The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) recently charged three individuals - Daniel Fingerhut, Tal Valariola and Itay Barak for participating in a binary options and cryptocurrency scam for $20 million. Valariola and Barak are Israeli citizens. They controlled three marketing companies – an American company called Digital Platinum Inc, an Israeli company called Digital Platinum Ltd. and a Bulgarian company called Huf Media Ltd. Those three companies created fraudulent marketing materials to reassure investors that they will profit quickly and easily from their investment, promising them no risk was involved as long as they opened a trading account with a number of unregulated brokers and pair larges commissions to the aforementioned scammers. Millions such solicitations were disseminated while the scam was perpetrated. What is more, the scammers used actors shown living luxurious lifestyles that they claimed was through trading binary options. In other words, this was a typical but very large-scale binary options scam. Hopefully the criminals will be convicted but I really doubt investors will get their money back.
I had friends lose money to these kinds of schemes. They use Facebook groups to lure in new investors who have no idea about how cryptocurrency works and tell them their investments will be multiplied. And when they realize they can't access their own funds the scammers tell them that they need to send more money, usually in Bitcoin, to try to suck as much money out of them as possible. Half of the problem is the new investors who don't do any research before buying and think money is just going to start rolling in once they sign up. It's a brutal enviornment and these kinds of things happen all the time, even in regular stock markets. But it's just part of the game...
It amazes me that after all these years in the scammy tech age, people still fall for this shit. There is so much stupid money out there it is frightening.