FinTelegram has reported the transformation of the now forbidden binary options industry into the cryptospace several times over the last months. With their illegally earned millions, most of the fraud artists coming from Israel have plunged into the 2017 dazzling crypto world. The potential big money of the ICOs in combination with the already looming ban of the binary options facilitated this transformation. But with the collapse of the ICO hype and cryptocurrencies the expected rain of money turned into a lethal trap. Game over for the binary options artists!
Good news – the naive money has dried up. As a matter of fact, neither binary options nor cryptocurrencies work. With it, a billion-dollar fraud industry “made in Israel” is about to collapse. In the coming weeks and months, we expect a tsunami of insolvencies and lawsuits. Moreover, enforcement agencies will chase those fraud artists. This development is fed by hundreds of thousands bounced investors.
One of the big players in the field of binary options and cryptocurrencies was the Israeli Moshe HOGEG. Now a court in Tel Aviv has ordered the liquidation of his holding company and appointed a temporary liquidator for the company behind Invest.com. 17 Shareholders of the company filed a respective petition with the court. HOGEG was one of Israel’s highest-profile cryptocurrency entrepreneurs. According to the report, he went on a multimillion-dollar spending spree. He purchased a $19 million property in Tel-Aviv, paying for part of it in Bitcoin. He bought one of Israel’s top soccer teams for $7.2 million and made a $1.9 million donation to the Tel Aviv University to establish the “Hogeg Institute for Blockchain Applications”.
Simona WEINGLASS published a detailed report on this case in the Times of Israel today. It sets out interesting links between the illegal binary options and the cryptoscene. Reading Simona’s article one gets an idea of how many hundreds of millions in investment money disappeared there in the darkness of the Internet. It was Simona WEINGLASS, who brought up the massive binary options fraud. She estimated that the industry has stolen billions of dollars from victims worldwide over a period of 10 years.
According to the petition, HOGEG’s Invest.com should have earned millions from its ICOs and other activities, “but the revenues from all this activity did not enter the coffers of Invest.com and were instead stolen by Hogeg,” resulting an insolvent Invest.com. According to the shareholders’ petition filed with the Tel Aviv court, ICO’s in Invest.com’s network of companies raised cryptocurrencies worth some USD 100 Mio.
The recipe of binary options artists seemed striking and actually worked in the ICO hype – addressing existing binary options investors with ICOs with cryptocurrencies. You wouldn’t even need bank accounts anymore and payments wouldn’t be traceable. Many of the new crypto startups like Bittrex have been seduced by this concept. Access to naive, solvent investors has brought not a few ICO’s the capital that has now disappeared.
