Yes, it's true. The GetFinancial scam wasn't the biggest scam of the cybercrime organization that German, Austrian and Israeli law enforcement cracked down on this week. During a law enforcement day in Tel Aviv, 20 people were temporarily detained and questioned. Four individuals are reported to remain in custody and be extradited to Germany. In connection with this cybercrime organization, the name of Israeli lawyer David Bar-El is repeatedly mentioned. Another update with more names.
Simona Weinglass provided an update on the GetFinancial Case and the respective law enforcement actions in Israel, which have been initiated by German prosecutors. Allegedly, 15 people have been questioned by the police, four are said to be extradited to Germany. Court documents show that the cybercrime organization ran the scams GetFinancial, IntegraOption, SolidCFD, TradeSolid, BitCapitalMarkets, MyCoinbanking, Procapitalmarkets, Profitstrade, FXPace, Acceptrade, and Gainfintech using the platforms SpotOption and Tradologic.
Israeli fintech pundits also invented binary options industry. Big players like SpotOption, PandaTS, or Tradologic had thousands of binary options schemes running on their platforms as white-label clients. Binary options turned out to be ultimately a gigantic fraud industry. Conveniently, fund recovery companies have also emerged in Israel, often run by former scammers. Schemes like Europe Refund or MyQuickRefund run massive Google Ad campaigns to acquire scam victims and sell their expensive services.
PandaTS is currently facing some hassles with law enforcement agencies from several jurisdictions. Among them, the Israeli ones. Agents from the Israeli police and their counterparts from other jurisdictions reportedly raided PandaTS' offices in Israel almost two weeks ago. And seized a lot of data. It is well known that the PandaTS platform is used by many scammers, such as the already convicted cybercrime principal Gal Barak. He has also accused PandaTS of manipulating trades for white-label platform clients. In his trial, Barak moved the Austrian court to order a search of his home in Israel and Cyprus.
Israeli Gal Barak was sentenced in September 2020 to four years in prison and millions in restitution payments for investment fraud and money laundering in the Vienna Cybercrime Trials. Barak also faces charges in Germany. He was the head of the cybercrime organization E&G Bulgaria, which operated broker scams such as XtraderFX, SafeMarkets, Golden Markets, or OptionStarsGlobal. Payvision was its main payment facilitator, and PandaTS, the white label provider, which Barak charges with similar arguments as the U.S. SEC does in its SpotOption fraud complaint.
Broker scams are like icebergs. You can see only the tip sticking out of the water, i.e., domain, website, offshore entities, and nominees a/k/a monkeys. Underwater or in the darkness of the Internet, the real perpetrators and facilitators are hiding. These scam-facilitators are white label providers, the boiler room operators, marketing and affiliate systems, and the payment processors. In the case of the Yukom scam, these were the boiler rooms in Israel and Mauritius, mostly Israeli payment processors, and the white-label operator SpotOption, which provided the software and trading infrastructure.
The Israeli broker white-label operator SpotOption is related to the Yukom Case. Today, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 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 deceiving U.S. investors out of more than $100 million through fraudulent and unregistered online sales of risky securities known as binary options.
FinTelegram received information connected to binary options scams around David Cartu. These include court documents provided by retail investors who have already filed criminal complaints in various jurisdictions.