Your best option... IGNORE this offer
N.P. writes: You might be interested in the letter I had from TB Options Limited, following a cold call. It offers binary options with amazing returns of up to £2,000 a week if I invest £10,000. As you will see from the copy of the letter I am sending, TB Options does not give its address or phone number. I get the impression it does not wish to be traced. I would not touch this with a bargepole. If only the Chancellor had known about TB Options, there would never have been suggestions of a black hole in his Budget. He could simply have invested the UK’s way out of trouble. ACCORDING to the letter you received: ‘The realistic earning potential with a £10,000 account doing £500 trades is £400 PROFIT per trade, and even if we only have an 81.7 per cent success rate, you will still look to achieve weekly profits in the region of £1,000 – £2,000.’
You do not even have to decide whether stocks and shares, or currencies and commodities, are going to rise or fall. TB Options ‘will find all the best trades and do all the analysing on your behalf’. All you need do is hand over your savings and the firm will tell you how to place spin-of-acoin bets on price movements, with instant profit – or total losses.
Too good to be true? Not half. This is a scam with more holes in it than a Swiss cheese. On paper, the company is run by sole director Lee Denton, 32, from Oxted, Surrey, and it is based in Cheapside in the City, not far from the Bank of England. But my own enquiries suggest it is more likely to be run from Israel, home to a growing number of binary options rip-offs.
I asked Denton for an interview with any investor who had made the profits he claims. I also asked where he gained experience of dealing in stocks and commodities. He did not reply and though I traced two phone numbers for him, both were dead lines.
This is a shame as I had more questions for him. For a start, his website’s terms and conditions say all disputes are to be settled under ‘United Kingdom law’, while genuine companies typically refer to the laws of England and Wales, since Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own systems.
The same terms and conditions refer to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. This is a US law that only applies in the US – where TB Options cannot legally trade as it has no investment licence. The terms state that they were ‘last updated on January 17 2014’ – yet TB Options did not exist before last July. They also boast that the legal wording has been supplied by a law firm in Tel Aviv.
In short, the terms are nonsense, a cut-and-paste job from elsewhere and have not even been tarted up to include the company’s name properly. To open an account, you are asked to declare ‘that all funds invested in your account with xxxx do not originate from drug trafficking’.
Binary options firms in Britain are licensed and regulated by the Gambling Commission. But its powers only apply if a firm’s ‘key equipment’ is here – and neither TB Options nor its trading computers can be located.
Last Tuesday, the US watchdog Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged two binary options firms with fraud. Vault Options and Global Trader 365 are both based in Israel. Under current laws, British authorities are virtually powerless and investors are a sitting duck, while the Treasury has spent the past year mulling over whether to hand responsibility to the Financial Conduct Authority. Whether binary options firms claim to be in Britain or elsewhere, the only sensible choice for investors is to stay well clear. You might just as well throw your money down the drain.
If you believe you are the victim of financial wrongdoing, write to Tony Hetherington at Financial Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TS or email tony.hetherington@mailonsunday.co.uk. Because of the high volume of enquiries, personal replies cannot be given. Please send only copies of original documents, which we regret cannot be returned.