Tag: Yossi Herzog

Is Playnance the new frontier for financial “games” in the age of blockchain, led by the controversial founder of SpotOption? The legendary SpotOption, under the stewardship of the Israeli Pini Peter, was the undisputed titan of the binary options industry—a sector now globally condemned as fraudulent and responsible for bilking hundreds of thousands of retail investors out of billions of dollars.

The U.S. CFTC has secured a massive $451 million judgment against the operators of the fraudulent Israeli binary options scheme linked to Yukom Communications. This enforcement action marks the culmination of years of global fraud facilitated by offshore entities and front companies, a network that FinTelegram has been exposing since its inception.

Lee Elbaz, 42, is a former CEO of the Israeli binary options scam scheme Yukom Communications, which defrauded investors worldwide of at least $140 million. In 2019, a U.S. jury found Elbaz guilty, including bank wire fraud. She was sentenced to 22 years in prison and $28 million in restitution payments. Elbaz was working from Israel and portrayed herself as a mere middle manager following the directions of the scheme's owners, Yossi Herzog and Kobi Cohen. She still fights her U.S. conviction.

The binary options industry was conceived in Israel as a gamification of the Forex industry. Forex for the stupid, it was. One of the masterminds and a member of our super villains' list was Yossi Herzog. Together with his junior partner Yakov "Kobi" Cohen, he launched, among others, the Yukom Scheme. While their former CEO, Lee Elbaz, and other managers were sentenced to prison and fines in the U.S., Herzog and Cohen are not available for the U.S. authorities.

The Times of Israel reports more arrests in the notorious binary options schemes operator Yukom Communications. Ori Maymon, Nissim Alfasi, Afik Tori, Oron Montgomery, Dave Barzilay, and Gilad Mazugi,, were arrested at the request of U.S. prosecutors. Their lawyers are fighting the extradition. Former CEO Lee Elbaz received 22 years of prison time and a $28 million restitution payments order. In March 2022, Elad Bigelman, former brand manager for BigOption, was sentenced to a 36-months prison term. The case will continue with a few more sentences, it seems!

Aviv Talmor, the Founder and CEO of the binary options scheme UTrade, has received a four-year prison sentence for defrauding investors of $22 million, FinanceMagnates reports. Additionally, he was fined about $78,900. The District Court in Tel Aviv sentenced Talmor after the conviction in September 2022. He was found guilty of fraud under aggravated circumstances, theft by an authorized person, money laundering, and managing an investment portfolio without a license.

Yukom Communications was the Israeli boiler room operator behind vast binary options scams BigOption, BinaryBook, or BinaryOnline and caused retail investors worldwide $150M losses. Elad Bigelman was the brand manager for BigOption. On March 14, 2022, Judge Paula Xinis handed a prison term of 36 months and three years of supervised release to Bigelman. It was the latest decision in the still-pending Yukom Case

Israeli lawyer Moshe Strugano, 52, is a greedy man always looking for more money. He was one of the facilitating lawyers of the fraudulent Israeli binary options scene. Scammers like Yossi Herzog, Kobi Cohen, Lee Elbaz, David Cartu, et al have run dozens of binary options scams worldwide, defrauding tens of thousands of consumers out of hundreds of millions. They could not have done this without the support of lawyers like Moshe Strugano. The US prosecutors charged him with conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud and sought his extradition from Israel.

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.

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.

UK FCA issued investor warnings against two suspected fund recovery scams Trader Recovery (www.traderrecovery.co.uk) and National Association of Refund Expert Bureaux (www.refund-expert.org). 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.