Israeli extradited to Germany for alleged part in massive investment scam
An Israeli was recently extradited to Germany to stand trial for his alleged role in several fraudulent investment schemes involving German citizens, the Ynet news site reported Thursday.
Yuri Dashevsky, 33, was among 15 people arrested in 2021 in a raid on a Petah Tikvah call center requested by German police.
Israeli police eventually detained Dashevsky and three others on suspicion of defrauding German citizens through binary options, forex and cryptocurrency scams.
The men are accused of being part of an organized gang that allegedly ran a range of websites peddling risky or fraudulent investment schemes from 2015 to 2019. The websites were named IntegraOption, SolidCFD, TradeSolid, BitCapitalMarkets, GetFinancial, ProCapitalMarkets, NordCapitalMarkets, ProfitsTrade, FXPace, AccepTrade and GainFinTech.
According to the prosecutor’s office in Bamberg, Germany, these websites are all connected and were operated by the four suspects and their associates over the Internet and from call centers in Israel and Tbilisi, Georgia; Yerevan, Armenia; and Chisinau, Moldova.
Additionally, in 2019, the group allegedly ran the so-called FXLaws and Tradelegal recovery room scams, in which they offered to help victims of scams get their money back – for a fee. These sites allegedly took victims’ money without helping them, German prosecutors charged.
The suspects allegedly persuaded people around the world to invest money in forex, binary options and other financial instruments. Regulators say the investment plans, which often involve betting on stock market movements but don’t actually own the underlying securities, amount to illegal gambling and are rife with fraud. The suspects were accused of using the money people thought they were investing in the market to run their call centers and platforms as well as for personal use.
German victims alone lost several million euros on these sites, German prosecutors said. The sites targeted people from all over the world, suggesting that the losses suffered by the alleged victims worldwide were much higher. According to German prosecutors, the 11 websites controlled by the suspects were powered by two platforms: SpotOption and Tradologic.
In October, Israeli police reportedly detained and interrogated a lawyer suspected of involvement in running the websites run by the suspects at the Petah Tikva call center, according to the Israeli news agency. Posta crime news website. The interrogation was reportedly carried out at the request of the German police.
A screenshot of the Tradesolid.com website as it appeared in 2016.
Seven individuals belonging to the same group as those from Petah Tikva have been arrested in Georgia, according to an October 27 statement Press release issued by the public prosecutor of Bamberg, Germany. Three of those arrested in Georgia were women.
Since 2005, Israel has been a hub of internet fraud involving fake online trading or investment sites. Israeli authorities have largely ignored the fraud, allowing it to become an industry in its own right that has employed thousands of people and stolen billions of dollars from internet users around the world.
Initially, these fraudulent websites offered forex transactions. In 2013, many forex agents started offering trading in a financial instrument known as binary options. After binary options websites were banned by the Knesset in 2017 – following a report by The Times of Israel – many of the same agents set up websites that offered bogus forex, CFD trading and cryptocurrency. Some have moved part of their operations overseas.
While Israeli police have arrested a handful of such agents over the years, almost none have been prosecuted. Similarly, while Israeli media have reported on individual investment scams, they have often portrayed them as lone wolf operations, failing to explain that they are part of a massive, interconnected industry.
In recent years, law enforcement in the United States, Germany, Austria and, to a lesser extent, Canada have, unlike their Israeli counterparts, investigated, charged and convicted some of these alleged Israeli fraudsters. in terms of investment.
