Broker technology and platform provider 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 PandaTS offices in Israel and Cyprus. He provided the addresses.
The Scam Clientele
PandaTS has numerous regulated brokers as clients. Many of them are regulated by CySEC. In addition, PandaTS operates a regular scam factory and runs countless illegally operating brokers a/k/a scams as white-label mutations. Gal Barak was one of the smaller scam clients of PandaTS with the scam brands XTraderFX, SafeMarkets, or Golden Markets. We have already uncovered many of them; lately, we have reported about InvestXE. Below are seven more illegal brokers using PandaTS:
- Coinnery with www.coinnery.com operated by Coinnery Ltd
- MargexOnline with www.margexonline.com operated by MargexOnline Ltd
- CryptoFinancial with www.cryptofinancial.live operated by CryptoFinancialINVESTMENT LTD
- FXBitMining with www.fxbitmining.com operated by Vantage International Group Ltd
- FXMarketTrades with www.fxmarketrades.com operated by FXmarkettrades Ltd
- TradeMarketsOption with www.trademarketsoption.live
- PrestoTradeOptions with www.prestotradeoptions.online operated by PrestotradeOptions Investments Ltd
The new scams look almost identical in design and process. Remarkably but logically, the new scams currently want mostly cryptocurrencies from their victims. PandaTS has nicely expanded this feature. This is to make it more difficult for law enforcement agencies to track the flow of money.
The Owners
Panda Application and Trade Ltd is an Israeli company owned 50% by Maor Lahav (LinkedIn) and 50% by Shmuel Gutman (LinkedIn). In Israel, the company has two subsidiaries, Panda T.S. Ltd and Panda Trading Technologies Ltd. However, the business with white-label customers is mainly conducted in Cyprus, where the company’s servers are also located. Gal Barak has therefore explicitly demanded a search of the PandaTS offices in Limassol, Cyprus.
PandaTS is the global leader in trading systems and white-label execution platforms following the demise of Pini Peter‘s Israeli SpotOption. Tradologic, owned and operated by Gal Barak and his partners, collapsed in a dispute between the partners, law enforcement actions, and subsequent arrest of Barak. Tradologic also had more than 240 white-label clients, including numerous scams clients. Besides PandaTS, there is currently Leverate, which also operates in Israel and Cyprus. Israeli technology companies dominate the entire scene of forex, CFD, and crypto trading.
We will monitor and report on further developments around PandaTS. If you have any information on this, we would appreciate it if you could share it with our research team.
