Yukom Case – Background information on BinaryBook, Yukom and the lawsuit

Lawsuit and Winding-Up

Richard Howlett of London-based law firm Selachii LLP represented BinaryBook investors. He was approached in 2015 by a US client who said BinaryBook shut down his account after he threatened to sue the binary options broker for denying his withdrawal requests.

BinaryBook was officially operated by the UK-registered marketing company WSB Investment Ltd so Howlett made an application with British authorities for that company to be wound up. A winding-up order was granted in March 2016 and Howlett was appointed by the liquidators to act for all the company’s creditors – wherever they might be. Many of the creditors say they have been denied access to their money.

“We have since been contacted by people from all over the world, who have lost a few hundred pounds to over a million dollars”

Richard Howlett

BinaryBook claimed that the platform was not operated by WSB Investment Ltd but by a parent company of the same name incorporated in St Vincent & the Grenadines. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Hiding behind some offshore entities is the typical pattern for scam brokers.

BinaryBook is an algorithm-based binary options trading platform owned by WSB Investment Services Ltd … ​WSB Investment Services Ltd, 1A, Arcade House, Temple Fortune, London, NW11 7TL, UK is a subsidiary of WSB INVESTMENTS LTD, 201 Rogers Office Building, Edwin Wallace Rey Drive George Hill, Anguilla​. (Source: BinaryBook website October 2014)

The boiler rooms

In November 2016, Melanie Newman of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism uncovered that BinaryBook was operated by at least two boiler rooms. According to her findings, initial approaches by salespeople to potential clients were made from a Mauritius-based call center run by a company called Linkopia. Some clients are then passed on to the Israeli Yukom Communication.

Both Linkopia and Yukom were owned by Yossi Herzog, a 54-year old Israeli. The two boiler rooms provided “conversion” and “retention services” to a range of binary options platforms besides BinaryBook.

U.S. Indictment

On March 22, 2018, Lee Elbaz, the former CEO of the Israel-based company, Yukom Communications, was charged in an indictment with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three counts of wire fraud for her alleged participation in a scheme to defraud investors in the United States and across the world in financial instruments known as “binary options.”

The indictment alleges that Yukom provided investor “retention” services for two websites, known as BinaryBook and BigOption, that were used to promote and market purported binary options, and that those binary options were fraudulently sold and marketed.

The U.S. prosecutors make the Yukum Case around BinaryBook and BigOption a big precedent for the processing of the binary options fraud. Therefore, besides Lee Elbaz, Yossi Herzog is now also accused as well as 16 other persons.