German television news show describes cross-border operation as one of the largest ever against online financial fraud
German and Austrian police have carried out one of the largest operations to date against alleged online financial scammers, German public television reported earlier this month. A joint German-Austrian team has in recent months carried out 35 raids in five countries and investigated ten suspects in connection with five allegedly fraudulent online trading websites, the report said.
The five online trading sites being investigated by German and Austrian police are Option888, TradeInvest90, XMarkets, ZoomTrader and TradoVest, according to the July 3 report by Germany’s “Tagesschau” television news program.
Most of these sites are or were associated with Tradologic, an Israeli-founded and -run Bulgaria-based online trading platform.
In a related arrest, Israeli Gal Barak was apprehended in Bulgaria in February at the behest of Austrian prosecutors. At the time, Austrian prosecutors announced that they had raided the offices of six other Tradologic websites: XTraderFX, Optionstars, OptionstarsGlobal, Goldenmarkets, SafeMarkets and Cryptopoint.
One suspect in police custody, according to the July 3 report, is German national Karsten Uwe Lenhoff, a 55-year-old veteran of the sports betting and online gambling industry who had been dividing his time between a five-star Tyrolean hotel and the French city of St. Tropez, according to the report. The report did not name any other suspects.
Reporters for “Tagesschau” saw customer lists for the five online trading websites, which they said contained the names of more than 200,000 Germans.
In the German city of Saarbrücken alone charges are being brought against these trading platforms on behalf of 233 alleged victims, the report noted. On average, each victim lost more than 40,000 euros.
The report also said that the group of alleged criminals operating these five websites could have been responsible for 400 or more fraudulent websites, and that this number was confirmed to them by a Saarbrücken public prosecutor.
