crypto platform of the CySEC-regulated Maxigrid. He lost everything and involved FinTelegram in the complaint and shortly afterward BitandBuy disappeared without a trace. However, more scams and victims appeared after our Request 4 Information in June 2020.

August 31, 2020

Broker scam Trade99, ClearTransfer, and another vanished crypto platform

Since we started our reports about the RoyalsFX Scam and described the background and processes, victims of other scams like LincolnFX or Trade99 have come forward. They have identified similar processes and/or have been involved in several of these scams and have discovered parallels. The involvement of the CySEC-regulated Maxigrid Ltd as a payment processor and its crypto platform BitandBuy was one of these parallels. As is the disappearance of another crypto platform.

August 27, 2020

FinTel Ombudsman – Maxigrid lawyer urges clients and scam victims to shut up

The story around the broker scams RoyalsFX and LincolnFX. These two broker scams have been using the CySEC-regulated investment firm Maxigrid Ltd (www.maxigrid.com) to process deposits from client-victims. Some of the victims made deposits via the now-vanished Maxigrid crypto platform BitandBuy and others without any crypto disguise to Maxigrid's bank account at the Lithuanian GlobalNetInt. Maxigrid denies any involvement in scam business and/or respective client allegations and threatens complaining customers with lawsuits.

August 19, 2020

Scam broker RoyalsFX, LincolnFX, and CapitalFunds are part of the Joshua Group

In the last weeks, we have invested considerable time and resources in the Scams RoyalsFX and LincolnFX. These scams were customers of the CySEC-regulated Maxigrid Ltd of Roy Almagor and Jekaterina Pedosa and have processed payments of client-victims via crypto and FIAT. Substantial sums of the customer victims were processed via the now-closed crypto platform BitandBuy (www.bitandbuy.com and https://crypto.maxigrid.com). The platform disappeared without further comment during the probe in Maxigrid. These scams and many more are part of the scam network of the Joshua Group.

August 16, 2020

CySEC Scam Tourism – The Israeli Maxigrid Network attacking EU investors

This is the second part of our series about CySEC Scam Tourism which has its roots in the era of binary options. In this period between 2010 and 2017, mainly Israeli financial entrepreneurs came to Cyprus en masse to set up their CySEC regulated Binary Options Brokers. Simona Weinglass, an investigative reporter of The Times of Israel, called it Israel's vast and amoral scam industry. The CySEC has not made things too difficult for these foreign binary options scammers.

August 7, 2020

The CySEC Scam Tourism – Launch of Investigative Series

CySEC is the financial supervisory authority of the Republic of Cyprus and a sort of gatekeeper for the EU financial markets. Cyprus has developed into the single most important gateway to EU financial markets for non-EU citizens and organizations. The Israeli financial scene in particular makes intensive use of this gateway. But also Russian individuals and companies enter the EU financial markets via Cyprus. The CySEC is controversial within the EU regulators because of its "relaxed" approach.

June 3, 2020

Request 4 Information – RoyalsFX, BitandBuy, Maxigrid, and a victims case

We have been in intensive contact with client-victims of the RoyalsFX broker scam in the last weeks. The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA and the Italian CONSOB have warned against the RoyalsFX scheme which worked with Maxigrid and its crypto payment platform BitandBuy.