Back in September 2017, Lee Elbaz, the CEO of Yukon was arrested by the US FBI for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. If you don’t know what Yukon is, it is the parent company of Binary Book and Big Option, two of the biggest binary options scam that the world financial world has seen.
It all started in April 2016, when the Binary book was added to the CFTC’s Red list of Illegal Traders for soliciting US residents. In May 2017, the FPA Traders Court issued a guilty vote against the company. It also cautioned the traders to not trade their money using Binary Book or Big Option as it might lead to severe consequences in the near future.
These brokers worked on the same old mechanisms of a typical binary options fraud. First of all, they didn’t have any kind of regulatory license number so as to provide investment advice. That was the first major red flag to look for. The second thing was that the website highly relied on plagiarized content where most of the content from the website was lifted from other famous websites.
They worked a lot on leveling up the marketing game where it was seen that their ads appeared on every financial website. They hired spokespersons who said that BigOption and Binary Book are the best binary options traders that existed. Their salespersons called potential investors and advised them to start with smaller trades. Their fraud exchange mechanism made sure that their investments doubled up soon enough. After that, these salespersons would call them again and ask them for a bigger investment. Sooner or later, the victims ended up investing the money.
Now, what happened was either they lost the money or doubled it up. But when they doubled it up, they couldn’t withdraw the money. Yes, that’s correct. They were not allowed to withdraw it and customer service became extremely unresponsive which led to the FBI investigating the case and the firms finally shutting down.
