American-Israeli Austin Smith serves time since January this year
‚Recovery Specialist‘ for Lost Money in Binary Options Arrested in US
Austin Smith, „expert“ in recovering lost money on binary promotional video options on Facebook. Image/Reproduction
The American-Israeli Austin Smith has been serving time in the US since January this year. In November 2019, he was tried and convicted of conspiracy and electronic fraud in the binary options market.
According to the US courts, Smith set up a financial recovery company precisely to cheat the same investors who took losses on two Israeli binary options platforms.
The defendant confessed that his abilities were to capture clients, steal data, and cheat vulnerable people in the financial marketplace. He subsequently created the ‚financial recovery service‘. Roughly speaking, stealing the same client twice.
His last shot was through a company with a very suggestive name for desperate traders, ‚Wealth Recovery International‘. Translated into English, a fund recovery company.
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Smith, who held the position of executive president, as shown on his Linkedin page. He promised to recover lost money on the BinaryBook and BigOption platforms, much like the IQ Option brokerage house.
To date, a text offering the money recovery service and a promotional video of ‚Wealth Recovery‘ are listed as a fixed post on his still active Facebook page.
Expert in binary options
During the trial, which took place in March last year, the ‚recovery specialist‘ also confirmed having acted as a customer retention operator for a company called ‚Numaris Communication‘.
This company, which operated out of Tel Aviv, Israel, reportedly made a loss of US$140 million to customers between 2015 and 2016. It was from her that Smith, on leaving, stole the customer list that was later used in Wealth Recovery.
At the peak, her company had thousands of clients from around the world whose hope was to get their lost money back at binary options sites and counterfeit currency exchange companies.
According to The Times of Israel, clients and former Wealth Recovery employees said most of those who believed in Smith’s business received a small amount of money back.
By then, however, they had already paid a fee for services ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars per client.
In at least one case, Smith received a heavy commission from a client who had previously been involved in fraud.
In a note to the paper, Smith’s lawyer, Daniel Suleiman, said that the company recovered approximately US$8.5 million. Wealth Recovery was extinguished by the Israeli courts later that year.
Arrest in the US
After several trial sessions, Austin Smith was sentenced in November 2019 to 12 months and one day in US federal prison. He began serving her in January of this year.
The sentence was supposed to be longer but was reduced because he made a prize-winning indictment on a side of the case. The action then slowed down the estimated five years of detention for the type of crime.
He was also ordered to return $486,199 in restitution to victims of binary options plus a monthly fine of $500.