The Federal Bureau of Investigation isn’t known for mincing its words. Today it issued a blunt announcement that “binary options fraud is a growing problem and one that the FBI currently has in its crosshairs.”
Fraudulent binary options website operators go to great lengths to recruit investors. They advertise their platforms—often on social networking sites, various trading websites, message boards, and spam e-mail—with big promises of easy money, low risk, and superior customer service. Potential investors are also cold-called from boiler room operations, where high-pressure salespeople use banks of phones to make as many calls as possible to offer “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities.
To give you some idea of the scope of the problem, in 2011 the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received just four complaints from victims of fraudulent binary options sites, representing $20,000 in loses. Last year, it received hundreds of complaints with total loses reaching millions of dollars. And these statistics are just the tip of the iceberg, since they are based only on reported complaints. Many more victims still may not know they were scammed, and others may be too embarrassed or depressed to contact law enforcement authorities.
Nor do these statistics take into consideration victims abroad. Online binary options scams, after all, are global phenomenon. The site operators, designers, call centers, bank accounts, and their internet servers may all be located in different countries. According to the FBI, various European countries report that the number of complaints their own law enforcement authorities receive regarding binary options scams now constitute 25% of the total filed.
If you have filed a similar complaint, or invested in an online binary options site that now looks suspicious, contact us at MyChargeBack and we’ll be happy to explain how we can help.
