The E&G Bulgaria of Gal Barak and Marina Andreeva have been cracked down by Austrian, German, and Bulgarian police two weeks ago. The enforcement agencies raided some of the offices of this organization which operates the perhaps largest network of illegal broker schemes globally. Gal Barak has been arrested but was later released to house arrest due to alleged health issues. Marina Andreeva with the support of her partners Gery Shalon and Vladislav Smirnov is currently restructuring the organization and moves boiler rooms to Georgia. The Serbian boiler rooms of the scheme, however, are still up and running – and hiring.
The Vast Cybercrime Operation
The cybercrime organization around E&G Bulgaria runs illegal broker schemes such as XTraderFX, SafeMarkets, Golden Markets, CryptoPoint, or OptionStars. Financial authorities such as the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) have issued many warnings times and again against those fraudulent broker schemes. According to information available to FinTelegram, the schemes mentioned above acquired more than 23,000 clients, i.e. victims.
The illegal broker schemes are operated via dozens of domains and deploy many boiler rooms in different jurisdictions. Besides Israel and Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia,
The Serbian Boiler Rooms
Some of the most important boiler rooms of the E&G Bulgaria scheme are not been operated in Bulgaria but in Serbia and Montenegro or Georgia. One of the Serbian boiler rooms is My Markets DOO which is headed by the Serbian citizen Katarina Kojić (LinkedIn profile). From the Serbian commercial register, one learns that My Markets DOO is a subsidiary of E&G Bulgaria. According to the information available to FinTelegram this Serbian boiler room handled customers of OptionStars, CryptoPoint, and XTraderFX.
Those Serbian boiler rooms continue their fraudulent activities despite the enforcement agencies’ crackdown in Bulgaria. They are still hiring people such as customer support specialists or retention agents for the English, French, and German markets. The HR recruiter of My Markets, Kristina Jovanović, is looking for new employees on LinkedIn, for example. Another person involved as an account manager for My Markets is Sanja Vicentijevic.
We have been informed that until recently the Israeli Kfir Levy, one of Gal Barak’s and Marina Andreeva’s lieutenants, also used to work for this Serbian branch of E&G Bulgaria. According to her LinkedIn profile, Katarina Kojic is also connected to the Serbian Cactus Marketing Ltd, a boiler room company operating in five languages – English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, French, and German. According to the commercial register, Cactus Marketing is owned and managed by the Serbian citizen Dragan Pantić.
Legal Responsibility Of Boiler Room Employees
It is those boiler rooms that actually rip off clients by calling them continuously, convincing them to deposit fresh money in their accounts with false profit statements and lies. Hence, each employee of such a boiler room is to be qualified as a co-conspirator of this illegal fraud scheme and needs to deal with the legal consequences eventually.
It is these employees that are responsible for the so-called “retention services”. The U.S. just recently indicted boiler room employees of the Israeli YUKOM Communication. Typically, they are falsely claiming to represent the interests of customers (traders) but that, in fact, the illegal broker profits when investors lose money. Those retention agents misrepresent whether and how customers could withdraw funds from their accounts. They typically misrepresent the terms of so-called “bonuses,” “risk-free trades” and “insured trades,” and deceptively use these supposed benefits in a manner that in fact harms customers.
Report Activities And People
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,
