Binary options no deposit bonus december 2012 movie

Quando Dan Guralnek imigrou da Austrália para Israel em 2012, ele não esperava se envolver em uma fraude internacional na internet. Eu sempre quis me mudar para Israel, diz Guralnek, que freqüentou uma escola judaica em Sydney. Ele estava trabalhando na administração de uma fábrica na Austrália quando seu chefe morreu de repente, e, aos 28 anos, ele percebeu que era um bom momento para ele se mudar para Israel. Eu pensei, Im livre, sem ataduras, eu posso ir. Guralnek matriculou-se em Jerusalém Ulpan Etzion para aprender hebraico, em seguida, mudou-se para a vibrante e movimentada cidade de Tel Aviv, onde ele conseguiu uma série de salários mínimos para NIS 25 (um pouco mais de 6) uma hora: cortar legumes em um restaurante, Dirigindo uma pessoa com deficiência, trabalhando o turno da noite em um hot-dog stand. Mas em uma cidade com aluguéis altos e um custo de vida em relação aos salários (PDF), atrás apenas do Japão, Guralnek não poderia sobreviver. Ele ouviu que empregos em uma indústria chamada opções binárias pagavam duas vezes o que ele estava ganhando, além de comissão. 8216It8217s gambling e we8217re um bookie8217 8212 ex-vendedor de opções binárias Assim que eu comecei a procurar um emprego, eu estava recebendo chamadas de empresas de opções binárias todos os dias, ele lembra. Dominam o espaço da propaganda do trabalho. Nem Guralnek teve dificuldade em conseguir um emprego. Você entra e eles fazem um grande show como eles estão avaliando se querem ou não. Mas eles querem você. No dia em que Guralnek entrou nos luxuosos escritórios de seu novo empregador na cidade litorânea de Herzliya Pituah, ele sabia que ele havia chegado. Vista, high-tech, escritório, edifícios, herzliya, pituah 12 de dezembro de 2015. (Nati Shohat / Flash 90) Havia café livre, comida gratuita, diz Guralnek. Meu salário era de 7.500 shekels (1.900) por mês, mais comissão. Guralnek estava em um call center com cerca de 50 funcionários, muitos dos quais eram novos imigrantes fluentes em uma variedade de idiomas. Seu trabalho era chamar as pessoas ao redor do mundo e persuadi-las a 8220invest8221 em um produto financeiro ostensivo chamado opções binárias. Os clientes seriam incentivados a fazer um depósito 8212 para enviar dinheiro para sua empresa 8212 e, em seguida, usar esse dinheiro para fazer 8220trades8221: Os clientes iriam tentar avaliar se uma moeda ou commodity iria para cima ou para baixo nos mercados internacionais dentro de um determinado, curto período de tempo. Se eles previam corretamente, eles ganharam dinheiro, entre 30 e 80 por cento da soma que tinham posto para baixo. Se eles estivessem errados, eles perderam todo o dinheiro que colocaram naquele negócio. Guralnek logo viu que quanto mais negócios um cliente fazia, mais perto eles chegavam a perder a totalidade de seu depósito inicial. Ele tinha sido instruído a apresentar a opção binária como um investimento e ele mesmo como um corretor, mesmo sabendo que eles provavelmente perderiam todo o seu dinheiro. O cliente não está realmente comprando nada. O que ele está comprando é uma promessa da nossa empresa de que vamos pagar a ele. É um jogo de apostas e um bookie, ele diz agora. Antes de começar o trabalho, a empresa deu a Guralnek um curso de vendas de uma semana em que ele foi ensinado o suficiente conhecimento financeiro para soar bem a um cliente que sabia menos do que ele. Ele também foi instruído em táticas de vendas de alta pressão. Eles nos ensinaram como fazer as pessoas desconfortáveis, como responder a objeções, como mantê-los no telefone. A sessão de treinamento era conhecida como um curso de conversão e o objetivo era aprender a transformar uma ligação de telefone em um cliente, tendo seu primeiro depósito. Em sua empresa, os vendedores não foram autorizados a tomar um depósito de menos de 250. Durante o curso de vendas, a gestão da empresa deu aconselhamento Guralnek que assombrou mais tarde. Eles nos disseram para deixar nossa consciência na porta. É isso legal Como as semanas passaram, mais e mais perguntas formadas em Guralneks mente 8212 perguntas que sublinhou o bizarro financeiro netherworld ele tinha entrado. Por que ele não sabia os sobrenomes de seus gerentes Por que os trabalhadores eram proibidos de falar hebraico ou trazer celulares para o call center Quem era o CEO da empresa Por que estava tudo bem para a equipe árabe-israelense vender opções binárias em lugares como a Arábia Saudita enquanto outros Países como Israel, Estados Unidos e Irã estavam fora do limite. Pior ainda, Guralnek começou a suspeitar de que, além das pobres probabilidades que os clientes tinham de realmente fazer algum dinheiro, e além das agressivas táticas de vendas, o que a empresa estava fazendo era francamente ilegal. Por exemplo, cada vendedor foi convidado a inventar um nome falso e biografia. O call center usou a tecnologia de Voz sobre Protocolo de Internet (VoIP), que exibia um número de telefone local para clientes em qualquer parte do mundo. O site da empresa listou um endereço em Chipre. Foi-me dito para dizer às pessoas que eu tinha anos de experiência no mercado, que eu tinha estudado em Oxford e trabalhou para o Bank of Scotland. Guralnek diz que ele foi dito para apresentar-se como um corretor que fez uma comissão sobre os comércios e enfatizar quanto dinheiro o cliente poderia fazer enquanto minimizar o risco. Na verdade, ao invés de ajudar os clientes a fazer negócios inteligentes, o verdadeiro interesse era para eles fazer previsões mal sucedidas e perder seu dinheiro. Guralnek diz que ele também estava cada vez mais preocupado com o que aconteceu quando os clientes tentaram parar. Aquele é o momento em que seria solicitado um monte de papelada. Nós diriam, Você quer retirar OK. Precisamos verificar sua identidade antes de liberar os fundos. Você precisa nos enviar uma fotocópia de sua conta de serviço público, sua carteira de motorista, seu passaporte, seus requisitos de cartão de crédito, é desnecessário dizer, que não tinha sido mencionado quando o cliente colocar dinheiro dentro. Enquanto o cliente estava reunindo e apresentando esta papelada, um agente de retenção iria chamá-los e passar por seus negócios, supostamente descobrir o que deu errado e convencê-los a continuar a negociação. Poderíamos atrasar essa retirada por um longo tempo. 8216 Por que eu deveria ser culpado por vender algo para pessoas estúpidas Se alguém tem mais de 18 anos e quer álcool, cigarros, uma faca, uma conta de opção binária, é sua própria responsabilidade 8217 Post Facebook Se um cliente era persistente, diz Guralnek, muitas vezes a empresa Iria parar de tomar suas chamadas, ou enviá-los um e-mail dizendo que suspeitamos que você de fraude e congelar todos os seus fundos. Porque o cliente não sabia o nome real ou a localização de seu vendedor, eles não tinham para onde procurar o dinheiro de volta, explica Guralnek. Mas a parte mais terrível do trabalho para o jovem imigrante era pedir dinheiro a pessoas que pareciam pobres e desanimadas. Eles acreditam que estão fazendo algo de bom: eles estão fazendo um investimento, fazendo algo responsável. E eles não estão. Cada história é triste. Todo mundo tem pessoas que dependem deles. Muitas pessoas estão finalmente ficando de pé depois de um problema de drogas ou algo assim. O pior foi quando um cliente lhe disse, I8217m no hospital. Quando alguém diz I8217m no hospital e eu tenho câncer, we8217re suposto ainda vendê-los. Mas eu iria jogar a venda de cada vez. Eu não poderia fazê-lo. Uma indústria vasta e desonrosa Se você digitar as palavras binárias ou forex em grupos do Facebook que atendem a novos olim (imigrantes para Israel), você encontrará longos segmentos de trocas aquecidas. Qualquer um de vocês que estão envolvidos em opções de Forex / Binário perceber que este é um negócio altamente desregulamentado que está solicitando jogos de azar para pessoas mal informadas ou sem instrução lê um desses postos no popular Secret Tel Aviv grupo. Por que eu deveria ser culpado por vender algo para pessoas estúpidas uma mulher responde. Se alguém tem mais de 18 anos e quer álcool, cigarros, uma faca, uma opção binária conta, é sua própria responsabilidade. Você vendê-lo a sua avó o cartaz original ateia fogo para trás. No grupo Keep Olim no Israel Movimento Facebook, uma mulher escreve, Olá a todos, alguém pode me explicar o que são Binário e Forex empregos e por que as pessoas são tão anti-trabalhando nessas indústrias em Israel Este campo é desonroso, lê uma resposta. Eu tinha feito isso e não sentia nada além de vergonha e auto-aversão por perseguir pessoas que nunca pediram esse telefonema e tentaram arranjar dinheiro delas que eles provavelmente não voltariam. Se você não gosta d, não o faz, lê outro. Trabalhe o que você sente é um trabalho honesto, faça seus 6.000 shekels (aproximadamente 1.500) um o mês leva embora, gaste-o metade na renda e vive como um roedor com o descanso dele. Ele continua, Enquanto a indústria binária e Forex e eu pagar 50 impostos sobre os nossos salários para pagar os seus cuidados de saúde, segurança social e segurança, posso falar por todos nós, não precisamos ser julgados. Ninguém parece saber exatamente o quão grande as opções binárias e as indústrias de forex estão em Israel. Nem mesmo a Autoridade de Valores de Israel, que, quando colocada a questão, respondeu via mensagem de texto, Como a indústria ainda não está regulamentada, não temos a imagem completa. Mas estimativas conservadoras colocam o número de pessoas empregadas na indústria em vários milhares, principalmente em Tel Aviv e seus subúrbios como Herzliya e Ramat Gan, enquanto a receita anual pode ser de centenas de milhões para mais de um bilhão de dólares. Globalmente, o termo forex normalmente se refere ao comércio legítimo em moeda estrangeira, enquanto opções binárias é o nome de um instrumento financeiro. No jargão popular israelense, no entanto, opções binárias e forex são muitas vezes aglomeradas como parte da mesma indústria: Quando os israelenses se referem a empresas de forex, que muitas vezes significam as empresas que as opções binárias em moedas. Às vezes, os termos Forex e opções binárias são usados ​​indistintamente para se referir a negociações rápidas, tudo ou nada em uma série de ativos. Em algumas empresas de opções binárias, a plataforma on-line é manipulada para fornecer resultados falsos que garantam o cliente perde O processo de 8220trading8221 pode funcionar da seguinte forma, disse o Times de Israel. Tendo transferido seu primeiro depósito financeiro para a empresa, os clientes fazem login em uma plataforma de negociação on-line, conforme orientado pelos vendedores da empresa e colocam o dinheiro em uma previsão de que o preço de uma moeda ou mercadoria vai subir ou descer nos mercados internacionais, Digamos, os próximos cinco minutos. Se o cliente prevê corretamente, ele faz um lucro de uma certa percentagem ea empresa perde dinheiro. Se o cliente está errado, ele perde todo o dinheiro que ele colocou no comércio, ea empresa mantém. Os comerciantes de opções profissionais consultados pelo The Times de Israel disseram que mesmo um gênio financeiro não pode prever com alguma confiança o que, digamos, o preço do ouro vai fazer nos próximos cinco minutos, em vez de um investimento, a transação é realmente nada mais do que um jogo. A deturpação do jogo como investimento responsável seria bastante ruim. O que é pior, porém, e descaradamente corrupto, o Times de Israel foi dito, é que, em algumas empresas, a casa está dobrada. Uma variedade de ruses são usados. O pagamento potencial para uma previsão correta é complexo, opaco e calculado para minimizar a perda da empresa. Se um ativo está se comportando de uma forma previsível 8212 dizer, o preço do cobre começa a subir após um terremoto no Chile 8212 a empresa vai puxar esse activo a partir da plataforma online. Em algumas empresas de opções binárias, a plataforma on-line é manipulada para fornecer resultados falsos que garantem que o cliente perde. Estimativas do número de opções binárias e empresas de forex em Israel variam de 20 a várias centenas. O Centro de Pesquisa IVC, uma empresa que fornece informações sobre o setor de tecnologia de Israel, estimou em seu anuário de 2015 que existem 100 empresas de comércio on-line em Israel, cuja esmagadora maioria se enquadra nas categorias de opções forex e binárias. A IVC estima que essas empresas empregam mais de 2.800 pessoas em Israel. No entanto, o anuário afirma, é difícil avaliar o tamanho real da indústria financeira on-line de negociação em Israel, em parte porque a indústria é low-key e seu nexo Israel é muitas vezes subestimado. Um relatório de 2014 sobre a indústria de Internet israelense pela incubadora Startup TheTime diz que das 90 empresas de Internet israelenses que ganham uma receita de 10 milhões ou mais por ano, a empresa de Internet TheTime Startup Incubator em Tel Aviv , 15 foram plataformas de negociação on-line, muitos deles negociação forex e opções binárias. Três destes, de acordo com o relatório, foram avaliados para ter uma receita de pelo menos 100 milhões por ano. Algumas outras empresas na lista incluíam iForex, bForex, AnyOption, 4XPlace, Optionbit e Banc de Binário. Com base nessas avaliações, a indústria israelense de divisas e opções binárias tem um faturamento anual de centenas de milhões, possivelmente bilhões, de dólares. Quantos são fraudulentos É anyones acho que a percentagem de empresas de comércio financeiro on-line envolver-se em práticas antiéticas, ilegais e / ou fraudulentas. Uma distinção que muitas pessoas entrevistadas para este artigo atraiu foi entre empresas não regulamentadas e regulamentadas. Várias empresas grandes e mais conhecidas com fundadores israelitas ou grandes operações de vendas e marketing em Israel são regulamentadas em Chipre, o que lhes dá licença para vender produtos financeiros em países da UE, mesmo que não estejam regulamentados nesses países. Muitas empresas de forex e opções binárias operando em Israel, no entanto, não são regulamentadas. Sam C., um imigrante recente de Israel dos Estados Unidos, descreve sua experiência trabalhando em uma empresa de opções binárias não regulamentada no verão passado. Muitos clientes tinham clicado em um anúncio hawking maneiras de ganhar dinheiro em casa. Eles realmente acreditam que eles vão se tornar um milionário apenas fazendo isso 8217 8212 ex-funcionário de serviço ao cliente em uma empresa de opções binárias Eles fazem extremamente, extremamente difícil para os clientes retirar seu dinheiro, diz Sam, que trabalhou no serviço ao cliente e que pediu que Seu nome verdadeiro não deve ser usado. Você tem que encontrar uma cópia de sua licença de driver8217s, uma cópia de sua conta de serviço público e há tantas regras e requisitos. Metade dos telefonemas que eu tinha que lidar com eram apenas pessoas queixando-se, dizendo que seus meses foram e eu preciso do meu dinheiro agora. Preciso pagar por isso ou aquilo. Praticamente a empresa simplesmente se recusa a desistir. Na verdade, Sam diz que não pode confirmar que qualquer cliente já recebeu pagamento ou retirou seu dinheiro durante seus poucos meses de trabalho na empresa. As pessoas ligariam e ligariam de volta. E, eventualmente, às vezes um de meus gerentes diria, Don8217t tomar essa pessoa8217s chamadas mais e fechar sua conta. Eles diriam, nós fizemos com ele e todo o dinheiro não importa. Não pegue as chamadas dele mais. A maioria dos clientes da empresa Sams era dos Estados Unidos, embora seja contra a lei dos EUA para as empresas venderem opções binárias para os cidadãos dos EUA desta forma. Outros clientes eram da África, Qatar e Arábia Saudita. Muitos haviam clicado em um anúncio hawking maneiras de ganhar dinheiro a partir de casa ou assistiram a um vídeo que alegou revelar estratégias secretas de investimento. A maioria parecia ser a pessoa burra estereotipada, lembra Sam. Você nem percebe que pessoas assim existem fora dos filmes. Eles realmente acreditam que eles vão se tornar um milionário apenas fazendo isso. E é quase triste. Perguntado sobre seus gerentes, Sam disse que eles eram jovens israelenses que pareciam pensar que era legal rasgar as pessoas. Leonardo DiCaprio como Jordan Belfort em uma cena de 20138217s. 8216O Lobo de Wall Street.8217 (Paramount Pictures e Red Granite Pictures, Mary Cybulski) Eles pareciam ter visto o Lobo de Wall Street e queriam emular os personagens. A brincadeira que eles teriam, seria como, oh yeah, eu não posso acreditar que ele caiu por isso, eu não posso acreditar que você tem que ele investir 300. Sam diz que um de seus gerentes realmente citação Leonardo DiCaprios arremessos de vendas do filme textualmente por telefone Ao tentar vender opções binárias. 82208216Hola, John. Como você está fazendo hoje? Você enviou minha empresa algumas semanas atrás, solicitando informações sobre um investimento que teve um potencial de crescimento enorme com riscos de queda muito pequenos, 8217 ele citaria de memória. 8216 Faz um toque de campainha8221 Eu pensei que era meio patético, para ser honesto, 8221 lembra Sam. Manipulando software Em 2013, os Estados Unidos proibiram a comercialização de opções binárias para seus cidadãos, exceto em um punhado de trocas reguladas. Em seu site, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), uma agência independente do governo dos EUA, alerta os investidores para esquemas fraudulentos envolvendo opções binárias e suas plataformas de negociação. Estes regimes alegadamente incluem a recusa de crédito contas de clientes, negando reembolso de fundos, roubo de identidade e manipulação de software para gerar negócios perdedores. As opções binárias de negociação podem ser uma proposição extremamente arriscada, adverte outra agência reguladora americana, a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), em seu site. Ao contrário de outros tipos de contratos de opções, 8221 diz FINRA, uma SRO que regula empresas de corretagem de membros e mercados de câmbio, as opções binárias são proposições de tudo ou nada. Quando uma opção binária expira, ou faz uma quantidade pré-especificada de dinheiro, ou nada em tudo, caso em que o investidor perde todo o seu investimento. A negociação de opções binárias torna-se ainda mais arriscada por esquemas fraudulentos, muitos dos quais se originam fora dos Estados Unidos. Em Israel, muitas empresas de forex são realmente vendendo opções binárias, o que significa que um cliente aposta sobre se uma moeda vai subir ou descer, em vez de comprar a moeda, Jared K., um ex-corretor de Wall Street explica ao Times de Israel . Tradicional forex é eu comprar em 3,50, eu vender em 3,60. Binário forex (ou seja, forex no mundo das opções binárias) está dizendo se ele vai para 3,60 eu ganhar dinheiro, let8217s dizer 20 mais do que eu aposto, mas se ele vai para 3,50 ou inferior, eu perco. A negociação de opções binárias torna-se ainda mais arriscada por esquemas fraudulentos, muitos dos quais se originam fora dos Estados Unidos. 8212 O governo dos EUA adverte Graham P., que atualmente trabalha em marketing para uma grande empresa de opções binárias regulada por Chipre em Tel Aviv, diz que conhece os esforços Para manipular o software como descrito pela CFIC 8212 cínica intervenção por empresas de opções binárias para garantir que eles ganham, o equivalente à indústria de uma roleta manipulada roleta em um cassino. Falei com um cara que eu estava potencialmente indo para trabalhar, e ele tinha realmente desenvolvido uma plataforma de opções binárias. Disse que todos que se encontrou que era interessado em comprar a plataforma (para começar sua própria companhia) o quis criar uma porta traseira. Por porta traseira, Graham significa que as empresas querem ser capazes de manipular um 8220trade8221 no último minuto se um cliente ou grupo de clientes parece estar ganhando muito. Vamos dizer que 70 por cento dos comerciantes são, por algum motivo apostando que o petróleo vai subir. Então, as empresas dizem, se fizermos apenas 30% de lucro, teremos mais dinheiro. E o algoritmo faz isso. É muito fácil dizer ao cliente, oh, a linha caiu um pouco abaixo de sua posição.8221 Se o cliente traz a prova de que o preço do petróleo realmente ir até onde eles previam que iria, a empresa irá apontá-los para a multa , Que afirma que a empresa tem seus próprios algoritmos que podem diferir do tempo real. 8220Trading taxas atribuídas aos ativos em nosso site são aqueles em que a nossa empresa está disposta a vender opções binárias para seus clientes no ponto de venda, 8221 lê um disclaimer típico em muitos sites de opções binárias. 8220Como tal, eles podem não corresponder diretamente aos níveis de mercado em tempo real no momento em que ocorre a venda de opções.8221 Graham, cuja empresa é regulamentada em Chipre, disse que, em sua opinião, toda a indústria de opções binárias é fraudulenta. Em caso afirmativo, isso representa uma corrupção cínica e sistemática em grande escala, superando escândalos tão nocivos como a venda ilegal de produtos do Mar Morto por israelenses em quiosques em shoppings de todo o mundo que, inconscientemente, permitiu o florescimento, com repercussões potencial extremamente graves para Israel. Por alguma razão louca sua legal na Europa. Nações europeias individuais estão deixando opções binárias voar. Enquanto países como os Estados Unidos cheirava a besteira há muito tempo e a tornava ilegal. Graham disse que em um instante, ele gostaria de ver a indústria fechada, mas ele está preocupado. There8217s tanto dinheiro derramando na cidade it8217s literalmente uma indústria aqui 8212 Im incluindo forex também. It8217s provavelmente pagando pelo sistema de metrô we8217re instalação. Você pode imaginar milhares de pessoas em Tel Aviv sem trabalho Visão geral de Tel Aviv em 27 de dezembro de 2010. (Abir Sultan / Flash 90) Uma má reputação Chaya Berkowitz, um veterano de oito anos de empresas de forex em Israel, diz ao Times De Israel que sua própria experiência na indústria tem sido boa. Não me esquecerei. I8217m ciente que tem uma reputação muito má. Eu acho que 8217s 100 por cento justificado. Berkowitz afirma que existem empresas legítimas na indústria, e chocalhos fora os nomes FXCM, Alpari e FXPro, nenhum dos quais são baseados em Israel. Se você tem dez empresas de forex, provavelmente seis ou sete deles têm reputações ruins que dão aos outros um nome ruim. É lamentável porque os outros levam seus negócios a sério e se preocupam com seus clientes, diz ela. Questionado se esses seis ou sete são culpados de fraude, diz Berkowitz, eu não diria que eles estão cometendo fraude. Eles têm a reputação de mentir para seus clientes e publicidade enganosa. Isso definitivamente existe, mas há uma razão pela qual algumas das grandes corretoras ainda estão por aí. É porque eles costumam brincar pelo livro 8212 caso contrário eles não são por muito tempo. Berkowitz estima que em empresas forex legítimo, dois ou três de cada 10 clientes ganham lucros e são capazes de retirar facilmente o seu dinheiro. Perguntada como saber se uma empresa é legítima, ela diz, eu procuraria uma regulação mais dura, e não uma empresa regulamentada em alguma ilha em algum lugar, mas regulamentada no Reino Unido, nos Estados Unidos ou na Austrália. Chipre, ela afirma, tornou-se mais rigorosa nos últimos anos. Está se tornando uma agência reguladora mais reconhecida. Gostaria também de pedir amigos ou outros investidores. Palavra pessoal da boca é enorme. Eu faria meu dever de casa. Olhe em linha para ver quem tem uma boa reputação. Gostaria de fazer perguntas ao pesquisar um corretor. Tenho acesso fácil ao meu dinheiro Você oferece educação Reeling os clientes em Depois de obter seu mestrado em Israel e casar com um israelense, Lynne R. um nativo californiano, começou a procurar um emprego, mas ficou desapontado com o que estava lá fora. Foi realmente chocante para mim, uma vez que eu comecei a ir para as empresas, para descobrir quão baixo os salários eram. Eu queria encontrar algo mais competitivo, mais semelhante ao que eu estava ganhando nos Estados Unidos. As pessoas continuaram mencionando a Lynne que os empregos de opções binárias pagavam bem. Ela postou o fato de que ela estava olhando para um casal sites de trabalho no Facebook, e eu provavelmente tinha 25-30 pessoas chamada para criar entrevistas. Lynne foi em cinco ou seis entrevistas, onde aprendeu que era elegível para dois tipos de trabalhos. Ramat Gan8217s Moshe Aviv Tower, edifício mais alto de Israel8217s, abriga muitas empresas de opções binárias (Simona Weinglass / Times de Israel) conversão e retenção There8217s. Para os trabalhos de conversão eles estavam me dizendo que eu faria cerca de 15.000 shekels (3.850) por mês e para os empregos de retenção me disseram que eu poderia fazer 30.000 a 40.000 (7.700 a 10.250) por mês. Em cada entrevista, Lynne sondou extensivamente sobre a natureza do trabalho. Cada empresa tem seus próprios métodos de marketing, muitas vezes envolvendo vídeos que contam a história de uma pessoa que aprendeu um método secreto de extrair dinheiro do mercado, diz ela. Uma empresa disse-lhe que atraiu clientes com um 8220robot8221: Eles disseram, basicamente usamos um programa, que chamamos de um robô. Nós o comercializamos para as pessoas e dizemos que ele pode fazer pequenos negócios para você, como 100 ou 200, e há um programa de Internet que vai fazer, você sabe, um pouco de magia e fazer algumas centenas de dólares extras por mês. Lynne8217s trabalho seria chamar as pessoas que tinham pago 200 para usar o robô, e persuadi-los a aprofundar o seu envolvimento. 8220Você os chama e diz, bem, você tem este robô, mas não é realmente tão grande de um programa que foi vendido a você por um afiliado do nosso. Se você quiser ganhar dinheiro sério, você precisa começar a negociar, e podemos dizer-lhe como. We8217re comerciantes especializados. Tudo que você precisa fazer é fazer um depósito maior, e você terá uma conta personalizada conosco e um comerciante pessoal. Tudo que você precisa fazer é fazer um depósito de 500 e we8217ll você começar. Lynne foi finalmente oferecido um trabalho de retenção, e foi matriculado em um curso de treinamento de duas semanas. A primeira coisa que lhe disseram foi nunca revelar que estava chamando de Israel. Todos os funcionários de retenção foram convidados a posar como corretores treinados trabalhando em um escritório em Londres. Eles foram obrigados a relembrar os dias em Londres, bem como o que estava acontecendo nas notícias. Você tinha que fazer uma biografia. Você precisava pensar em uma escola de negócios e dizer que você foi lá. Você precisava dizer que você era um comerciante, que você tinha trabalhado para um banco de investimento ou em Wall Street. Se você é uma mulher, eles o encorajam a dizer que você é solteiro porque os caras provavelmente irão depositar com você. Se você é um cara, você quer ter uma esposa e dois filhos, porque isso faz você se relacionar. A empresa, segundo ela, estava regulamentada em Chipre. A indústria está certificada para a Europa, mas você não está fortemente regulamentada. É uma forma de ser credenciada pela UE sem muita supervisão. (Finanças Magnates, uma publicação de comércio de Israel8217s indústria financeira on-line de negociação, escreveu no passado que Chipre tem uma reputação de regulação lax.) 8216 Quando oferecemos treinamento para eles, gostaríamos de compartilhar seu desktop e levá-los através do site. Foi-nos dito para olhar em volta de seu desktop para pornografia ou slots on-line ou outros sinais de comportamento compulsivo, porque isso significa que eles são mais propensos a fazer um depósito de 8217 ex-agente de retenção de opções binárias Lynne diz que o ponto de venda de sua empresa, Era mais ético do que outras empresas de opções binárias. Se alguém pediu para retirar o seu dinheiro que seria dar-lhes a eles dentro de 48 horas, ela diz. Quando Lynne começou a jogar com a plataforma de opções binárias de sua empresa, ela percebeu que era divertido e viciante, quase como um jogo de azar. Havia muita adrenalina. Se você colocar dinheiro em sua conta de investimento hoje, pode dar-lhe 3 a 6 por cento retorna. Em binário você vê 70 por cento vindo imediatamente. Se os agentes de conversão foram esperados para obter um cliente para fazer seu primeiro depósito, agentes de retenção como Lynne foram encarregados de trazer o dinheiro grande. O primeiro passo foi dimensionar o cliente. Eles nos disseram para procurar casas de pessoas no Google Maps para ver o quão rico eles pareciam e para verificar suas informações de cartão de crédito para ver se eles tinham ouro ou platina status. Além disso, quando oferecemos treinamento para eles, gostaríamos de compartilhar seu desktop e levá-los através do site. Foi-nos dito para abusar desse acesso e olhar ao redor de seu desktop para pornografia ou slots on-line ou outros sinais de comportamento compulsivo, porque isso significa que eles são mais propensos a fazer um depósito. Você chama alguém e diga a eles que me chamo Jane Smith, que me chamou de Londres, onde fui um banqueiro de investimentos para essa incrível firma. I8217m chamando para falar com você sobre o quanto você realmente quer fazer. Vemos que você investiu 300, mas ambos sabemos que 300 não vai fazer nada para você. Então o que é que você realmente quer fazer em um ano Então as pessoas diriam, eu quero fazer 100.000. Eu quero comprar uma casa ou eu quero viajar.8221 Eles te dizem algo que eles querem e então você diz, então provavelmente levará 6-8 meses para conseguir isso. Se você quiser alcançá-lo você precisa trocar todos os dias. Vou trabalhar com você. I8217m vai dar-lhe informações sobre quais picaretas para fazer todos os dias. Lynne disse que o corretor faria check-in com os clientes regularmente, encorajando-os, ensinando-os sobre o mercado e oferecendo dicas. Quando o corretor escolheu um estoque para que eles apostassem, o estoque iria muitas vezes executar como prometido. Quando eles chegaram na plataforma e fizeram suas próprias escolhas, eles começaram a perder. Em seguida, o corretor iria voltar e ajudá-los a fazer algumas boas chamadas, e eles iriam ganhar novamente. Então, basicamente, você se deparar com este comerciante realmente grande, mas na realidade você está apenas tentando fazer o volume de comércios ser o mais alto possível. O próximo passo, lembra Lynne, era pedir um depósito de 10 mil. Os clientes costumam recusar e dizer não há nenhuma maneira que eu quero depositar 10.000. Então você pressioná-los e dizer Se você não realmente sério sobre como ganhar dinheiro, então por que estamos falando agora Traders tentar tudo. Alguns são realmente doces, alguns tentam se identificar com eles, outros tentam fazê-los sentir incompreensíveis, seja qual for a técnica que os leve a depositar. A técnica favorita é dizer: Se você depositar 5.000, eu lhe darei um bônus de 5.000. Os clientes ouvem isso e dizem That8217s insano. Vou depositar. Mas o bônus, explica Lynne, é uma armadilha. Você não está autorizado a retirar qualquer do seu dinheiro até que você use esse dinheiro bônus algo como 30 a 40 vezes. Vamos dizer que te dou um bônus de 1.000. Você precisaria trocar isso até que você fez pelo menos 30.000 lucros fora dele, e então você pode retirar seu dinheiro. Mas você nunca vai chegar a essa quantidade. Vamos dizer que você faz 10.000 fora dele e você diz que quer retirar, no contrato ele vai dizer que você pode retirar. Você pode tirar seu dinheiro original, mas você não pode receber o bônus ou o dinheiro que ganhou com o bônus. Assim, os clientes ficam presos no sistema, porque não querem perder todo o seu dinheiro, e quando trocam 30 vezes a quantia do bônus, perderam tudo. Quanto mais você troca, mais dinheiro você perde, diz Lynne. Você pode ir tão longe e ser bem sucedido. No entanto, Lynne diz novamente, com sua empresa, se você resistiu a tentação de tomar o bônus, e se você colocar em um pedido, a empresa iria enviar-lhe o seu dinheiro. Eles realmente se gabaram sobre o fato de que eles eram bons em dar às pessoas seu dinheiro imediatamente. Na verdade, eles incentivaram as pessoas a tomar pequenas retiradas. Se um cliente tivesse 10.000, eles diriam, por que você toma 2.000 e leva sua esposa em uma pequena viagem, muito calculada com o quanto eles estão dando e quanto espaço para tentar dar aos clientes. Lynne parou seu trabalho binário das opções logo após o curso de treinamento porque disse que não poderia estômago fazer exame das economias dos professores e dos motoristas de caminhão. Perguntada se ela pensava que o que ela tinha sido designado a fazer era antiético ou ilegal, ela responde: Era certamente antiético. Quando eu digo às pessoas sobre esse trabalho, elas ficam chocadas. Dizem que isso nunca poderia ser legal, de modo algum Israel poderia permitir isso. Economic terrorism In November 2014 a man by the name of Ariel Marom, who described himself as a former employee of several companies in the forex industry, sent a strongly worded letter to both the Finance and the Ethics committees of the Knesset, as reported in Israels financial daily Globes. Israel8217s parliament, the Knesset, January 19, 2016. (Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) I am calling on the regulator in charge of banking services and the Knesset Finance Committee to immediately take action to stop the wave of plundering, theft, fraud, money laundering, and crime on an international scale that is managed and operated in Israel that is hurting thousands of customers around the world. Marom described the forex industry as economic terrorism targeting the citizens of many countries. When this information becomes public knowledge through investigative reports by the media, which is bound to happen sooner or later, Israels status in the world will be damaged and it will unleash a wave of hatred toward the Jewish people and Israel, causing tremendous damage. 8216When this information becomes public knowledge through investigative reports by the media8230 Israels status in the world will be damaged and it will unleash a wave of hatred toward the Jewish people and Israel, causing tremendous damage8217 8212 letter sent to Knesset committees Marom said in the letter that he had been searching for a job in recent months and as a Russian speaker had interviewed with forex companies that operate in Israel and target customers abroad. He said he was surprised at the sheer magnitude of the fast-growing industry. There are hundreds of jobs currently available to Arabic, Russian, English, Spanish and French speakers as these companies seek new workers for their expanding departments. Marom added that after years in the traditional banking industry, he was shocked at the practices he witnessed in several forex companies. In the absence of any regulation, they are simply robbing customers. Many people compare forex to a casino, but its worse than a casino. A casino hands you your winnings immediately. Forex companies 8212 and Im talking about most of them 8212 simply do not allow people to withdraw money. Marom goes on: Many forex customers have no idea that the company operates from Israel, especially when were talking about the Arabic-speaking desks. Their complaints never reach our justice system and so the industry is not exposed. How is it possible that this has been happening for years, with no local regulation What happens when thousands of Turks, Russians, Spaniards, Italians and French figure out that the scam they fell for was carried out from here, in Israel Are our regulators waiting for synagogues to start blowing up all over the world to shut this thing down It is not clear what the Knesset Finance Committee did in response to Maroms letter. The Times of Israel tried to track Marom down, but the CEO of FeeX, a high-tech startup he used to blog for, said he had not heard from Marom for a few years and had no contact information. Maroms LinkedIn profile placed him at a high-tech company in Brazil where no one who answered the phone seemed to speak English. A phone call to an Ariel Marom listed near Haifa was answered by a woman who said her husband is an astronomer, not a finance professional. Youre the third journalist who has called looking for Ariel Marom in the last two weeks, she said. Now Im curious. The Times of Israel asked for the help of SixGill, a cybersecurity high-tech firm that specializes in the dark web, to track down Marom, but after a brief automated search, Tommy Ben-avi, a senior analyst at Sixgill, concluded that either Ariel Marom is not his real name or he doesnt want to be found.8221 The cyber intelligence company did, however, make some interesting observations about the forex and binary options industries. Ben-avi mentioned several companies known to be operating from Israel. This industry is a bit shady. Its hard to get to the owners and CEOs of some of these companies. Most of the time, when you have a company that large, you can see the owner, you can see the shareholders. Ben-avi conducted an automatic search with a system that scours hundreds of thousands of sites and closed dark web forums. It seems like they8217re trying to hide their identity. Maybe a few companies have the same owner, and they want to hide that fact,8221 he mused. 8220Or maybe their business is not 100 percent legitimate. How its done on Wall Street Jared K. a licensed stockbroker from the United States who now lives in Tel Aviv, says that he sees several problems with the local forex and binary options industries. On Wall Street, brokers are regulated, transactions are regulated, the money is regulated. Where is it coming from and where is it going There are rules as to how someone can access money in a claim. 8216I am shocked that Israel hasn8217t shut this down8217 8212 US-licensed stockbroker who lives in Tel Aviv Furthermore, says Jared, in the United States, a license to sell securities or handle client investments would require a person to meet certain ethical standards. If they dont look out for the best interest of their clients investments, it is a criminal offense. On Wall Street I can8217t put someone in an investment that doesn8217t fit them. That is fraudulent. If I called up your parents and said put money in this investment and they lost it all, in theory I could be arrested and go to jail. 8220Binary doesnt have that, there are no repercussions. What happens if someone loses money Nothing. I am shocked that Israel hasn8217t shut this down, he sums up. A product that invites fraud Yaron Zelekha, Israels former accountant-general, became known as the countrys foremost whistle-blower in 2007 when he exposed the financial improprieties of a sitting prime minister, Ehud Olmert. 8216I personally would not advise any Israeli to trade with any of these companies8217 8212 Yaron Zelekha, Israel8217s former accountant-general Zelekha told The Times of Israel that he doesnt want to tar all its players with the same brush, but that binary options and some instruments related to forex are designed in a way that creates a strong incentive for fraud. There is a very wide information gap between the public and these players, and they are exploiting it to their advantage. The broker is not giving you a service like in a bank he is personally betting against you. This is a flagrant conflict of interest, because youre betting on something, and the person reporting the outcome wants you to lose. Such circumstances invite fraud, says Zelekha, and there is no small number of companies that simply defraud the customer. Sometimes that fraud is very sophisticated. Israeli economist Yaron Zelekha, (Yossi Zeliger/FLASH90) Asked whether the entire industry should be shut down, Zelekha responds, There is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, although I personally would not advise any Israeli to trade with any of these companies. What the industry does need, he says, is real-time regulation. He says there is software that can now do real-time monitoring of a companys transactions. The Israel Securities Authority (ISA) must have real-time access to these companies computer systems. Zelekha says the ISA has fought a long battle to regulate the online financial trading industry. They deserve credit for their efforts, although the regulation wont be effective if it isnt done in real time. ISA: We probably wont allow binary options The Israel Securities Authority is housed in a 1920s Eclectic-style building in one of Tel Avivs loveliest neighborhoods, near the stock exchange. Itzik Shurki, director of the ISA8217S Exchange and Trading Platforms Supervision, is a soft-spoken man, but he has harsh words for binary options. Shurki says a new law to regulate online financial trading industries went into effect in May 2015. The companies that wanted to continue to offer their products to Israeli customers had to request a license from the ISA. Twenty-one companies requested licenses. One was disqualified, because its controlling shareholder, Aviv Talmor, had fled to Cyprus to escape arrest for alleged financial misdeeds. Talmor has since returned to Israel and is currently under house arrest. Two other companies withdrew their applications, leaving 18. Of these, four are primarily binary options companies, while the others seek to offer other types of CFDs, or contracts for differences, as well. 8216With binary options we8217ve already informed the companies that our intention is probably not to approve this product8217 8212 Itzik Shurki of the Israel Securities Authority Almost a year later, none of the applicants has been approved. Shurki says that the industry is currently in a transition period while the ISA reviews the applicants. During this period, the 18 companies have permission to continue to operate. If we decide yes, they will become fully regulated companies if we decide no, they will have to stop their operations. Which way is the ISA leaning With binary options we8217ve already informed the companies that our intention is probably not to approve this product. Its basis is problematic. Because ultimately 8212 I don8217t want to use the word 8216gambling8217 because it is a financial product 8212 but in the way it is offered and in the short time frame, and with all its complexity, in our view it brings it closer to a guessing game than a financial product where you can evaluate its worth. Itzik Shurki of the ISA (Courtesy) CFDs, or contracts for differences, a high-risk financial instrument that is also banned in the United States except on registered security exchanges, will be allowed in Israel, says Shurki. However, Shurki says CFDs will be regulated in real-time and aggressive or deceptive sales tactics will be rendered illegal. The ISA will monitor the prices of every product offered to make sure they are transparent and fair traders will need to be licensed and traders will also be prohibited from offering advice or tips to their customers. 8220You can8217t be in a position to give advice when their earnings are your loss,8221 Shurki explains. This all sounds quite impressive. Once the ISA makes it decision, one might be forgiven for thinking, the binary options fraudsters will be out of business. But theres a catch 8212 a great big catch that potentially excludes the overwhelming proportion of binary options trading from effective supervision in Israel: The new regulations apply only to companies that target Israeli customers. If a binary options or forex company targets customers abroad exclusively, it will not be regulated by the ISA. Thus, to ensure that the new law not apply to them, companies need only exclude Israeli clients. A quick visit to the websites of several binary options firms does indeed prompt messages saying the service is not available to Israelis. Shurki says he is aware that the new regulations will not solve the problem of call centers that are defrauding people abroad, but says that such activity is not under the ISAs jurisdiction, in the same way that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) only protects British citizens and the CFTC only protects Americans. If an American company tried to sell securities to Israelis, it would be our job to protect our citizens, not the Americans responsibility, he explains, although he adds that the ISA does have very good information exchanges with its foreign counterparts. Yes, but when an Israeli company steals from people in another country, is that not a crime It is a crime, says Shurki, but it8217s not a crime for his authority to investigate. Theres no such thing as a vacuum of authority. If an Israeli commits fraud or misrepresentation, thats the purview of the Israel Police. The French connection Perhaps nowhere is the hand-wringing and acrimony over Israel-based forex and binary options trading more anguished than in the community of French Jews living in Israel. In January of this year, a cover story of the French-language Israel Magazine , a monthly glossy magazine and website serving the French-speaking community in Israel and the Diaspora, was titled, Forex, is it kosher 8216A generation of young people is in the process of perverting themselves into worshipers of the golden calf8217 8212 journalist in a piece warning about Forex In the introduction to the piece, journalist Andre Darmon writes, The point of this article is not to point a finger at some of our fellow citizens or co-religionists, because the phenomenon is global, but to raise awareness that a generation of young people is in the process of perverting themselves into worshipers of the golden calf. And that earning a living does not mean everything is permissible These call centers hire lost young souls, writes journalist Ilana Mazouz in Alliance, a French-Jewish Internet magazine, many who do not speak Hebrew or English, and for a short time provide the illusion of a normal life in Israel. Some rabbis have forbidden people from working in the industry, calling it theft, while rabbinic lectures on the Internet in French bear titles like Forex, dirty work and Amalek. Again, numbers are hard to come by for how many young French speakers are employed in the industry. Didier F. a French-Jewish businessman, told The Times of Israel that after he graduated from the IDC-Herzliya, many of his fellow students were recruited by forex and binary options companies. Didier asserts that many owners of forex websites are members of a French-Jewish community of conmen who are hiding from French law enforcement in Israel, where the police, he alleges, dont bother them over-much. As previously reported in The Times of Israel, about 10 recent immigrants from France were charged last year with cyber crimes and telephone scams, while France has reportedly sent Israel 70 additional formal requests for judicial assistance for cases of suspected fraud. A movie was recently made in France about one of these alleged fraudsters. The movie is called 8220Je Compte sur Vous, French for 8220I8217m counting on you.8221 I love when they say French aliyah has increased so much now it8217s 7,000 people, says Didier. It8217s great, I8217m happy about it. But then you see that many of them are working in the forex industry or binary options industry. You go to Tel Aviv today, when you say to someone in the French community, I work in finance, they immediately think that you work in this shit. Adds Didier: Even if its a small amount of money, theyre stealing money from poor people. Its destroying families. Some people have killed themselves. According to a report in Le Nouvel Observateur, a French news weekly, lAutorite des Marches Financiers, the French securities authority, received a staggering 4,500-plus complaints about forex and binary options fraud in 2014. Those forex and binary options complaints constituted 37 percent of all complaints about securities fraud received by the authority in that year. The majority of the forex transactions that prompted those complaints originated in Israel, the article claims. What does Google have to do with this There is yet another piece of the binary options empire, and it relates to the way Israeli firms manage to reassure customers of their ostensible integrity, via Google. Lets say you are a potential binary options customer. A company has approached you about making a deposit, but you are not sure, so you decide to do your homework. You Google, Are binary options legitimate You will get a list of results, one or two of which may be fraud warnings from the US regulatory body, the CFTC. The first few pages of search results, however, are dominated by sites that purport to warn you away from scam binary options sites and steer you toward legitimate ones. Upon closer examination, however, many of these 8220helpful8221 sites themselves turn out to be affiliates of the binary options companies. Next, you might Google, Are binary options legal in the United States Once again, many of the top results turn out to be websites affiliated with the industry itself, rather than an objective source of information. Some of these sites offer misleading statements and half-truths like There are at this moment no laws both on the federal and state level that forbid US citizens from trading binary options online. US law banning binary options is directed at the companies that market them, not the customers who buy them, so there is some truth in that statement. However, the SEC and CFTC clearly warn investors that they may not have the full safeguards of the federal securities and commodities laws if they purchase unregistered binary options that are not subject to the oversight of U. S. regulators. Aerial view of the coastal city of Herzliya Pituah, July 21, 2010. (Moshe Shai/FLASH90) Many countries, including Canada, publish updated lists of unregistered binary options companies that solicit customers in Canada in violation of the law. A recent Canadian list is here. The list features 37 companies. The Times of Israel went to the website of each company on this list. Some were no longer in operation. Others blocked users from Israel (presumably to avoid trouble with the Israel Securities Authority). One now hosts a porn site. Most were hard to pin down to a geographic location. However, based on first - and secondhand sources, The Times of Israel suspects that more than half of these companies, if not the overwhelming majority, operate from Israel. Investing with offshore companies operating outside of Canada can be risky and is a common red flag of investment fraud, the Canadian Securities Authority warns. Yet if you Google Canada, binary options, blacklist, once again, many of the top search results appear to be industry-affiliated sites, some of which recommend as legitimate the very same sites that are on the Canadian government8217s blacklist. Bryan Seely, a Seattle-based cybersecurity expert, tells The Times of Israel he is not surprised to hear of these Google search results, which, he explains, show Google8217s search engine being manipulated. Bryan Seely (Facebook) Google doesnt make a point of censoring stuff you can find drugs, you can find steroids, you dont have to go to the Silk Road. Google indexes the Internet and ranks things where it ranks them. Asked why, if this industry allegedly has so many victims, their voices dont show up higher in Google rankings, Seely says, the victims aren8217t as good at promoting what happened to them as the people in the binary options industry are at promoting the stuff they8217re selling. The victims aren8217t all going to each other8217s pages 8212 so each victim8217s page would typically have only a low Google ranking. Seely, who has been battling to raise public awareness of massive search engine manipulation in the locksmith industry 8212 another area, incidentally, where systemic fraud in the United States, with large-scale Israeli involvement, has caused scandal in recent years 8212 adds, here8217s the underlying issue: Is Google safe to use Or Bing What he8217s really asking, when it comes to the binary options industry, is whether searching Google will lead a potential investor who fears being defrauded to the independent, credible and accurate information he is seeking. The answer, it would appear, is no. Search engine optimization and the secret of success Over the last decade, Israel earned the nickname 8220start-up8221 nation for its high-tech prowess. But not many people are aware that the country is also a global leader in online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), an expertise it acquired in the 8220shadow industries8221 of porn, online gambling and binary options, according to TheTime8217s 2014 report on the Israeli Internet industry. That expertise has plainly been applied by fraudulent binary options firms, whose affiliated sites show up high in Google searches 8212 sending unsuspecting and naive clients their way. Yoni S. an Israeli high-tech entrepreneur and SEO consultant, explains that without effective SEO, a fraudulent local player remains local, defrauding perhaps a few hundred victims in his vicinity. But with the power of Internet marketing, the scammer8217s reach can go global. The Times of Israel sent Google a request for an interview about the manipulation of its search platform by allegedly fraudulent businesses in the binary options industry, but Google did not respond. What do the police have to say The Times of Israel contacted the Israel Police repeatedly to ask them about alleged fraud in the forex and binary options industries. Their answers underlined how law enforcement is struggling to grapple with the soaring, fast-moving challenge of Internet crime. If there are investigations going on into fraud, etc. I don8217t have information on this. If someone has filed a complaint to the police, then let me know, Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld replied. A second police spokesperson, Luba Samri, told The Times of Israel, We got lost in your question. Please focus it more. Who filed a complaint against whom Finally, The Times of Israel called a third spokesperson, Merav Lapidot, and asked her what the police are doing about suspected fraud on a vast scale in the forex and binary options industries in Israel. Israel Police spokeswoman Merav Lapidot, November 28, 2007. (Moshe Shai/FLASH90) This is something you8217re claiming. If no one has complained about it, there is no issue. You want us to check every company in Israel and see if by chance they are committing crimes8221 Told that people who worked inside the industry have described widespread potentially fraudulent behavior on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, affecting tens of thousands of people, Lapidot replied: But no one has complained. I don8217t know what happens in every company. That8217s not our job. You could start a business tomorrow selling jewelry over the Internet. Will the police come to investigate your business To the suggestion that there may be thousands of victims abroad, Lapidot said, If there is someone who complained, we need to check that specific complaint. We8217re not going to check a whole issue. Is it possible that an entire industry, much of it allegedly corrupt, is slipping through the cracks between Shurki8217s Israel Securities Authority, which doesn8217t handle crimes hatched in Israel whose victims are abroad, and the police, which won8217t act unless specific complaints are filed with them Zvika Rubins, a PR consultant for the Israel Securities Authority, says the law simply hasn8217t caught up with the dubious and crooked methods people have devised to make money on the Internet. When you talk about bits and bytes, its not that simple. Was there a crime Where did it take place For instance, lets say you have a company and its incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and its servers are in India and it has a trading room in Israel. Is it an Israeli company I dont know. Rubins, who stresses that he is not an expert on criminal law, muses that if someone in Israel commits a crime against someone in, say, France, over the Internet, then it might be the responsibility of the French to open an investigation, trace the crime to Israel, and approach the Israeli police about it. Zvika Rubins (Facebook) Yoni S. the SEO expert, is outraged by this approach. In Israel its against the law to murder, but if I establish a company in Israel that murders people through the Internet in Malaysia, that8217s okay Seely sees the problem as extremely serious and growing: We8217re becoming a global culture and global economy, and physical borders don8217t exist on the Internet. It8217s become easier to scam people all over the world. We have no protections in place to prevent it and it8217s getting worse. Its a jungle out there, says Yoni, referring to the fact that people do all sorts of things on the Internet that would be illegal within their own borders. The Internet came in, no one has passed any regulation yet, and now there is an opportunity to make tons of money in the jungle.8221 A response from inside the industry Tali Yaron-Eldar, Israel8217s income tax commissioner from 2002 to 2004, in 2007 founded eTrader, a binary options firm that targets Israelis, along with Shay Ben-Asulin. who also co-founded AnyOption, one of Israel8217s largest binary options companies with revenues in the tens of millions of dollars. In 2011, Ben-Asulin was indicted by the United States for securities fraud, and last month he was convicted of fraud by an Israeli court for helping an Israeli credit card company, ICC-CAL, illegally clear billions of shekels of charges from porn, binary options and gambling websites, as well as conceal the number of canceled transactions. For his crimes, Ben-Asulin will do five months of community service and pay a fine of less than 1 million. Tali Yaron-Eldar (Screenshot Channel 10) In a 2014 interview (Hebrew) with Israel8217s Channel 10 news, when asked if she was discomfited by the fact of young demobilized soldiers and old pensioners losing all their money trading binary options, Yaron-Eldar responded: 8220Ask the people who invested and lost their money. All of them knew they were entering something risky.8221 The Times of Israel contacted Yaron-Eldar to ask her about alleged fraud within the binary options industry. To the extent that this is true, she said, it applies to unregulated companies. 8220The companies with a license are very careful,8221 she says. 8220AnyOption a company she is associated with has a Cypriot license. It is very careful to follow the law. It is being watched all the time.8221 In Yaron-Eldar8217s view, and contrary to the opinions of other people interviewed for this article, Cypriot regulation is very tough, on a par with the UK8217s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Asked about the fact that the Canadian government has included AnyOption on a list of companies illegally soliciting Canadian citizens, Yaron-Eldar replies, 8220Not that I am aware of.8221 In fact, Yaron-Eldar insists that AnyOption is not an Israeli company at all. 8220AnyOption does not have offices in Tel Aviv. It8217s a company that operates from Cyprus.8221 Indeed, a perusal of anyoption reveals no references to Israel. Nevertheless, it is no secret that hundreds of employees go to work each day at AnyOption8217s offices at 38 Habarzel Street in Tel Aviv8217s Ramat Hachayal neighborhood. How does she explain this discrepancy 8220They8217re not working for the same company,8221 she says. 8220They8217re working for AnyOption Israel, not AnyOption Cyprus. The company they work for is a service provider to the company in Cyprus.8221 In other words, AnyOption (like many other binary options companies with similar corporate structures) is not in fact an Israeli company, according to Yaron-Eldar8217s reasoning. This means that it, and many others like it, is subject to Cypriot law and regulation, not Israeli law. Since much of the regulated part of the binary options industry is subject to Cypriot regulation, the honesty or dishonesty of those firms may hinge on the strength and honesty of Cypriot law enforcement. Where are the victims The Times of Israel contacted the FBI to see if anyone had complained about forex or binary options call centers in Israel, but the agency did not respond. ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, replied in an email, We don8217t comment on operational matters, this includes confirming or denying if we have received complaints about a particular matter or not. A French government spokeswoman, however, confirmed that France has been having problems with forex fraud emanating from Israel. Yes, there are some cases of fraud, as you say,8221 she said. 8220Forex is not per se a fraud but it can be used for fraudulent objectives. We have had some cases between France and Israel, and we are in touch with the Israeli authorities about this. There is a very good cooperation between the two countries and the two services on this issue.8221 Back to Australia Ariel Marom, the mysteriously disappeared former forex employee who wrote that anguished 2014 letter to the Knesset, warned of the fallout when the extent of the corruption in the binary options industry in Israel is exposed. 8220What happens when thousands of Turks, Russians, Spaniards, Italians and French figure out that the scam they fell for was carried out from here, in Israel8221 he asked in his letter. 8220Are our regulators waiting for synagogues to start blowing up all over the world to shut this thing down Dan Guralnek, the Australian immigrant, has drawn his own conclusions. 8220This amount of dishonesty would never be allowed to exist in Australia,8221 he says. 8220They would shut down the industry overnight.8221 Guralnek recently became engaged to an Israeli woman. But he hopes to persuade her to move back to Australia with him, in part because of the high cost of living that drove him to work in binary options in the first place, and in part because of the corruption he has encountered. Now I see corruption everywhere I look,8221 he says. 8220Anywhere where there8217s no light shining on the corruption in this country, it feels like its growing.8221 CoursTorah, the website of a Francophone synagogue near Tel Aviv8217s Hamedina Square, has a page on its website warning against the binary options industry, headlined 8220Stop the Scam8221 8220Many people you know work directly or indirectly for these scam websites,8221 reads the page, warning that binary options and the majority of forex companies operating from Israel are fraudulent. It advises congregants to 8220run away from these companies8221 And it issues an evidently all too necessary reminder: 8220Let us remember the eighth commandment, 8216Thou shalt not steal.8221Binary Options Demo 8211 Everything You Need to Know Last updated on October 26, 2016 by Martin K If youve ever had a question about binary options demo accounts, chances are that you will find the answer inside this huge article. Weve cobriu tudo, desde o que é uma conta Demo para tipos de contas de demonstração, como usá-los para melhorar a sua negociação e, claro, como obtê-los. Fivela e começar a ler, você está em um longo passeio. Você não pode aprender opções binárias corretamente sem praticar. Pense em pilotos (mas isso se aplica a quase todas as profissões lá fora): um piloto aprende a teoria, em seguida, salta em que simulador de vôo virtual thingy e só depois disso, ele começa a voar um avião real. Opções binárias são os mesmos: você tem que aprender a teoria que a nossa escola cuida de que, em seguida, você tem que negociar dinheiro virtual em uma conta Demo e só então você pode trocar de verdade. No entanto, por algumas razões estranhas, nem todos os corretores oferecem contas Demo gratuitas. Uma coisa é certa: a conta Demo não é um rumor, mas é envolta em muita incerteza e hoje vamos tentar levantar a neblina, dando-lhe a verdade por trás Demo contas. O que é uma conta de demonstração de opções binárias Ao falar sobre contas de demonstração, a maioria das pessoas está se referindo a contas de dinheiro virtual. As contas de dinheiro virtuais são basicamente a negociação de ativos reais com tempos de expiração reais, mas com dinheiro virtual ou de demonstração. Em outras palavras, você não pode perder seu dinheiro real, mas você pode praticar e se familiarizar com a plataforma de Opções Binárias e com o processo de colocação de comércios. It8217s muito como jogar um jogo de vídeo de negociação, apenas com dados reais e gráficos reais que irão ajudá-lo a obter um passo mais perto de negociação opções binárias para viver. Alguns corretores afirmam ter uma demo, mas seu muitas vezes apenas um clipe de filme ou algum outro tipo de breve demonstração sobre como negociar opções binárias, e não uma conta que você usa para praticar negociação. Quando me deparo com uma corretora que afirma ter uma demo, mas tudo que eles têm é um clipe de filme de 5 minutos, eu geralmente começar a procurar outro corretor. Eu não acho que é justo para enganar clientes como esse. O que você vai encontrar com mais freqüência é a chance de jogar no mercado por alguns minutos ou poucos dias, até que o corretor corta o seu acesso e pede que você faça um depósito. Ainda não sei por que você ainda precisa de uma conta demo Então você deve entender que você pode usar demo trading como uma ótima ferramenta para ajudar as opções binárias processo de aprendizagem. Neste artigo vamos discutir as variações das contas demo que estão atualmente disponíveis: Real, Livre, Papel e nosso próprio sabor especial, CommuniTraders 2.0. 8220Real8221 Demo Account Trade Virtual Cash A maioria dos corretores de opções binárias não fornecem seus clientes com contas de demonstração e em vez disso dar desculpas hilariantes. Alguns dizem que é desnecessário e só aumentaria a carga de tráfego em seus sites, portanto, poderia prejudicar o comércio de dinheiro real. Outros corretores explicaram que poderia induzir em erro as pessoas a pensar que suas decisões são as mesmas ao negociar dinheiro real versus dinheiro virtual de negociação. Alguns corretores até me disseram que eu realmente posso fazer isso sozinho, sem qualquer ajuda dizendo apenas escolher um ativo, definir o seu tempo de expiração e, em seguida, verificar o seu comércio sobre os ativos expiries história. Por outro lado, alguns corretores de opções binárias fornecem uma conta de demonstração. Uma conta virtual é criada pelo corretor no momento em que o comerciante pede, normalmente não antes. Corretores não apenas entregá-los. Cada corretor irá fornecer-lhe uma quantia diferente de dinheiro virtual. Outra questão importante é o período de expiração de contas demo alguns corretores irá oferecer-lhe uma conta demo gratuita, mas apenas por um dia, ou uma semana tops. Então, se você pretende abrir essa conta, certifique-se de saber um pouco sobre a negociação de antemão, porque você vai querer colocar em alguns comércios virtual antes que o corretor fecha sua conta virtual. Como eu disse, é geralmente uma oferta dentro de um prazo específico. Portanto, certifique-se de fazer o melhor dele e você colocar como muitos negócios como você pode, enquanto sua conta demo ainda está ativo. 8220Free8221 Contas de Demonstração Preciso Depositar Primeiro A grande maioria dos corretores de Opções Binárias requer um depósito inicial antes de configurar uma conta demo de Opções Binárias. Existem muito poucas contas de demonstração verdadeiramente livres, apenas contas demo destinadas a levá-lo a fazer um depósito. A resposta para isso é mais ou menos a mesma explicação escrita acima corretores não querem distribuir contas de demonstração aleatoriamente para pessoas que nunca podem fazer um comércio de dinheiro real. Outra razão pela qual um depósito inicial é necessária é o contrato não escrito entre clientes e corretores. Ao dizer o contrato estou sugerindo que fazer um depósito mostra um compromisso do cliente, e, portanto, o corretor tem boas razões para fornecer ao comerciante com uma conta demo. Alguns podem dizer que é uma captura, eu concordo em parte. Pode ser bastante difícil, mas você pode realmente depositar, usar a conta de dinheiro virtual e, em seguida, solicitar uma retirada. Então, se você está realmente interessado em uma conta demo sem comércio de verdade, tente a minha sugestão. No geral, eu acho que o comércio de dinheiro virtual é um passo que todos os comerciantes devem concluir antes de investir dinheiro real. Mesmo que o aspecto psicológico (medo de perder dinheiro, a ganância) não é o mesmo que quando negociação com contas demo, ainda é um bom exercício que prepara você para a negociação de opções binárias futuro. Um número de corretores novos emergiram com uma atitude diferente para oferecer contas de demonstração. Eles oferecem contas demo direita sobre a plataforma sem a necessidade de registo ou depósitos, mas ainda há capturas. Existem dois tipos de contas de demonstração gratuitas. Um que não exige uma inscrição e oferece acesso directo à demo este tem a desvantagem de não obter o histórico de negociação salvo. O segundo tipo é aquele que requer um registro para que ele possa ser convertido em uma conta real mais tarde. Depois de criar um nome e uma senha, você pode entrar e começar a negociar imediatamente. Algo que ambos têm em comum são os limites e as restrições à negociação, como saldo de caixa limitado, ativos bloqueados e algumas ferramentas de negociação não estão disponíveis. Paper Trading uma Demonstração Para mais informações sobre papel de negociação, por favor, verifique o seguinte artigo: Opções Trading Binário em papel. Obter uma demonstração: CommuniTraders Totalmente livre, sem restrições Eu salvei o melhor para o último. Como sobre uma conta demo gratuita a partir de 20.000 dinheiro virtual, sem gerentes de conta chamando-lhe todos os dias e sem limites ou restrições sobre o que ou quando você pode negociar em uma conta demo que nunca expira Sim, sem pressa, comércio tudo o que quiser, quando você quer. Você também obter estatísticas de negociação, um perfil comercial e acesso completo ao fórum onde você pode assistir, copiar e aprender com outros comerciantes reais. Este é CommuniTraders Onde Negociação torna-se Social Veja este vídeo e aprender a obter acesso à nossa conta Demo CommuniTraders hoje Vamos falar sobre as formas de tirar o máximo proveito de sua conta Demo, mas também como evitar alguns erros comuns e onde Para obter uma conta Demo sem aborrecimento. Usando a conta Demo como uma ferramenta para ajudar a aprender opções binárias Dê um homem um peixe e ele come por um dia. Ensine um homem a pescar e ele come por toda a vida. Jon R. Orcutt (investidor e escritor). Eu fiquei interessado em mercados financeiros em torno de nove anos atrás, quando um conhecido meu me falou sobre Forex. Negociar moedas foi uma opção muito legal para mim como forma de trabalhar de forma independente e ganhar algum dinheiro. Tentei melhorar minhas habilidades lendo vários livros sobre investimentos. Como eu fiz isso amanheceu em mim que as informações que recebo de livros podem ser aplicadas não só no Forex, mas também em ações e opções. Este se tornou o principal incentivo para me juntar ao fórum de BOTS e aprender a negociar opções binárias. Usando esta plataforma, descobri que é muito mais fácil abrir e fechar comércios com opções do que é com moedas. Eu não precisava se preocupar sobre onde colocar minhas ordens stop loss ou tomar ordens de lucro. O preço simplesmente tinha que ser maior no momento da expiração da opção quando você comprou uma chamada e mais baixo se você comprou um put. Não jogue em demonstração. Forçar-se a acreditar no seu real Antes de escolher a sua estratégia de negociação em termos de prazo (horária, diária, três dias, semanalmente e etc) ou em termos de condições de mercado (intervalo, tendência, intermitente) você precisa tentar praticar Cada um em um demo para ver qual se adapta melhor ao seu estilo. Se você quiser construir um bom sistema, você terá que saber regras exatas para quando você troca chamadas ou coloca. Em seguida, você colocá-los em uma demo como se você estivesse fazendo isso em uma conta real. No momento em que você faz um comércio em uma conta real você terá praticado sua estratégia dezenas de vezes. Você terá experiência e você terá habilidades técnicas necessárias para realizar um comércio. Mas uma coisa que você nunca deve fazer: não jogar com a conta Demo. Não pense: Ah, é apenas uma demo, não importa se eu explodi-lo .. Não jogue dinheiro ao redor (mesmo que sua Demo), pensando que você é esse cara: Claro, o dinheiro de demonstração não vai comprar carros ou casas, mas considerá-lo Uma ferramenta para ajudá-lo a obter essas coisas em seu próprio país, não um brinquedo. Se você negociar imprudentemente e crescer a 20.000 inicial em 100.000, isso não significa que você será capaz de replicar a façanha em uma conta real porque uma vez que seu próprio dinheiro está na linha adivinhar o que você vai começar a se preocupar. E se eu perder esse comércio E se eu perder o próximo também OMG se eu perder o terceiro também, estou ficando louco. Tente cuidar de sua conta Demo tanto quanto você faria para sua conta real. Agora, eu sei que isso não é inteiramente possível, mas tente, porque você quer que sua negociação de demonstração para replicar tanto quanto possível condições reais, você quer se preparar para o comércio real onde você arriscar dinheiro real. Uma conta prática ajuda você a passar pelos mesmos processos e ações que você vai passar por fazer um comércio real e prepara você para os possíveis resultados. Se você encontrar o intervalo de negociação mais atraente do que a tendência de negociação, você terá que descobrir o método para usar um intervalo de negociação e passar pelo processo em uma conta demo uma dúzia ou mesmo centenas de vezes. O ponto é que você não basta colocar comércios aleatórios e tentar ver o quão bom você é. Não, isso é jogo e nós não queremos fazê-lo. Você seleciona um método ou uma estratégia e vai sobre ele tantas como vezes como você pode a fim começar melhor nesse método específico. Negociação de demonstração como oposta ao comércio ao vivo Aprender a negociar em um demo é uma coisa emocionante e gratificante. Você aprende a colocar negócios, aplicar várias estratégias de negociação, o tempo suas entradas e escolher expiries e você não arriscar um único centavo. No entanto, você nunca deve esquecer que passar para a negociação ao vivo será uma experiência diferente. Não importa o quanto você tente tratar a sua Demo como se fosse uma conta de dinheiro real, você não será capaz de fazê-lo completamente. Em uma conta Live você vai experimentar o stress (pelo menos inicialmente), que você havent durante a negociação demo, você vai arriscar dinheiro real, suas emoções vão ficar no seu caminho, as dúvidas podem começar a vir também. Após sua primeira perda ou algumas perdas, você pode realmente perder sua confiança em seu método. Nesse momento, mudar de volta para a demonstração de negociação pode ser de ajuda. No entanto, se youve experimentou uma série de perdas em Demo antes de passar para Live, você estará familiarizado com o sentimento e você vai lidar com ele mais fácil. Não estou dizendo que vai ser uma brisa, mas hey, pelo menos, você sabe que sua estratégia não é 99 precisa e também você sabe que depois de uma série de derrotas, as coisas vão começar a ficar melhor. A verdadeira jornada é para a frente Real trading não é certamente fácil, mas não significa que você não pode lidar com as coisas acima mencionadas. Você não vai se tornar um bom comerciante de negociação exclusivamente em uma conta demo da mesma forma como você não vai se tornar um grande boxeador, simplesmente fazendo boxe sombra. Você só será capaz de adquirir habilidades com demo trading. Para ganhar a nitidez de um profissional você terá que começar a colocar os negócios reais em uma conta real, cometer erros, aprendendo com eles, corrigindo-os e melhorar o seu estilo de negociação em condições reais de negociação. Alguns comerciantes dizem que estar em torno de um mês em uma demo é mais do que suficiente, outros dizem que você precisa de pelo menos 6 meses, outros aconselham você deve dobrar sua conta Demo três vezes antes de passar para Real. Diferentes pessoas, diferentes opiniões que eu digo usá-lo tanto quanto você precisa, mas não tenha medo de fazer o interruptor. Sempre que alguém tem praticado seus métodos favoritos bastante vezes ele certamente terá que fazer uma mudança de demonstração para real. Uma vez que você acredita que está pronto para fazer isso, cabeça sobre a CommuniTraders novamente e acertar o botão Real Account que irá levá-lo para uma lista de nossa lista de corretores recomendados. É hora de começar você Real Journey Final Conclusão Use o Virtual Thingy Não importa o quanto você ler e aprender, você precisa para começar a sua prática. Oferecemos-lhe uma Escola de Opções Binárias muito complexa, pensando que os corretores lhe oferecerão as ferramentas para praticar o que aprendeu. Quando percebemos que eles realmente não manter a sua parte do negócio, weve decidiu trazer-lhe CommuniTraders assim agora você tem seu próprio simulador de vôo livre. Hoje em dia mais e mais corretores oferecem Demo contas para que a escolha é sua. Use CommuniTraders ou use uma demonstração de seu corretor, mas não se esqueça que uma conta virtual não é a coisa real (hey, não há emoções em demo) e não é a resposta para todos os seus problemas, mas ele irá ajudá-lo a conectar os pontos para Tornar-se um verdadeiro profissional. Acho que as empresas de opções binárias são como casinos, mas ainda pior. Eles são muito enganosos sobre suas contas de demonstração, querendo que você depositar dinheiro. Existem desculpas por não oferecer conta demo completamente livre são lixo, como em todas as formas de negociação você tem acesso a contas de demonstração. Por exemplo, basta olhar para quantas contas de demonstração livre forex há também, corretores de ações de negociação oferecem contas de demonstração gratuita. It8217s importante aprender como usar uma plataforma primeiramente com dinheiro virtual. Eles sabem que, limitando o acesso às contas demo que muitas pessoas vão perder dinheiro, e sua empresa vai fazer um monte de dinheiro Concordo inteiramente que, embora parece fácil você precisa praticar diferentes formas de negociação para encontrar o que é mais bem sucedido. Você pode perder um monte de aprender isso com um live acct. E é isso que os corretores estão contando. OptionBit tem conta demo gratuita. Mas é confiável eu don8217t saber. Binaryoption corretores são alguns que scammers. Você pode tentar forex para ganhar dinheiro, os principais problemas dos corretores são sua fácil depositar dinheiro, mas não é fácil retirar lucros, e binaryoptions não são um sistema de negociação verificada de chicago bordo de troca de segurança, mas a negociação forex é verificada pela CBCE. Banc De Binary BDB exigem uma conta de financiamento antes de criar uma conta de prática. A conta de prática é bom para testar suas habilidades e vários aspectos da plataforma. Eu testei anyoption e trading247 plataformas e retiradas sem qualquer dificuldade. Todos eles viram variações de preços para dois provedores de terceiros e isso pode afetar os lucros às vezes nos últimos dias eu tenho sido capaz de usar essas variações de preço para o meu benefício. I8217m sobre para testar a retirada em BDB. Há processo de verificação é muito bom e há bate-papo on-line é o melhor que eu vim em toda, até agora. Robert 8211 Como você encontrou a função de retirada com Banc De binário Eu tenho uma conta com eles, mas ainda não depositaram, gostaria de saber como você conseguiu antes de eu depositar AnyOption parecem ter uma conta demo estagnada. Ok, it8217s não um site promocional e that8217s muito bem, mas pode u recomendar-me um corretor com conta demo gratuita no meu e-mail É absolutley executar como um casino. Você precisa saber que vai dentro NO spreeds, então eles são pagos quando você lose. You pode quando, por vezes, mas probabilidades são empilhados contra você. Também obter o seu dinheiro é uma missão. Certifique-se de que você está configurado com um banco que é internacional como HSBC, se não, pode demorar até 2 semanas para obter seus ganhos ou não em tudo. BOA SORTE. do u people offer japanese candlestick chart in your platformThe wolves of Tel Aviv: Israel8217s vast, amoral binary options scam exposed Related Stories When Dan Guralnek immigrated from Australia to Israel in 2012, he did not anticipate becoming involved in an international internet scam. I always wanted to move to Israel, says Guralnek, who attended a Jewish day school in Sydney. He was working in the administration of a factory in Australia when his boss died suddenly, and, at the age of 28, he realized it was a good time for him to move to Israel. I thought, Im free, no strings attached, I can go. Guralnek enrolled in Jerusalems Ulpan Etzion to learn Hebrew, then moved to the vibrant and bustling city of Tel Aviv, where he landed a series of minimum-wage jobs for NIS 25 (a little over 6) an hour: chopping vegetables in a restaurant, driving a disabled person, working the night shift at a hot-dog stand. But in a city with sky-high rents and a cost of living relative to salaries (PDF) second only to Japan, Guralnek could not survive. He heard that jobs in an industry called binary options paid twice what he was earning, plus commission. 8216It8217s gambling and we8217re a bookie8217 8212 ex-binary options salesman As soon as I started looking for a job, I was getting calls from binary options companies every day, he recalls. They dominate the job advertisement space. Nor did Guralnek have any difficulty landing a job. You walk in and they make a big show like they8217re assessing whether or not they want you. But they want you. On the day Guralnek stepped into the lavish offices of his new employer in the seaside town of Herzliya Pituah, he knew he had arrived. View of high-tech office buildings in Herzliya Pituah. December 12, 2015. (Nati Shohat/Flash 90) There was free coffee, free food, says Guralnek. My salary was 7,500 shekels (1,900) per month, plus commission. Guralnek sat in a call center with about 50 other employees, many of whom were new immigrants fluent in a variety of languages. His job was to call people around the world and persuade them to 8220invest8221 in an ostensible financial product called binary options. The clients would be encouraged to make a deposit 8212 to send money to his firm 8212 and then use that money to make 8220trades8221: The clients would try to assess whether a currency or commodity would go up or down on international markets within a certain, short period of time. If they predicted correctly, they won money, between 30 and 80 percent of the sum they had put down. If they were wrong, they forfeited all the money they put on that 8220trade.8221 Guralnek soon saw that the more trades a client made, the closer they came to losing the entirety of their initial deposit. He had been instructed to present the binary option as an investment and himself as a broker, even though he knew they would most likely lose all their money. The client isnt actually buying anything. What he8217s buying is a promise from our company that we will pay him. It8217s gambling and we8217re a bookie, he says now. Before he started the job, the company gave Guralnek a week-long sales course in which he was taught enough financial knowledge to sound good to a customer who knew less than him. He was also instructed in high-pressure sales tactics. They taught us how to make people uncomfortable, how to answer objections, how to keep them on the phone. The training session was known as a conversion course and the goal was to learn how to turn a telephone lead into a customer by taking their first deposit. At his company, salespeople were not allowed to take a deposit of less than 250. During the sales course, the companys management gave Guralnek advice that haunted him later. They told us to leave our conscience at the door. Is this legal As the weeks passed, more and more questions formed in Guralneks mind 8212 questions that underlined the bizarre financial netherworld he had entered. Why didnt he know the surnames of his managers Why were workers prohibited from speaking Hebrew or bringing cellphones into the call center Who was the companys CEO Why was it okay for the companys Arab-Israeli staff to sell binary options in places like Saudi Arabia while other countries, like Israel, the United States and Iran were off-limits Even worse, Guralnek began to suspect that beyond the poor odds customers had of actually making any money, and beyond the aggressive sales tactics, what the company was doing was downright illegal. For instance, every salesperson was asked to invent a fake name and biography. The call center used Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which displayed a local phone number to customers anywhere in the world. The companys website listed an address in Cyprus. I was told to tell people I had years of experience in the market, that I had studied at Oxford and worked for the Bank of Scotland. Guralnek says he was told to present himself as a broker who made a commission on the trades and to emphasize how much money the customer could make while downplaying the risk. In fact, rather than helping customers to make smart trades, the 8220broker8217s8221 true interest was for them to make unsuccessful predictions and lose their money. Guralnek says he was also increasingly disquieted by what happened when the clients tried to quit. That8217s when they would be asked for a lot of paperwork. We would say, You want to withdraw OK. We need to verify your identity before we can release the funds. You need to send us a photocopy of your utility bill, your drivers license, your passport, your credit card 8212 requirements, needless to say, that had not been mentioned when the client put money in . While the customer was gathering and submitting this paperwork, a retention agent would call them and go through their trades, purportedly figuring out what went wrong and convincing them to continue trading. We could delay that withdrawal for a long time. 8216Why should I be blamed for selling something to stupid people If someone is over 18 and wants alcohol, cigarettes, a knife, a binary option account, it8217s his own responsibility8217 8212 Facebook post If a customer was persistent, says Guralnek, very often the company would stop taking their calls, or send them an email saying we suspect you of fraud and freeze all their funds. Because the customer didnt know the real name or location of their salesperson, they had nowhere to turn to get their money back, explains Guralnek. But the grimmest part of the job for the young immigrant was asking for money from people who seemed poor and dejected. They believe they8217re doing something good: They8217re making an investment, doing something responsible. And they8217re not. Every story is sad. Everyone8217s got people depending on them. Lots of people are finally getting back on their feet after a drug problem or something. The worst was when a client told him, I8217m in hospital. When someone says I8217m in hospital and I have cancer, we8217re supposed to still sell them. But I would throw the sale every time. I couldnt do it. A vast, dishonorable industry If you type the words binary options or forex into Facebook groups that cater to new olim (immigrants to Israel), you will encounter long threads of heated exchanges. Do any of you who are involved in Forex/Binary options realize that this is a highly unregulated business that it is soliciting gambling to misinformed or uneducated persons reads one such post in the popular Secret Tel Aviv group. Why should I be blamed for selling something to stupid people a woman replies. If someone is over 18 and wants alcohol, cigarettes, a knife, a binary option account, its his own responsibility. Would you sell it to your grandmother the original poster fires back. In the Keep Olim in Israel Movement Facebook group, a woman writes, Hi all, can someone explain to me what are Binary and Forex jobs and why people are so anti-working in these industries in Israel This field is dishonorable, reads one reply. I8217ve done it and I felt nothing but shame and self-loathing for harassing people who never asked for this call and trying to get money out of them that they8217re unlikely to ever get back. If you dont like it, dont do it, reads another. Work what you feel is an honest job, make your 6,000 shekels (approx 1,500) a month take away, spend it half on rent and live like a rodent with the rest of it. He continues, While the Binary and Forex industry and I pay 50 taxes on our salaries to pay for your health care, social security, and security, I can speak for all of us, we dont need to be judged. No one seems to know precisely how big the binary options and forex industries are in Israel. Not even the Israel Securities Authority, which, when posed the question, responded via text message, As the industry is still unregulated, we dont have the full picture. But conservative estimates put the number of people employed in the industry at several thousand, mostly in Tel Aviv and its suburbs like Herzliya and Ramat Gan, while annual revenue could be anywhere from hundreds of millions to over a billion US dollars. Globally, the term forex normally refers to legitimate trade in foreign currency, while binary options is the name of a financial instrument. In Israeli popular parlance, however, binary options and forex are often lumped together as part of the same industry: When Israelis refer to forex companies, they often mean companies that 8220trade8221 the binary options on currencies. Sometimes the terms Forex and binary options are used interchangeably to refer to rapid, all-or-nothing trades on a range of assets. At some binary options firms, the online platform is manipulated to provide false results that ensure the customer loses The 8220trading8221 process can work as follows, The Times of Israel was told. Having transferred their first financial deposit to the company, customers log in to an online trading platform, as directed by the company8217s salespeople, and place money on a prediction that the price of a currency or commodity will go up or down on international markets in, say, the next five minutes. If the customer predicts correctly, he makes a profit of a certain percentage and the company loses money. If the customer is wrong, he loses all the money he placed on the trade, and the company keeps it. Professional options traders consulted by The Times of Israel said that even a financial genius cannot predict with any confidence what, say, the price of gold will do in the next five minutes rather than an investment, the transaction is really nothing more than a gamble. The misrepresentation of gambling as responsible investment would be bad enough. What8217s worse, though, and blatantly corrupt, The Times of Israel was told, is that, at some companies, the house is bent. A variety of ruses are used. The potential payout for a correct prediction is complex, opaque and calculated to minimize the company8217s loss. If an asset is behaving in a predictable way 8212 say, the price of copper starts to climb following an earthquake in Chile 8212 the company will pull that asset from the online platform. At some binary options firms, the online platform is manipulated to provide false results that ensure the customer loses. Estimates of the number of binary options and forex companies in Israel vary from 20 to several hundred. The IVC Research Center, a company that provides information about Israels technology sector, estimated in its 2015 yearbook that there are 100 online trading companies in Israel, the overwhelming majority of which fall into the categories of forex and binary options. IVC estimates these companies employ more that 2,800 people in Israel. However, the yearbook states, its difficult to gauge the actual size of the online financial trading industry in Israel, in part because the industry is low-key and its Israel nexus is often understated. The lobby of TheTime Startup Incubator in Tel Aviv (Photo by Eytan Brucker/liftoff. co. il) A 2014 report on the Israeli Internet industry by TheTime startup incubator says that of the 90 Israeli Internet companies earning revenue of 10 million or more per year, 15 were online trading platforms, many of them trading forex and binary options. Three of these, according to the report, were assessed to have revenue of at least 100 million a year. Some other companies on the list included iForex, bForex, AnyOption, 4XPlace, Optionbit and Banc de Binary. Based on these assessments, the Israeli forex and binary options industry has annual turnover in the hundreds of millions, possibly even billions, of dollars. How many are fraudulent It is anyones guess what percentage of online financial trading companies engage in unethical, illegal and/or fraudulent practices. One distinction many people interviewed for this article drew was between unregulated and regulated companies. Several large, better-known companies with Israeli founders or major sales and marketing operations in Israel are regulated in Cyprus, which gives them license to sell financial products in individual EU countries even if they are not regulated in those countries. Many forex and binary options companies operating in Israel, however, are unregulated . Sam C. a recent immigrant to Israel from the United States, describes his experience working in an unregulated binary options company last summer. Many customers had clicked on an ad hawking ways to earn money from home. 8216They actually believe that they8217re going to become a millionaire just by doing this8217 8212 former customer service staffer at a binary options firm They make it extremely, extremely hard for customers to withdraw their money, says Sam, who worked in customer service and who asked that his real name not be used. You have to find a copy of your driver8217s license, a copy of your utility bill and there are so many rules and requirements. Half of the calls I had to deal with were just people complaining, saying that its been months and I need my money now. I need it to pay for this or that. Pretty much the company just refuses to give it up. In fact, Sam says he cannot confirm that any customer ever received payment or withdrew their money during his few months working at the company. People would call back and call back. And eventually, sometimes one of my managers would say, Don8217t take that person8217s calls anymore and close his account. They would say, We8217re done with him and all the money doesn8217t matter. Don8217t take calls from him anymore. Most of the customers of Sams company were from the United States, even though it is against US law for companies to sell binary options to US citizens in this way. Additional clients were from Africa, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Many had clicked on an ad hawking ways to earn money from home or watched a video that claimed to reveal secret investment strategies. The majority seemed to be8230 the stereotypical dumb person, recalls Sam. You don8217t even realize that people like this exist outside of movies. They actually believe that they8217re going to become a millionaire just by doing this. And its almost sad. Asked about his managers, Sam said they were young Israelis who appeared to think it was cool to rip people off. Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in a scene from 20138217s 8216The Wolf of Wall Street.8217 (Paramount Pictures and Red Granite Pictures, Mary Cybulski) They seemed like they had just watched The Wolf of Wall Street and wanted to emulate the characters. The banter they would have, would be like, oh yeah, I can8217t believe he fell for that, I can8217t believe you got him to invest 300. Sam says one his managers would actually quote Leonardo DiCaprios sales pitches from the movie verbatim over the telephone when trying to sell binary options. 82208216Hello, John. How are you doing today You mailed my company a few weeks back, requesting information on an investment that had huge upside potential with very little downside risks,8217 he would quote from memory. 8216Does that ring a bell8221 I thought it was kind of pathetic, to be honest,8221 recalls Sam. Manipulating software In 2013, the United States outlawed the marketing of binary options to its citizens, except on a handful of regulated exchanges. On its website, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an independent US government agency, alerts investors to fraudulent schemes involving binary options and their trading platforms. Estes regimes alegadamente incluem a recusa de crédito contas de clientes, negando reembolso de fundos, roubo de identidade e manipulação de software para gerar negócios perdedores. Trading binary options can be an extremely risky proposition, warns another US-based regulatory agency, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA ), on its website. Unlike other types of options contracts,8221 says FINRA, an SRO that regulates member brokerage firms and exchange markets, 8220binary options are all-or-nothing propositions. When a binary option expires, it either makes a pre-specified amount of money, or nothing at all, in which case the investor loses his or her entire investment. Trading binary options is made even riskier by fraudulent schemes, many of which originate outside the United States. In Israel, many so-called forex companies are actually selling binary options, meaning that a client bets on whether a currency will go up or down, rather than buying the currency, Jared K. a former Wall Street broker explains to The Times of Israel. Traditional forex is I buy at 3.50, I sell at 3.60. Binary forex (that is, forex in the world of binary options) is saying if it goes to 3.60 I win money, let8217s say 20 more than I bet, but if it goes to 3.50 or lower, I lose. Trading binary options is made even riskier by fraudulent schemes, many of which originate outside the United States 8212 US government warning Graham P. who currently works in marketing for a large, Cyprus-regulated binary options firm in Tel Aviv, says he knows about efforts to manipulate software as described by the CFTC 8212 cynical intervention by binary options firms to ensure they win, the industry8217s equivalent of a rigged roulette wheel in a casino. I spoke to a guy I was potentially going to work with, and he had actually developed a binary options platform. He said that everyone he met who was interested in buying the platform (to start their own company) wanted him to create a back door. By back door, Graham means that companies want to be able to manipulate a 8220trade8221 at the last minute if a customer or group of customers appears to be winning too much. Lets say 70 percent of the traders are for some reason betting that oil is going to go up. So then the companies say, gee, if we make just 30 percent win, we8217ll be able to keep a lot more money. And the algorithm does that. Its very easy to tell the customer, oh, the line fell a little bit below your position.8221 If the customer brings proof that the price of oil did actually go up to where they predicted it would, the company will point them to the fine print, which states that the company has its own algorithms which may differ from real-time. 8220Trading rates assigned to the assets on our website are ones at which our company is willing to sell binary options to its customers at the point of sale,8221 reads a typical disclaimer on many binary options websites. 8220As such they may not directly correspond to real-time market levels at the point in time at which the sale of options occurs.8221 Graham, whose company is regulated in Cyprus, said that in his view the entire binary options industry is fraudulent. If so, this represents cynical and systematic corruption on an huge scale 8212 dwarfing such damaging scandals as the illegal hawking of Dead Sea products by Israelis at kiosks in malls around the world 8212 unconscionably allowed to flourish, with extremely grave potential repercussions for Israel. For some crazy reason its legal in Europe. Individual European nations are letting binary options fly. While countries like the United States smelled the bullshit a long time ago and made it illegal. Graham said that on a gut level, he would like to see the industry shut down, but he is worried. There8217s so much money pouring into the city it8217s literally an industry here 8212 Im including forex too. It8217s probably paying for the subway system we8217re installing. Can you imagine thousands of people in Tel Aviv out of work General view of Tel Aviv on December 27, 2010. (Abir Sultan/Flash 90) A bad reputation Chaya Berkowitz, an eight-year veteran of forex companies in Israel, tells the Times of Israel that her own experience in the industry has been good. I8217m not oblivious. I8217m aware that it has a very bad reputation. I don8217t think that8217s 100 percent justified. Berkowitz asserts that there are legitimate companies in the industry, and rattles off the names FXCM, Alpari and FXPro, none of which are based in Israel. If you have ten forex companies, probably six or seven of them have bad reputations that give the others a bad name. Its unfortunate because the others take their business seriously and do care about their clients, she says. Asked if those six or seven are guilty of fraud, Berkowitz avers, I wouldnt say theyre committing fraud. They have the reputation of lying to their clients and misleading advertising. That definitely exists, but there8217s a reason some of the big brokerage firms are still around. Its because they usually play by the book 8212 otherwise they8217re not around very long. Berkowitz estimates that in legitimate forex companies, two or three out of 10 clients do earn profits and are able to easily withdraw their money. Asked how to tell if a company is legitimate, she says, I would look for tougher regulation, not a company regulated on some island somewhere but regulated in the UK, the United States or Australia. Cyprus, she claims, has become stricter in recent years. Its becoming a more recognized regulatory agency. I would also ask friends or other investors. Personal word of mouth is huge. I would do my homework. Look online to see who has a good reputation. I would ask questions when researching a broker. Do I have easy access to my money Do you offer education Reeling the customers in After getting her Masters degree in Israel and marrying an Israeli, Lynne R. a native Californian, began looking for a job, but was disappointed by what was out there. It was really shocking to me, once I started going to companies, to find out how low the salaries were. I wanted to find something more competitive, more similar to what I was earning in the United States. People kept mentioning to Lynne that binary options jobs paid well. She posted the fact that she was looking into a couple job sites on Facebook, and I probably had 25-30 people call to set up interviews. Lynne went on five or six interviews, where she learned she was eligible for two types of jobs. Ramat Gan8217s Moshe Aviv Tower, Israel8217s tallest building, houses many binary options companies (Simona Weinglass/Times of Israel) There8217s conversion and retention. For the conversion jobs they were telling me I would make around 15,000 shekels (3,850) a month and for retention jobs they told me I could make 30,000 to 40,000 (7,700 to 10,250) a month. At each interview, Lynne probed extensively as to the nature of the job. Each company has its own marketing methods, often involving videos that tell the story of a person who learned a secret method of extracting money from the market, she says. One firm told her it attracted customers with a 8220robot8221: They said, basically we use a program, which we call a robot. We market it to people and we say it can make small trades for you, like 100 or 200, and there8217s an Internet program that will do, you know, some magic and make you a few hundred extra dollars a month. Lynne8217s job would be to call people who had paid 200 to use the robot, and persuade them to deepen their involvement. 8220You call them and you say, well, you have this robot, but its not actually that great of a program it was sold to you by an affiliate of ours. If you want to make serious money, you need to start trading, and we can tell you how. We8217re expert traders. All you need to do is make a bigger deposit, and you8217ll get a personalized account with us and a personal trader. All you need to do is make a deposit of 500 and we8217ll get you started. Lynne was eventually offered a retention job, and was enrolled in a two-week training course. The first thing she was told was to never reveal she was calling from Israel. All retention staff were asked to pose as trained brokers working out of a London office. They were required to brush up on the days weather in London as well as what was happening in the news. You had to make yourself a biography. You needed to think of a business school and say that you went there. You needed to say that you were a trader, that you had worked for either an investment bank or on Wall Street. If you8217re a woman, they encourage you to say you8217re single because guys will more likely deposit with you. If you8217re a guy, you want to have a wife and two kids, because that makes you relate-able. The company, she said, was regulated in Cyprus. The industry is certified for Europe, but you8217re not heavily regulated. Its a way to be EU-accredited without a lot of oversight. (Finance Magnates, a trade publication of Israel8217s online financial trading industry, has written in the past that Cyprus has a reputation for lax regulation.) 8216When we offered training to them, we would share their desktop and walk them through the website. We were told to look around their desktop for pornography or online slots or other signs of compulsive behavior, because that means they8217re more likely to make a deposit8217 8212 former binary options retention agent Lynne says her companys selling point, which it bragged about, was that it was more ethical than other binary options companies. If someone asked to withdraw their money we would give it to them within 48 hours, she says. When Lynne started playing with her companys binary options platform, she realized it was fun and addictive, almost like a gambling game. There was lots of adrenaline. If you put money in your investment account today, it might give you 3 to 6 percent returns. In binary you see 70 percent coming in right away. If conversion agents were expected to get a client to make their first deposit, retention agents like Lynne were tasked with bringing in the big money. The first step was to size up the customer. They told us to look up people8217s homes on Google Maps to see how rich they seemed and to check their credit card information to see if they had gold or platinum status. Also, when we offered training to them, we would share their desktop and walk them through the website. We were told to abuse that access and look around their desktop for pornography or online slots or other signs of compulsive behavior, because that means they8217re more likely to make a deposit. You call someone and you tell them my name is Jane Smith, I8217m calling from London where I8217m an investment banker for this amazing firm. I8217m calling to talk to you about how much you actually want to make. We see that you8217ve invested 300 but we both know 300 is not going to make you anything. So what is it you actually want to make in a year So people would say, I want to make 100,000. I want to buy a house or I want to travel.8221 They tell you something that they want and then you say, so it will probably take you 6-8 months to achieve that. If you want to achieve it you need to trade every day. I8217m going to be working with you. I8217m going to give you information about which picks to make every day. Lynne said the broker would check in with customers regularly, encouraging them, teaching them about the market, and offering tips. When the broker chose a stock for them to bet on, the stock would often perform as promised. When they got on the platform and made their own picks, they started losing. Then the broker would come back and help them make some good calls, and they would win again. So basically you come across as this really great trader, but in reality you are just trying to make the volume of trades be as high as possible. The next step, recalls Lynne, was to ask for a 10,000 deposit. Customers usually balk and say There8217s no way I want to deposit 10,000. So you pressure them and say If you8217re not really serious about making money, then why are we talking right now Traders try everything. Some are really sweet, some try to identify with them, some try to make them feel awkward 8212 whatever the technique is that gets them to deposit. The favorite technique is to say, If you deposit 5,000, I will give you a 5,000 bonus. Customers hear that and they say That8217s insane. Im going to deposit. But the bonus, explains Lynne, is a trap. You8217re not allowed to withdraw any of your money until you use that bonus money something like 30 to 40 times over. Let8217s say I give you a 1,000 bonus. You would need to trade that until you made at least 30,000 profit off of it, and then you can withdraw your money. But you will never get to that amount. Let8217s say you make 10,000 off of it and you say you want to withdraw, in the contract it will say you can8217t withdraw. You can take your original money out, but you can8217t take the bonus or the money you earned with the bonus. So clients get stuck in the system, because they don8217t want to lose all their money, and by the time they trade 30 times the amount of the bonus, they8217ve lost everything. The longer you trade, the more money you lose, says Lynne. You can8217t go that far typically and be successful. However, Lynne says again, with her company, if you resisted the temptation to take the bonus, and if you put in a request, the company would send you your money. They really bragged about the fact that they were good about giving people their money right away. In fact, they encouraged people to take small withdrawals. If a customer had 10,000, they would say, why don8217t you take 2,000 and take your wife on a small trip It8217s very calculated with how much they8217re giving out and how much leeway to try to give the customers. Lynne quit her binary options job soon after the training course because she said she couldnt stomach taking the savings of schoolteachers and truck drivers. Asked whether she thought what she had been assigned to do was unethical or illegal, she replies: It was certainly unethical. When I tell people about this job, they are shocked. They say, that could never be legal, there8217s no way Israel would ever allow that. Economic terrorism In November 2014 a man by the name of Ariel Marom, who described himself as a former employee of several companies in the forex industry, sent a strongly worded letter to both the Finance and the Ethics committees of the Knesset, as reported in Israels financial daily Globes. Israel8217s parliament, the Knesset, January 19, 2016. (Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) I am calling on the regulator in charge of banking services and the Knesset Finance Committee to immediately take action to stop the wave of plundering, theft, fraud, money laundering, and crime on an international scale that is managed and operated in Israel that is hurting thousands of customers around the world. Marom described the forex industry as economic terrorism targeting the citizens of many countries. When this information becomes public knowledge through investigative reports by the media, which is bound to happen sooner or later, Israels status in the world will be damaged and it will unleash a wave of hatred toward the Jewish people and Israel, causing tremendous damage. 8216When this information becomes public knowledge through investigative reports by the media8230 Israels status in the world will be damaged and it will unleash a wave of hatred toward the Jewish people and Israel, causing tremendous damage8217 8212 letter sent to Knesset committees Marom said in the letter that he had been searching for a job in recent months and as a Russian speaker had interviewed with forex companies that operate in Israel and target customers abroad. He said he was surprised at the sheer magnitude of the fast-growing industry. There are hundreds of jobs currently available to Arabic, Russian, English, Spanish and French speakers as these companies seek new workers for their expanding departments. Marom added that after years in the traditional banking industry, he was shocked at the practices he witnessed in several forex companies. In the absence of any regulation, they are simply robbing customers. Many people compare forex to a casino, but its worse than a casino. A casino hands you your winnings immediately. Forex companies 8212 and Im talking about most of them 8212 simply do not allow people to withdraw money. Marom goes on: Many forex customers have no idea that the company operates from Israel, especially when were talking about the Arabic-speaking desks. Their complaints never reach our justice system and so the industry is not exposed. How is it possible that this has been happening for years, with no local regulation What happens when thousands of Turks, Russians, Spaniards, Italians and French figure out that the scam they fell for was carried out from here, in Israel Are our regulators waiting for synagogues to start blowing up all over the world to shut this thing down It is not clear what the Knesset Finance Committee did in response to Maroms letter. The Times of Israel tried to track Marom down, but the CEO of FeeX, a high-tech startup he used to blog for, said he had not heard from Marom for a few years and had no contact information. Maroms LinkedIn profile placed him at a high-tech company in Brazil where no one who answered the phone seemed to speak English. A phone call to an Ariel Marom listed near Haifa was answered by a woman who said her husband is an astronomer, not a finance professional. Youre the third journalist who has called looking for Ariel Marom in the last two weeks, she said. Now Im curious. The Times of Israel asked for the help of SixGill, a cybersecurity high-tech firm that specializes in the dark web, to track down Marom, but after a brief automated search, Tommy Ben-avi, a senior analyst at Sixgill, concluded that either Ariel Marom is not his real name or he doesnt want to be found.8221 The cyber intelligence company did, however, make some interesting observations about the forex and binary options industries. Ben-avi mentioned several companies known to be operating from Israel. This industry is a bit shady. Its hard to get to the owners and CEOs of some of these companies. Most of the time, when you have a company that large, you can see the owner, you can see the shareholders. Ben-avi conducted an automatic search with a system that scours hundreds of thousands of sites and closed dark web forums. It seems like they8217re trying to hide their identity. Maybe a few companies have the same owner, and they want to hide that fact,8221 he mused. 8220Or maybe their business is not 100 percent legitimate. How its done on Wall Street Jared K. a licensed stockbroker from the United States who now lives in Tel Aviv, says that he sees several problems with the local forex and binary options industries. On Wall Street, brokers are regulated, transactions are regulated, the money is regulated. Where is it coming from and where is it going There are rules as to how someone can access money in a claim. 8216I am shocked that Israel hasn8217t shut this down8217 8212 US-licensed stockbroker who lives in Tel Aviv Furthermore, says Jared, in the United States, a license to sell securities or handle client investments would require a person to meet certain ethical standards. If they dont look out for the best interest of their clients investments, it is a criminal offense. On Wall Street I can8217t put someone in an investment that doesn8217t fit them. That is fraudulent. If I called up your parents and said put money in this investment and they lost it all, in theory I could be arrested and go to jail. 8220Binary doesnt have that, there are no repercussions. What happens if someone loses money Nothing. I am shocked that Israel hasn8217t shut this down, he sums up. A product that invites fraud Yaron Zelekha, Israels former accountant-general, became known as the countrys foremost whistle-blower in 2007 when he exposed the financial improprieties of a sitting prime minister, Ehud Olmert. 8216I personally would not advise any Israeli to trade with any of these companies8217 8212 Yaron Zelekha, Israel8217s former accountant-general Zelekha told The Times of Israel that he doesnt want to tar all its players with the same brush, but that binary options and some instruments related to forex are designed in a way that creates a strong incentive for fraud. There is a very wide information gap between the public and these players, and they are exploiting it to their advantage. The broker is not giving you a service like in a bank he is personally betting against you. This is a flagrant conflict of interest, because youre betting on something, and the person reporting the outcome wants you to lose. Such circumstances invite fraud, says Zelekha, and there is no small number of companies that simply defraud the customer. Sometimes that fraud is very sophisticated. Israeli economist Yaron Zelekha, (Yossi Zeliger/FLASH90) Asked whether the entire industry should be shut down, Zelekha responds, There is no need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, although I personally would not advise any Israeli to trade with any of these companies. What the industry does need, he says, is real-time regulation. He says there is software that can now do real-time monitoring of a companys transactions. The Israel Securities Authority (ISA) must have real-time access to these companies computer systems. Zelekha says the ISA has fought a long battle to regulate the online financial trading industry. They deserve credit for their efforts, although the regulation wont be effective if it isnt done in real time. ISA: We probably wont allow binary options The Israel Securities Authority is housed in a 1920s Eclectic-style building in one of Tel Avivs loveliest neighborhoods, near the stock exchange. Itzik Shurki, director of the ISA8217S Exchange and Trading Platforms Supervision, is a soft-spoken man, but he has harsh words for binary options. Shurki says a new law to regulate online financial trading industries went into effect in May 2015. The companies that wanted to continue to offer their products to Israeli customers had to request a license from the ISA. Twenty-one companies requested licenses. One was disqualified, because its controlling shareholder, Aviv Talmor, had fled to Cyprus to escape arrest for alleged financial misdeeds. Talmor has since returned to Israel and is currently under house arrest. Two other companies withdrew their applications, leaving 18. Of these, four are primarily binary options companies, while the others seek to offer other types of CFDs, or contracts for differences, as well. 8216With binary options we8217ve already informed the companies that our intention is probably not to approve this product8217 8212 Itzik Shurki of the Israel Securities Authority Almost a year later, none of the applicants has been approved. Shurki says that the industry is currently in a transition period while the ISA reviews the applicants. During this period, the 18 companies have permission to continue to operate. If we decide yes, they will become fully regulated companies if we decide no, they will have to stop their operations. Which way is the ISA leaning With binary options we8217ve already informed the companies that our intention is probably not to approve this product. Its basis is problematic. Because ultimately 8212 I don8217t want to use the word 8216gambling8217 because it is a financial product 8212 but in the way it is offered and in the short time frame, and with all its complexity, in our view it brings it closer to a guessing game than a financial product where you can evaluate its worth. Itzik Shurki of the ISA (Courtesy) CFDs, or contracts for differences, a high-risk financial instrument that is also banned in the United States except on registered security exchanges, will be allowed in Israel, says Shurki. However, Shurki says CFDs will be regulated in real-time and aggressive or deceptive sales tactics will be rendered illegal. The ISA will monitor the prices of every product offered to make sure they are transparent and fair traders will need to be licensed and traders will also be prohibited from offering advice or tips to their customers. 8220You can8217t be in a position to give advice when their earnings are your loss,8221 Shurki explains. This all sounds quite impressive. Once the ISA makes it decision, one might be forgiven for thinking, the binary options fraudsters will be out of business. But theres a catch 8212 a great big catch that potentially excludes the overwhelming proportion of binary options trading from effective supervision in Israel: The new regulations apply only to companies that target Israeli customers. If a binary options or forex company targets customers abroad exclusively, it will not be regulated by the ISA. Thus, to ensure that the new law not apply to them, companies need only exclude Israeli clients. A quick visit to the websites of several binary options firms does indeed prompt messages saying the service is not available to Israelis. Shurki says he is aware that the new regulations will not solve the problem of call centers that are defrauding people abroad, but says that such activity is not under the ISAs jurisdiction, in the same way that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) only protects British citizens and the CFTC only protects Americans. If an American company tried to sell securities to Israelis, it would be our job to protect our citizens, not the Americans responsibility, he explains, although he adds that the ISA does have very good information exchanges with its foreign counterparts. Yes, but when an Israeli company steals from people in another country, is that not a crime It is a crime, says Shurki, but it8217s not a crime for his authority to investigate. Theres no such thing as a vacuum of authority. If an Israeli commits fraud or misrepresentation, thats the purview of the Israel Police. The French connection Perhaps nowhere is the hand-wringing and acrimony over Israel-based forex and binary options trading more anguished than in the community of French Jews living in Israel. In January of this year, a cover story of the French-language Israel Magazine , a monthly glossy magazine and website serving the French-speaking community in Israel and the Diaspora, was titled, Forex, is it kosher 8216A generation of young people is in the process of perverting themselves into worshipers of the golden calf8217 8212 journalist in a piece warning about Forex In the introduction to the piece, journalist Andre Darmon writes, The point of this article is not to point a finger at some of our fellow citizens or co-religionists, because the phenomenon is global, but to raise awareness that a generation of young people is in the process of perverting themselves into worshipers of the golden calf. And that earning a living does not mean everything is permissible These call centers hire lost young souls, writes journalist Ilana Mazouz in Alliance, a French-Jewish Internet magazine, many who do not speak Hebrew or English, and for a short time provide the illusion of a normal life in Israel. Some rabbis have forbidden people from working in the industry, calling it theft, while rabbinic lectures on the Internet in French bear titles like Forex, dirty work and Amalek. Again, numbers are hard to come by for how many young French speakers are employed in the industry. Didier F. a French-Jewish businessman, told The Times of Israel that after he graduated from the IDC-Herzliya, many of his fellow students were recruited by forex and binary options companies. Didier asserts that many owners of forex websites are members of a French-Jewish community of conmen who are hiding from French law enforcement in Israel, where the police, he alleges, dont bother them over-much. As previously reported in The Times of Israel, about 10 recent immigrants from France were charged last year with cyber crimes and telephone scams, while France has reportedly sent Israel 70 additional formal requests for judicial assistance for cases of suspected fraud. A movie was recently made in France about one of these alleged fraudsters. The movie is called 8220Je Compte sur Vous, French for 8220I8217m counting on you.8221 I love when they say French aliyah has increased so much now it8217s 7,000 people, says Didier. It8217s great, I8217m happy about it. But then you see that many of them are working in the forex industry or binary options industry. You go to Tel Aviv today, when you say to someone in the French community, I work in finance, they immediately think that you work in this shit. Adds Didier: Even if its a small amount of money, theyre stealing money from poor people. Its destroying families. Some people have killed themselves. According to a report in Le Nouvel Observateur, a French news weekly, lAutorite des Marches Financiers, the French securities authority, received a staggering 4,500-plus complaints about forex and binary options fraud in 2014. Those forex and binary options complaints constituted 37 percent of all complaints about securities fraud received by the authority in that year. The majority of the forex transactions that prompted those complaints originated in Israel, the article claims. What does Google have to do with this There is yet another piece of the binary options empire, and it relates to the way Israeli firms manage to reassure customers of their ostensible integrity, via Google. Lets say you are a potential binary options customer. A company has approached you about making a deposit, but you are not sure, so you decide to do your homework. You Google, Are binary options legitimate You will get a list of results, one or two of which may be fraud warnings from the US regulatory body, the CFTC. The first few pages of search results, however, are dominated by sites that purport to warn you away from scam binary options sites and steer you toward legitimate ones. Upon closer examination, however, many of these 8220helpful8221 sites themselves turn out to be affiliates of the binary options companies. Next, you might Google, Are binary options legal in the United States Once again, many of the top results turn out to be websites affiliated with the industry itself, rather than an objective source of information. Some of these sites offer misleading statements and half-truths like There are at this moment no laws both on the federal and state level that forbid US citizens from trading binary options online. US law banning binary options is directed at the companies that market them, not the customers who buy them, so there is some truth in that statement. However, the SEC and CFTC clearly warn investors that they may not have the full safeguards of the federal securities and commodities laws if they purchase unregistered binary options that are not subject to the oversight of U. S. regulators. Aerial view of the coastal city of Herzliya Pituah, July 21, 2010. (Moshe Shai/FLASH90) Many countries, including Canada, publish updated lists of unregistered binary options companies that solicit customers in Canada in violation of the law. A recent Canadian list is here. The list features 37 companies. The Times of Israel went to the website of each company on this list. Some were no longer in operation. Others blocked users from Israel (presumably to avoid trouble with the Israel Securities Authority). One now hosts a porn site. Most were hard to pin down to a geographic location. However, based on first - and secondhand sources, The Times of Israel suspects that more than half of these companies, if not the overwhelming majority, operate from Israel. Investing with offshore companies operating outside of Canada can be risky and is a common red flag of investment fraud, the Canadian Securities Authority warns. Yet if you Google Canada, binary options, blacklist, once again, many of the top search results appear to be industry-affiliated sites, some of which recommend as legitimate the very same sites that are on the Canadian government8217s blacklist. Bryan Seely, a Seattle-based cybersecurity expert, tells The Times of Israel he is not surprised to hear of these Google search results, which, he explains, show Google8217s search engine being manipulated. Bryan Seely (Facebook) Google doesnt make a point of censoring stuff you can find drugs, you can find steroids, you dont have to go to the Silk Road. Google indexes the Internet and ranks things where it ranks them. Asked why, if this industry allegedly has so many victims, their voices dont show up higher in Google rankings, Seely says, the victims aren8217t as good at promoting what happened to them as the people in the binary options industry are at promoting the stuff they8217re selling. The victims aren8217t all going to each other8217s pages 8212 so each victim8217s page would typically have only a low Google ranking. Seely, who has been battling to raise public awareness of massive search engine manipulation in the locksmith industry 8212 another area, incidentally, where systemic fraud in the United States, with large-scale Israeli involvement, has caused scandal in recent years 8212 adds, here8217s the underlying issue: Is Google safe to use Or Bing What he8217s really asking, when it comes to the binary options industry, is whether searching Google will lead a potential investor who fears being defrauded to the independent, credible and accurate information he is seeking. The answer, it would appear, is no. Search engine optimization and the secret of success Over the last decade, Israel earned the nickname 8220start-up8221 nation for its high-tech prowess. But not many people are aware that the country is also a global leader in online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), an expertise it acquired in the 8220shadow industries8221 of porn, online gambling and binary options, according to TheTime8217s 2014 report on the Israeli Internet industry. That expertise has plainly been applied by fraudulent binary options firms, whose affiliated sites show up high in Google searches 8212 sending unsuspecting and naive clients their way. Yoni S. an Israeli high-tech entrepreneur and SEO consultant, explains that without effective SEO, a fraudulent local player remains local, defrauding perhaps a few hundred victims in his vicinity. But with the power of Internet marketing, the scammer8217s reach can go global. The Times of Israel sent Google a request for an interview about the manipulation of its search platform by allegedly fraudulent businesses in the binary options industry, but Google did not respond. What do the police have to say The Times of Israel contacted the Israel Police repeatedly to ask them about alleged fraud in the forex and binary options industries. Their answers underlined how law enforcement is struggling to grapple with the soaring, fast-moving challenge of Internet crime. If there are investigations going on into fraud, etc. I don8217t have information on this. If someone has filed a complaint to the police, then let me know, Israel Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld replied. A second police spokesperson, Luba Samri, told The Times of Israel, We got lost in your question. Please focus it more. Who filed a complaint against whom Finally, The Times of Israel called a third spokesperson, Merav Lapidot, and asked her what the police are doing about suspected fraud on a vast scale in the forex and binary options industries in Israel. Israel Police spokeswoman Merav Lapidot, November 28, 2007. (Moshe Shai/FLASH90) This is something you8217re claiming. If no one has complained about it, there is no issue. You want us to check every company in Israel and see if by chance they are committing crimes8221 Told that people who worked inside the industry have described widespread potentially fraudulent behavior on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, affecting tens of thousands of people, Lapidot replied: But no one has complained. I don8217t know what happens in every company. That8217s not our job. You could start a business tomorrow selling jewelry over the Internet. Will the police come to investigate your business To the suggestion that there may be thousands of victims abroad, Lapidot said, If there is someone who complained, we need to check that specific complaint. We8217re not going to check a whole issue. Is it possible that an entire industry, much of it allegedly corrupt, is slipping through the cracks between Shurki8217s Israel Securities Authority, which doesn8217t handle crimes hatched in Israel whose victims are abroad, and the police, which won8217t act unless specific complaints are filed with them Zvika Rubins, a PR consultant for the Israel Securities Authority, says the law simply hasn8217t caught up with the dubious and crooked methods people have devised to make money on the Internet. When you talk about bits and bytes, its not that simple. Was there a crime Where did it take place For instance, lets say you have a company and its incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and its servers are in India and it has a trading room in Israel. Is it an Israeli company I dont know. Rubins, who stresses that he is not an expert on criminal law, muses that if someone in Israel commits a crime against someone in, say, France, over the Internet, then it might be the responsibility of the French to open an investigation, trace the crime to Israel, and approach the Israeli police about it. Zvika Rubins (Facebook) Yoni S. the SEO expert, is outraged by this approach. In Israel its against the law to murder, but if I establish a company in Israel that murders people through the Internet in Malaysia, that8217s okay Seely sees the problem as extremely serious and growing: We8217re becoming a global culture and global economy, and physical borders don8217t exist on the Internet. It8217s become easier to scam people all over the world. We have no protections in place to prevent it and it8217s getting worse. Its a jungle out there, says Yoni, referring to the fact that people do all sorts of things on the Internet that would be illegal within their own borders. The Internet came in, no one has passed any regulation yet, and now there is an opportunity to make tons of money in the jungle.8221 A response from inside the industry Tali Yaron-Eldar, Israel8217s income tax commissioner from 2002 to 2004, in 2007 founded eTrader, a binary options firm that targets Israelis, along with Shay Ben-Asulin. who also co-founded AnyOption, one of Israel8217s largest binary options companies with revenues in the tens of millions of dollars. In 2011, Ben-Asulin was indicted by the United States for securities fraud, and last month he was convicted of fraud by an Israeli court for helping an Israeli credit card company, ICC-CAL, illegally clear billions of shekels of charges from porn, binary options and gambling websites, as well as conceal the number of canceled transactions. For his crimes, Ben-Asulin will do five months of community service and pay a fine of less than 1 million. Tali Yaron-Eldar (Screenshot Channel 10) In a 2014 interview (Hebrew) with Israel8217s Channel 10 news, when asked if she was discomfited by the fact of young demobilized soldiers and old pensioners losing all their money trading binary options, Yaron-Eldar responded: 8220Ask the people who invested and lost their money. All of them knew they were entering something risky.8221 The Times of Israel contacted Yaron-Eldar to ask her about alleged fraud within the binary options industry. To the extent that this is true, she said, it applies to unregulated companies. 8220The companies with a license are very careful,8221 she says. 8220AnyOption a company she is associated with has a Cypriot license. It is very careful to follow the law. It is being watched all the time.8221 In Yaron-Eldar8217s view, and contrary to the opinions of other people interviewed for this article, Cypriot regulation is very tough, on a par with the UK8217s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Asked about the fact that the Canadian government has included AnyOption on a list of companies illegally soliciting Canadian citizens, Yaron-Eldar replies, 8220Not that I am aware of.8221 In fact, Yaron-Eldar insists that AnyOption is not an Israeli company at all. 8220AnyOption does not have offices in Tel Aviv. It8217s a company that operates from Cyprus.8221 Indeed, a perusal of anyoption reveals no references to Israel. Nevertheless, it is no secret that hundreds of employees go to work each day at AnyOption8217s offices at 38 Habarzel Street in Tel Aviv8217s Ramat Hachayal neighborhood. How does she explain this discrepancy 8220They8217re not working for the same company,8221 she says. 8220They8217re working for AnyOption Israel, not AnyOption Cyprus. The company they work for is a service provider to the company in Cyprus.8221 In other words, AnyOption (like many other binary options companies with similar corporate structures) is not in fact an Israeli company, according to Yaron-Eldar8217s reasoning. This means that it, and many others like it, is subject to Cypriot law and regulation, not Israeli law. Since much of the regulated part of the binary options industry is subject to Cypriot regulation, the honesty or dishonesty of those firms may hinge on the strength and honesty of Cypriot law enforcement. Where are the victims The Times of Israel contacted the FBI to see if anyone had complained about forex or binary options call centers in Israel, but the agency did not respond. ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, replied in an email, We don8217t comment on operational matters, this includes confirming or denying if we have received complaints about a particular matter or not. A French government spokeswoman, however, confirmed that France has been having problems with forex fraud emanating from Israel. Yes, there are some cases of fraud, as you say,8221 she said. 8220Forex is not per se a fraud but it can be used for fraudulent objectives. We have had some cases between France and Israel, and we are in touch with the Israeli authorities about this. There is a very good cooperation between the two countries and the two services on this issue.8221 Back to Australia Ariel Marom, the mysteriously disappeared former forex employee who wrote that anguished 2014 letter to the Knesset, warned of the fallout when the extent of the corruption in the binary options industry in Israel is exposed. 8220What happens when thousands of Turks, Russians, Spaniards, Italians and French figure out that the scam they fell for was carried out from here, in Israel8221 he asked in his letter. 8220Are our regulators waiting for synagogues to start blowing up all over the world to shut this thing down Dan Guralnek, the Australian immigrant, has drawn his own conclusions. 8220This amount of dishonesty would never be allowed to exist in Australia,8221 he says. 8220They would shut down the industry overnight.8221 Guralnek recently became engaged to an Israeli woman. But he hopes to persuade her to move back to Australia with him, in part because of the high cost of living that drove him to work in binary options in the first place, and in part because of the corruption he has encountered. Now I see corruption everywhere I look,8221 he says. 8220Anywhere where there8217s no light shining on the corruption in this country, it feels like its growing.8221 CoursTorah, the website of a Francophone synagogue near Tel Aviv8217s Hamedina Square, has a page on its website warning against the binary options industry, headlined 8220Stop the Scam8221 8220Many people you know work directly or indirectly for these scam websites,8221 reads the page, warning that binary options and the majority of forex companies operating from Israel are fraudulent. It advises congregants to 8220run away from these companies8221 And it issues an evidently all too necessary reminder: 8220Let us remember the eighth commandment, 8216Thou shalt not steal.8221