Hi there, I am Elfriede Sixt, co-founder, and coordinator of the European Funds Recovery Initiative (EFRI). First and foremost, I wish you a Happy Passover and a Happy Easter. Enjoy this great time of the year!
Before you start into your holidays give me a few minutes of your time and let me give you a small status report of our activities at EFRI.
Why?
We started to go after the fraudsters behind the illegal broker schemes Option888, SafeMarkets, XTraderFX for very personal reasons: When we filed a money laundering complaint against those perpetrators late in 2016, we were attacked by them heavily. Back then when we denied doing business with the fraudsters, Werner Boehm and Alfred Dobias lost a company (BitRush) to them. Neither Boehm nor Dobias had the money to fight these (“get-rich-by-ripping-off retail investors“) -fraudsters before a Canadian Court but started Fintelegram. As a consequence, Uwe Lenhoff (Option888) and his guys issued kill orders and started slandering campaigns. Earlier 2018 we started to work with the European enforcement agencies to go after them in a joint effort.
In January 2019, two principals of these fraudulent schemes were arrested – The German Uwe Lenhoff and his Israeli partner Gal Barak. Eight more have been charged with fraud/money laundering/financial crime (including Joachim Kalcher, the former CTO of BitRush who teamed up with Uwe Lenhoff). And more will be further down the road. When the police arrested Uwe Lenhoff, the enforcement agents found one Bentley and one Ferrari parked in the hotel garage. This is how those perpetrators make their living at the expense of retail investors.
EFRI’s mission
By chasing those scammers and perpetrators we got in contact with a lot of their victims. We understood very well their helplessness and we only recognized then the supersize volume of cybercrime going on and how much damage these fraudsters are causing by ripping off thousands of European retail investors. Many people and their families out there are losing their life savings to fraudsters who are pretending to be reliable and trustworthy by lying to them on a constant basis.
It became evident that only a structured and organized big group of victims will put enough pressure on the perpetrators and their co-conspirators involved – PSPs, banks, media supporting the fraudsters and so on to get a refund for our victims. In
We also do not think that litigation can and should be financed by private people again risking their money. Therefore we started to speak with litigation funders and they are interested even keen to support EFRI. But for the sake of efficiency, we agreed, before we start any out-of-court negotiations or litigation cases, we have to have some 1.000 registered binary options victims with all details (i.e. PSPs involved) to show the extent of the European-wide fraud.
By now we have
- 261 people registered with EFRI for XTraderFX, SafeMarkets, OptionStarsGlobal, and CryptoPoint.
- Another 100+ victims registered for Option888 and the Veltyco schemes.
- +200 victims from the Blue Trading schemes
1000 Victims and 75 Euros
We hate to say this – but we need more victims to have the impact we want to have. Our goal is to have some 1,000 victims registered with EFRI to go forwards. In case we legally represent victims and their respective claims against the perpetrators.
The research reports on scam schemes are provided for free on FinTelegram but we demand €75 for the so-called “Power-of-Attorney (POA) Membership“. This €75 are not meant to finance any litigation but it enables us to collect data and administrate the registered victims in a professional manner, i.e. to prepare reports for enforcement agencies, establish excel sheets showing the money flow, support Fintelegram´s research activities.
The Rough Ride And You
For EFRI it is a rough ride. We are constantly attacked by the fraudsters, as you can imagine.
We definitely need the support of the victims as much as the victims of these fraudulent trading and investment schemes need ours.
From my experience over the last couple of past months, the scale of global fraud with illegal broker schemes is unbelievable. And they hardly face any legal consequences. If a shoplifter is caught in the supermarket he will be promptly arrested and/or indicted. If retail investors are ripped off by hundreds of millions, NO ONE cares – except EFRI!
So it is definitely time to go against this wave of online fraud schemes and cybercrime. Please support EFRI in this fight and join us. Be it with free membership registration or with a POA membership. It’s up to you.
In case you have any more questions pls get in touch with us [email protected].
Enjoy your holidays, see you next week. Yours,
Elfi
