LIMASSOL, Cyprus — The first person I met at the IFX Expo, an annual summit for the binary options and forex industry held at the Palais des Sports in this industrial Mediterranean port, was a prim Russian woman in her thirties who had recently taken a job with a binary options company in Israel.

Over cappuccinos at a makeshift espresso bar on the floor of the converted sports arena where the conference was held late last month, we made small talk, discussing life in Israel, how expensive it was, and how Tel Aviv was more fun than Jerusalem. The woman was well-educated, she spoke excellent English, was polite and professional. But when she bade me goodbye and handed me her business card, something was off. But there was no phone number or physical location.

Held yearly in Cyprus, it drew about attendees from around the world. My purpose was to gain an inside view of the industry and understand what makes it tick.

Over the course of the conference, I would experience other incongruous moments like the encounter with the woman with the incomplete business card.

Binary options and forex are terms popularly used worldwide for financial products that are marketed to people as an investment.

Both products can be, and are, offered by legitimate, highly regulated firms. Many of the fraudulent companies employ smooth-talking brokers, often pretending to be based in global financial capitals like New York or London, or claiming to have extensive investing experience, who then hard-sell clients around the world into putting their money on whether a certain commodity or currency will rise or fall over a very short period of time.

In theory, if customers predict correctly, they win money, and if their prediction is wrong, they lose their deposit. In practice, fraudulent binary options and forex companies employ a variety of stratagems to ensure that all or almost all of their clients lose all or almost all of their money. Presenting themselves to naive clients as responsible firms offering an opportunity to make money by trading in options on commodities, the fraudulent Israeli companies in this industry turn over hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps even billions.

Thousands of Israelis work in the field, defrauding customers worldwide out of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. In the US, binary options dealing is limited to three regulated US exchanges, and it is illegal for binary options companies outside the country to approach US citizens. In countries including France and Canada, numerous Israeli firms appear on government blacklists, and investigators are attempting to run the Israeli fraudsters to ground, without much help from the Israeli authorities.

In France and Romania, there has been a series of recent arrests, including of Israelis and Israeli-linked binary options fraud suspects. Israel recently banned Israel-based binary options firms from operating with Israeli clients, but they are still — scandalously — permitted to perpetrate their cynical theft among customers abroad. The Israel Securities Authority claims it does not have the authority to stop the who had heard about binary options stealing from foreigners; the police have shown no interest in tackling the snowballing scandal.

And so it thrives. Israelis had an outsize presence at the Cyprus shindig. An Israeli company, SpotOption, was given the center space on the expo floor, where it constructed a plush lounge with leather couches and chandeliers.

The conference floor at the IFX Expo Cyprus conference, May Hunter Stuart. Other attendees and speakers came from the US, UK, Cyprus, Greece, Russia and former Soviet countries, Eastern Europe, Arab countries a very small number of participants and Southeast Asia, including China perhaps a dozen.

The majority of exhibitors seemed to be service providers to binary options companies rather than the binary companies themselves. An exhibitor geared toward the Arab market, at the IFX Expo conference at the Palais des Sports in Limassol, Cpyrus, May Hunter Stuart. Since then, he said, the Israeli industry has exploded. Every year you have a dozen new ones opening and then going out of business. When the economy goes downhill, even oil is affected, but not forex and binary options.

People still want to find a way to earn money from home. The rapidly growing market in Asia is something I heard about again and again during the conference. The entrance to the IFX Expo conference at the Palais des Sports in Limassol, Cpyrus, May Hunter Stuart. Free download dalal street stock market book researching online, they got a call from an investment broker at a company called Fxntrade.

The wolves of Tel Aviv: Israel's vast, amoral binary options scam exposed | The Times of Israel

Fxntrade had a glossy website and a London address. The dealer repeatedly called them over a long period to rope them, benelli m2 replacement stocks by little, into investing more and more money.

I befriended an earnest young the forex income engine 2.0 from Latvia, for example, clad in dark blue Levis, a sky-blue cotton blazer and Elvis Costello glasses.

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He spoke articulately of how many binary options companies lie about how the commodities on which their clients place bets actually perform in the market. Models in Greek-themed costume greet conference attendees at the IFX Expo Cyprus conference, May Hunter Stuart.

He told me how pushy binary options salespeople are: He complained about how much of the regulation for the industry is ineffective: It was striking to hear industry employees speak so candidly. They seemed so normal, the kind of people that, if I forgot my wallet at one of their corporate booths, would promptly return it.

And yet, while many of them were not the people directly plundering the bank accounts of widows in Canada and impoverished young men in Pakistan, they were making forex racer renko system money from an industry that, in substantial part, does precisely that, and drinking and dancing at its annual conference.

Open bar serving cocktails at the IFX Expo Cyprus conference, May Hunter Stuart. There was an open bar that began serving free cocktails around lunchtime each day. And there I met a self-described Polish businessman, a good conversationalist who spoke to me in fluent English about Jerusalem — where he said he had once redwood binary options sign in, years ago — and also about journalism, since he had a nephew who was also a freelance reporter in the Middle East.

When I turned the conversation around to his own line of work, he grew cagey.

As I headed home the next day, I saw him at the airport, speaking Hebrew and waiting to board a flight to Tel Aviv. At a party at a nightclub on the second night of the convention, sponsored by one of the bigger forex brokerage firms, things got rather weird.

There was a s theme: A mustachioed little person on hand was grabbed by people to pose in group photos, like a party prop. A cross-dressed entertainer, who performed an old-time song-and-dance routine on stage, was similarly pulled into group photos at random.

When I left the club at 1 a. The next morning, the conference floor was largely deserted until almost lunchtime.

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Her response was dismissive. That was the theme, it became clear: Though almost everyone I met acknowledged that in one way or another, there were duplicitous practices in the binary options industry, to put it mildly, they all passed the buck.

Everyone is responsible for checking regulation in the jurisdiction where they want to work. And what of the large tech corporations who gave presentations at the expo: Google, Facebook and Twitter?

All three companies delivered keynote addresses offering tips on how to use their platforms to acquire more customers and make more money. Liset van Oosterhout from Twitter at the IFX Expo Cyprus conference, May Hunter Stuart. When The Times of Israel contacted them, seeking to ask about their cooperation with an industry blighted by fraud, neither Facebook nor Twitter responded.

Google wrote back addressing the issue of how it ostensibly prevents binary options and forex marketers from gaming its search results, but did not address the issue of why it is helping to facilitate this industry at all. As I left Cyprus to fly back to Israel, a question kept nagging at me. I think they like to be abused. The Times of Israel invites people who have been defrauded by binary options, and people who have worked in the industry, to contact us.

You can do so by email to: Atlanta Jewish Times New Jersey: The Jewish Standard New York: The Jewish Week United Kingdom: The Jewish News For Publishers: Become a Times of Israel partner.

Wednesday, June 21, Sivan 27, 9: About Us About the site Contact us Advertise with us Advertise with us. Subscribe to the Daily Edition. I think they like to be abused'. By Hunter Stuart June 15, Newsroom Email the Newsroom Facebook Twitter googletag. Like us on Facebook Get our newsletter Follow us on Twitter. The Times of Israel Current top stories.

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