Israel’s multi-million dollar scammers
Thousands of Israelis work for crooked internet trading firms
EVERY MORNING, thousands of Israelis wake up and go to work stealing money from strangers abroad. If you are in your 20s, live in Tel Aviv and moved to Israel from another country, you probably have numerous acquaintances who do this. Drawn by the salaries, they have taken jobs in the widely fraudulent industries of binary options and forex.
One Italian acquaintance of mine said that most of his friends,
(new immigrants) from Italy, work in binary options. My neighbour, an international student at the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, said that about 10 per cent of her classmates work in the field. Several acquaintances, mothers of young children, apparently think nothing of dropping their kids off at day care, driving to a fancy office tower in Herzliya or Ramat Gan and writing SEO spam for an industry that seeks to bring financial ruin to families in places like the UK, Saudi Arabia or the United States — and even Israel itself.
This is an unfortunate fact. When readers in the UK open the newspapers and read the cringe-inducing claim that Britain’s largest-scale fraud preys on pensioners, leads to suicides and is centered on Israel, the reports are sadly, tragically, true. At the beginning of this year, in my capacity as an investigative reporter for the
I was approached by a young man who had worked in the binary options industry and wanted to be a whistleblower.
At first I could not believe what he told me, but I soon learned that over the past 10 years, in the absence of government concern or effective law enforcement, a shameful scam industry has been allowed to fester and grow in Israel to the point where it rakes in hundreds
This scam preys on pensioners and has led to suicides
lated firms. Ex-employees of binary options companies have estimated the figure at 96-99 per cent. Many binary options companies will redistribute about 10 per cent of the money they take to those clients who secure card refunds (via the normal credit card fraud protection schemes) or those who seem the most doggedly determined to complain to law enforcement authorities or sue the company. Statistically, most clients trade away their deposits (the cash placed in a trading account) eventually, but that is not enough for fraudulent binary options firms, many of which also rig their technology platforms to make clients lose trades, as well as refuse to pay out to clients who “earn” money on the computer screen. This is where the companies’ Israeli location becomes useful (many, but not all binary options brokerages are located in Israel). Once a broker decides they have got as much money as they can out of a client, they will often “disappear”, blocking the client on Skype, refusing
The vast majority of binary options clients lose some or all or their money