Investigating Forex, CFD and Binary trading scams
Criminals use highly sophisticated methods to conduct online trading scams. This often involves scam brokers or criminal entities cloning legitimate businesses, trading platforms or reputable brokerage services to falsely represent their authenticity.
To withdraw profits, investors frequently face demands to pay release fees or taxes. This is a major red flag and is typical of how trading scams work. It’s also not uncommon for scam trading platforms to sell personal data to a second scammer, who will contact investors to recover funds. This is known as a ‘second wave scam’.
Criminals swiftly disperse stolen funds across a complex network of financial instruments. It requires highly skilled investigators and technical expertise to track and trace funds, communications and currency transfers. Thankfully, it’s not always necessary to locate the criminals to secure the return of invested capital.
Using ‘police method’ investigation techniques the investigation phase, carried out by an IYE lead investigator with a research team aims to understand the transaction process and prove criminality to a police prosecution standard. Proof of criminality is important as it places a culpability issue on any ‘legitimate’ agents who aided the process, for example banks or digital currency exchanges.
Our highly experienced investigators work with law enforcement agencies, financial regulators and strategic partners to resolve online trading fraud and scams.
We conduct pre-investigation research to establish the precise resources required to achieve a successful outcome.
Analysis takes into account how funds were transferred, including through which bank, App, broker, website, trading platform or digital currency exchange to identify precise points of culpability.
Insights obtained during our pre-investigation assessment allow us to map out the entire investigation with pinpoint accuracy. Our strategic partners provide access to additional layers of intelligence and technical resource to support our investigations.
In 95% of online trading fraud cases we investigate, funds are recovered directly from culpable financial entities, such as banks or intermediary payment providers, without the need to locate the criminals.
Banks have a legal duty to keep client’s funds safe and an obligation to undertake due diligence on any transactions proposed by a client to an acceptable standard. It is an obligation banks consistently fail to perform. This leaves banks open to claims for compensation based on negligence, a position the Financial Ombudsman Service across jurisdictions have consistently supported.
We can hold banks accountable even if your money passed through several different payment providers or cryptocurrency exchanges, before reaching the trading scam.
Recovering money from banks and financial institutions is always our first point of attack as it offers the quickest means of redress.
To give clients both comfort and protection, the recovery of funds is handled by our legal department (IYE Legal) which is regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA).
Find the probability of recovering your money and receive a no obligation proposal for your consideration.