The FCA issued an investor warning on November 9, 2020, against BeforexCapital and Capital Holding Funds allegedly operated by Capital Holdings LLC, St. Vincent & the Grenadines. As payment processors, we have discovered Praxis Cashier with the Estonian crypto exchange MisterBit.
Cyprus is really dark territory within the regulatory regimes in the EU. In plain sight, CySEC-regulated investment firms operate scams and/or facilitate them with their financial services. As in the case of Roy Almagor's Maxigrid and its meanwhile vanished BitandBuy crypto investment platform. Even the Financial Ombudsman Office has found that Maxigrid has violated regulatory requirements. However, the office does not feel responsible for customer complaints for very strange reasons.
Sometime in April 2020, the discussion with Maxigrid started. A customer lost several hundred thousand Euros via the broker Scam RoyalsFX. He had made the deposits on the instructions of RoyalsFX via the BitandBuy crypto platform of the CySEC-regulated Maxigrid. He lost everything and involved FinTelegram in the complaint and shortly afterward BitandBuy disappeared without a trace. However, more scams and victims appeared after our Request 4 Information in June 2020.
This is the second part of our series about CySEC Scam Tourism which has its roots in the era of binary options. In this period between 2010 and 2017, mainly Israeli financial entrepreneurs came to Cyprus en masse to set up their CySEC regulated Binary Options Brokers. Simona Weinglass, an investigative reporter of The Times of Israel, called it Israel's vast and amoral scam industry. The CySEC has not made things too difficult for these foreign binary options scammers.