By: Serach Nissim
Israeli police arrested six alleged investment scammers, with a process now in the works to extradite them to the United States.
As reported by The Times of Israel, six former employees of the infamous Yukom Communications scam call center were arrested last week in Israel. Ori Maymon 36, Nissim Alfasi, 37, Afik Tori, 30, Oron Montgomery, 41, Dave Barzilay, 44 and Gilad Mazugi, 39, were arrested last Tuesday. They are now being held in custody, as their lawyers fight a request from the U.S. government to have them extradited.
The six men were all formerly managers or sales agents at Yukom Communications which had call centers in Caesarea and Tel Aviv that operated the fraudulent websites Bigoption.com and Binarybook.com. The men were indicted by a US grand jury in February 2019 and charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
The defendants allegedly took part in a $148 million scam, which misappropriated money from thousands of investors around the world from 2014 through 2017. The company allegedly sold fraudulent binary options as part of a large-scale scam and conspired to obtain the maximum deposits from investors, as per the allegations in the indictment against them. The indictment alleged that they lured investors to deposit money by misrepresenting: the potential for profit on the binary options, investors’ chances of withdrawing the money again, the conflict of interest between investors and sales reps, as well as their own names, locations and biographies.
The International Department of the U.S. Attorney General’s Office has requested the extradition of the six Israeli citizens wanted for fraud. Part of the extradition agreement stipulates that, if convicted they would be sent back to serve their sentences in Israel. They each face up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
Yukom’s fromer CEO, Lee Elbaz, has already been sentenced and is serving 22 years in jail. As per FX New Group, Elbaz, who was also required to pay $28 million in restitution, was convicted in 2019 after she landed in JFK airport in September 2017, not realizing that she was on the FBI’s wanted list, and was promptly arrested.
As per the Times of Israel, the six defendants have all been living in Israel, some starting families or new businesses, despite the fact that a Maryland court issued arrest warrants for them in February 2019. “No one ever contacted them and they were never asked to get in touch,” Maymon and Alfasi’s attorney said at the remand hearing.
“There is a fear that they will flee now that they know that the United States wants to get its hands on them,” said Israeli prosecutor Avi Kronenberg on Wednesday in Jerusalem District Court at the defendants’ remand hearing. “Proceedings in the US are different from proceedings in Israel. They know they can expect heavy punishments and they know what happened to one of the other defendants,” Kronenberg added.
The entire binary options industry was outlawed by Knesset legislation in October 2017, after exposures regarding hundreds of far-reaching scam websites.
