After an appeal by the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (Australian Securities & Investments Commission, or ASIC), several binary options financial applications have been removed from both the App Store and Google Play, as told the Bloomberg.
The Australian regulatory commission's request was due to fraud investigations involving several such apps. As revealed by the The Independent, the scheme involving binary options has already caused so much inconvenience that one victim's lawyer considered it “possibly the biggest coup in the world”.
The publication cited that thousands of people, mainly pensioners, are falling for this scam and it is difficult for the British authorities to have recourse to recover the money of all the victims.
Thousands of pensioners are at risk of losing their life savings in a financial fraud that is growing so rapidly that British authorities cannot stop.
Binary options platforms encourage investors to make seemingly simple bets if stocks or currencies increase or decrease in value over time. Many of these platforms are legitimate, but an increasing number have emerged across Australia, the United Kingdom and elsewhere that are fraudulent.
As much of this scheme took place online, applications were reviewed by ASIC and, as a result, Apple and Google withdrew 330 apps of binary options from their stores.
Not all applications of this type are fraudulent, but some problems were pointed out in those who applied the scam. For example, some prevented customers from withdrawing money after they won; others allowed users (apparently fraudulently) to win nine out of ten demonstration transactions, only to lose everything when switching to the real product. Among the apps linked to the scam, 80% did not offer warnings about commercial risks.
An Apple representative in Australia also said that the App Store guidelines have also been modified. The item on the developers page states that “apps that facilitate binary options trading are not allowed on the App Store. Consider a web app instead. ”
It is possible that scams of the type were also carried out here in Brazil. So, if you like this type of service, be very attentive to the signs, try to see if the company is reliable and always be suspicious when everything seems easy and “too good to be true”.
via Cult of Mac