In April 2017 the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC), Canada, has added to its Investment Caution List unregulated binary options broker GTOptions, owned and operated by Bulgarian MG Ventures Ltd. Similar warnings were issued by Cyprus regulator CySEC and by Quebec regulator AMF. GToptions was a broker scam in the vast GreyMountain Management network that also targeted retail investors in the North American markets.
The GreyMountain Management Network
Controlled by Israelis David Cartu and Jonathan Cartu and registered in Ireland, the GreyMountain Management Ltd (GMM) network was one of the largest scam broker networks in the binary options era. In the years between 2015 and 2017, thousands of retail investors were ripped off with hundreds of millions. The operators of the GMM network organized dozens of companies, domains, and frontmen to run their scam broker sites. Closely involved in this broker scam was the German Wirecard. Payment services were handled via its subsidiary Wirecard UK & Ireland. GMM was also located at the address of Wirecard UK & Ireland in Dublin, Ireland.
Currently, the Irish company GreyMountain Management Ltd is being liquidated by Deloitte. In 2018 GMM and its directors, the Dublin-based Liam Grainger and Ryan Coates and Israel-based brothers David and Jonathan Cartu have been taken to the Irish High Court by its investors who claim to have been scammed to the tune of €4.1 million.
You can find the list of scam brokers linked with the GMM network here in our FinTelegram report.
The GToption Scam Story
Financial market regulators in various jurisdictions have issued investor warnings against the GToption and included them in their warning lists:
- Nov 2016: Quebec watchdog included the scam in its warning list
- Dec 2016: The Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) included GToptions in its warning list
- April 2017: British Columbia Securities Commission issued a
warning against the GToption scam - July 2017: Manitoba Securities Commission included the scam scheme in its warning list
The Forex Peace Army has qualified GToptions as a scam. The FPA considers all brokers which are part of the GMM group to be scams and warns all traders to avoid depositing money with them.
Beneficial Owners and Perpetrators
The scam broker website www.GToptions.com was operated by the Bulgarian MG Ventures EOOD. The Bulgarian citizen Metodi Andreev Aleksiev ( МЕТОДИ АНДРЕЕВ АЛЕКСИЕВ )was appointed a director of the company. The company was controlled and/or owned by The World Marketing Group Ltd registered in Saint Vincent & The Grenadines. Director and shareholder of this offshore entity were an Anastasiia Chipysheva, a Ukraine citizen.
You can download the certificate of incumbency for The World Marketing Group Ltd here.
While we are aware that these two guys may not be the only ultimate beneficial owners /UBO) of this scam in the GMM universe we are sure that they know all participating perpetrators. Legally, Metodi Andreev Aleksiev and Anastasiia Chipysheva are held to be liable for the illegal activities of GToptions.
Involved Payment Services
Without payment service providers (PSP there could not have been binary options broker scams. We, therefore, consider PSPs who negligently or knowingly and willfully participate in schemes like GToptions to be fraud facilitators and co-conspirators who must be held accountable by investors and authorities who have suffered losses.
Payment services for the binary options fraud have been provided by the companies of Eyal Nachum and Tamir Zoltovski. FinTelegram has been provided with documents showing that GToptions and its Bulgarian operator MG Ventures were registered as a merchant with
- Payotech Ltd with PayObin group.
Tamir Zolvovski and other Payotech and Payobin people have deleted their respective entries in their LinkedIn profiles. Apparently, the traces of the Payobin past are to be deleted. Since the first FinTelegram report on Moneta International UAB and Payobin Tamir Zoltovski was published, the latter was removed from the Monetas International file in the Lithuanian companies register.
The Moneta International UAB commercial register entry can be downloaded here.
Tamir Zoltovski and Eyal Nachum are also the people behind International Fintech UAB, another licensed payment services provider in Lithuania.
Report Scam Brokers
Illegally operating broker schemes and their boiler rooms are part of fast-growing global cybercrime activities. Millions of investors are defrauded by those broker sites losing billions of euros every year. Hence, it is important to warn investors of such illicit sites. If you are a victim of an illegally operating broker site such as Tradeinvest90, Option888,
