The 35-year-old Israeli Gal Barak has shown how helpless the E.U. is in the fight against cybercrime. Barak, along with U.S. defendant Gery Shalon, Russian Vladislav Smirnov and the German Uwe Lenhoff ran a global network of binary options and CFD broker scams, defrauding tens of thousands of victims of more than $200M.
In Sept 2020, he was sentenced to a four-year prison term but was released after just one-year in-home custody (Bulgaria) and one year jailed in Austria. Upon his release, a private jet flew him to Israel, where he announced plans to launch a $20 million cybercrime fund to benefit from cybercrime energy!
Comparable Sentences
In the U.S., the former CEO of the binary options fraud scheme Yukom Communications, Lee Elbaz, was sentenced to a 22-years prison term and $28M restitution payments. She was not the mastermind or principal of the scheme like Gal Barak. She was “only” a high-ranking boiler room manager.
Read more about the Lee Elbaz trial here.
Due to the specific European situation with low sentences for white collar crimes and a single country-minded criminal law regulation Gal Barak was “only” charged with a few dozen victims in Austria so far. However, the German prosecutors also brought charges against Barak for the German victims of his scams. Barak is paying expensive lawyers with the money stolen from his victims to prevent more charges. According to the information available to FinTelegram, Barak paid more than $1.000,000 to lawyers by now to defend him and his wife and deputy in crime, Marina Barak.
One of Barak’s lieutenants, Jacky Fitelzon, was sentenced to an 84-month prison term in Germany, almost double the time his mastermind and boss Barak received. Do you see any justice in that? We do not! And neither do the thousands of victims of Gal Barak’s broker scams such as XTraderFX, OptionStarsGlobal, CryptoPoint, or SafeMarkets.
Read more about the Jacky Fitelzon trial here.
The Wrong Signals
If the Barak case is the precedent it should be, then the actual punishment invites cybercriminals to steal even more money from unsuspecting European consumers.
Barak received a paltry fine in light of the actual damages of more than $200M, and his wife Marina Barak was (preliminary) acquitted despite overwhelming evidence against her. The Austrian judges obviously do not understand the threat cybercrime poses to society. The German investigation revealed that Marina Barak was a ringleader of the E&G Bulgaria cybercrime organization. Former lieutenants of the cybercrime organization incriminate both Marina and Gal. However, both are allowed to live a luxury life with the stolen millions – and are now establishing a fund to enhance cybercriminals like themselves.
Share Information
If you have any information about Gal Barak, Marina Barak, Gery Shalon, Vladislav Smirnov or anyone else around this network, please let us know via our whistleblower system Whistle42.
