Gal Barak and his partner, German citizen Uwe Lenhoff, were arrested in early 2019 in an international law enforcement action. They are accused by various EU authorities of being part of an international cybercrime organization that has defrauded tens of thousands of retail investors of hundreds of millions via broker scams. The Austrian public prosecutor has now brought the first charge.
The Israeli Gal Barak and his Bulgarian wife Marina Barak (formerly known as Marina Andreeva) were the operators of Bulgarian E&G Bulgaria (formerly E&G Finance). Together with their Israeli network with Amit Hulin, Kfir Levy, Jesse Tally, and Itzik Gellet, E&G Bulgaria, based in Sofia, operated the huge broker scams XTraderFX, SafeMarkets, Golden Markets, CryptoPoint or OptionStars.
Through illegal boiler rooms in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, consumers and retail investors in the EU were attacked and pressed to invest in trading with binary options, CFDs, or cryptocurrencies. In reality, however, the money deposited by retail investors was not invested in trading, but in financing the operation and expansion of the cybercrime organization, private luxury, and real estate. According to our records, more than 25,000 customer victims worldwide are said to have lost well over €150 million.
It is expected that the process will start as early as summer this year. Gal Barak and his wife Marina Barak are the defendants in this first trial. We have heard that this is only the first of many trials in this context in different EU jurisdictions.
In Germany, Gal Barak‘s former partner, Uwe Lenhoff, is in prison where he is awaiting trial along with about a dozen other accused in this context.
Together with the Dutch real estate investor Dirk-Jan Bakker, the German entrepreneur Falk Uwe Preussner and the Dutch accountant Marcel Noordeloos, Lenhoff founded the AIM-listed B90 Holdings PLC (formerly Veltyoc Group PLC). The former partners of Lenhoff claim that he deceived them and cheated them out of many millions.
