CFTC asks court to permanently ban employees, affiliates, and attorneys in Yukom Enterprise fraud scheme

The CFTC’s lawsuit against Yossi Herzog, Kobi Cohen, Lee Elbaz, and their participating partners and companies – the CFTC calls this network of companies Yukom Enterprise – accuses them of, among other things, fraud with binary options. The CFTC requests the court to enter an order to permanently ban the defendants in the Yukom Enterprise case as well as all employees, affiliates, attorneys and other third parties from the U.S. futures and options market. Neither in their own name nor through agents or trustees should these people and companies be allowed to participate in the area regulated by the CFTC. According to the CFTC, this should also apply to the lawyers involved in this cyberscam organization. The Israeli lawyer Moshe Strugano is one of the involved attorneys.

Moshe Strugano, Binary Options and Cyberscams

The interesting point for us here is that attorneys participating in the Yukom Enterprise should also be affected by this ban when it comes to the CFTC. This would also possibly apply to the Israeli lawyer Moshe Strugano (LinkedIn profile).

On his website www.strugano.com Strugano sells himself as an expert in financial law and financial market regulation. He also offers Israeli clients the opportunity to obtain companies and bank accounts abroad and to hold them through trusteeships. In particular, according to the website, Strugano has specialized in the areas of gaming, binary options, online trading, and forex. Everything a broker scam needs.

The firm specializes in registering and establishing companies around the world, and provides a multitude of legal, financial and business-related services pertinent both to the early establishment process, as well as the company’s regular course of business abroad afterwards. The firm’s services include, among others, opening overseas bank accounts, consulting regarding banking services and online payments, provision of trustee services abroad, clearing, licensing, issuance of commercial operating permits for companies in the fields of Forex, Gaming, Binary Options, and Online Trading as well as providing the company with ongoing counsel in its overseas business activities.

Moshe Strugano website

Strugano has provided his legal opinion to WSB Investment Ltd (BinaryBook) including a comprehensive description of the binary options brokerage business and the KYC and AML procedures in place. These legal opinions, in turn, were necessary for the Yukom Enterprise scheme (and all other broker scams as well) to open bank accounts through offshore companies such as WSB Investment Ltd or Tech SB Ltd.

The CFTC lawsuit sets out in detail how funds stolen from retail investors in the binary options scheme were laundered through a network of offshore bank accounts. According to the CFTC, Yossi Herzog and Kobi Cohen were the beneficial owners of the Yukom Enterprise entities. Among others, the Hungarian Zsolt Csilling and the Ukrainian Oleksandr Ustymenko worked as front men for them. Strugano, for example, also carried out the KYC check for Zsolt Csilling. In Strugano’s legal opinion, no reference is made to the actual beneficial owners.

Moshe Strugano may also have been part of the defense team of former Yukom CEO Lee Elbaz. A blog post describes the alleged strategy for the desired acquittal of Elbaz. It didn’t help. Elbaz was convicted by a U.S. jury for binary option fraud. Sentencing is scheduled for December 9, 2019.

The author of this strange blog post related to the Lee Ebaz case is a certain Moshe Strugano:

Now, one of the renowned lawyers in Israel “Moshe Strugano” Join her legal team and will look out the allegations more closely. Moshe Strugano, graduated from law school in London and worked for JP Morgan as a professional lawyer. He offered the most cost effective deal for the client in terms of opening business abroad, offering a huge number of legal, financial, and business-related services.

Moshe Strugano on the Lee Elbaz case on SteemIt

Legal confirmation for many scams

As a matter of fact, the renowned Moshe Strugano has issued such legal opinions for a variety of Israeli broker scams. FinTelegram has several of these legal opinions established for scams in the GreyMountain Management Enterprise of David Cartu, for example. These are essentially a sort of standard opinion from an attorney’s assembly line. An insider from the Israeli binary options scene has confirmed to FinTelegram that Moshe Strugano was indeed the first address to ask for legal opinions for a broker scam. For example, Strugano also issued legal opinions as a lawyer to the infamous Binary Options Scam of 23Traders Legal Opinion. For those Hermes Ventures Ltd who later ran the www.23traders.com website and drove a Canadian retail investor into suicide.

The CFTC’s demand to also block the lawyers involved in Yukom Enterprise‘s binary options fraud seems to us to be a first step in the right direction. The responsibility of the attorneys already results from the fact that their legal opinions were the basis for the fraud of the retail investors. The fraud would not have been possible in the first place without the bank accounts and merchant registrations with payment services providers.