The Israeli broker technology and platform provider PandaTS is currently facing some hassles with law enforcement agencies from several jurisdictions. Law enforcement agents from the Israeli police and their counterparts from other jurisdictions reportedly recently raided PandaTS’ offices in Israel. It is no secret that many scammers use the PandaTS platform. The UK FCA has followed FinTelegram’s assessment (read here) and issued an investor warning against PandaTS white-label scam Coinnery (www.coinnery.com) operated by Coinnery Ltd in St. Vincent & The Grenadines.
The Scam Clientele
PandaTS has numerous regulated brokers as clients. Many of them are regulated by CySEC in Cyprus. In addition, PandaTS operates a regular scam factory and runs countless illegally operating brokers a/k/a scams as white-label mutations. The convicted Israeli fraudster 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 PandaTS 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.
We will monitor and report on further developments around PandaTS. If you have any information on this, we would appreciate it if you share it with our research team.
