Israeli police last week arrested six alleged investment scammers as part of a proceeding to extradite them to the United States.
Ori Maymon 36, Nissim Alfasi, 37, Afik Tori, 30, Oron Montgomery, 41, Dave Barzilay, 44 and Gilad Mazugi, 39, were arrested on Tuesday and are being held in custody as their lawyers battle the US government’s request for their extradition.
All six men were managers or sales agents at Yukom Communications in Caesarea, a call center that operated the fraudulent websites Bigoption.com and Binarybook.com. They were indicted by a US grand jury in February 2019 and charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The men are alleged to have participated in the theft of $148 million from thousands of investors around the world in 2014-2017. They allegedly did this through the fraudulent sale of binary options, a financial instrument at the heart of a massive Israeli scam industry. They conspired to obtain the maximum deposits from investors and made sure the investors lost the money in their accounts or could not withdraw it, according to the allegations in the indictment against them.
They induced investors to deposit money by misrepresenting the conflict of interest between investors and sales reps, the returns investors could make on binary options, their own names, locations and biographies, and investors’ chances of withdrawing their money, the indictment further alleges.
