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Old September 25th, 2016 #41
littlefieldjohn
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Default Jewish Swindle: Suicides, Elderly Scammed

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British police receive at least two reports every day from victims of the Israel-based “binary options” fraud swindle—and victims of the scam have lost so much that they have committed suicide.

Other victims include the elderly who have lost all their life savings to the scam—which Israel has outlawed in its own country, but which it allows to be perpetrated against non-Jewish countries.





A report in the Daily Mail—which was careful to downplay the Israel connection
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...g-suicide.html
—said that “thousands of Britons—including many pensioners—have lost millions of pounds in a secret fraud known as binary options investments.”

Quoting an “insider” at a call center, the Daily Mail said that “staff were ordered to ‘rape clients’ of their cash.”

“And some brokers involved have swapped tales of people committing suicide after realizing they have been duped,” the Daily Mail continues.

Only in one line does the newspaper admit where the swindlers are coming from: “British police say call centers in Israel are behind the hard-sell tactics.”



The attempted cover-up of the Israeli connection by the Daily Mail is not surprising, given that the paper earlier boasted of its controlling Jewish editors.

As detailed in an earlier report published in the Times of Israel, the Israeli binary options “industry” specifically targets non-Jews in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, brings in over a billion dollars, and employs thousands of Jews cheating “naive would-be investors via a range of corrupt practices.”

In a major act of chutzpah, the “binary options” scam is illegal in Israel—in other words, the Israeli government makes it illegal for the swindlers to target Jews—but the companies, all based in Tel Aviv’s central business district—are free to target non-Jewish victims from the safety of Israel.

The Daily Mail report added that the swindlers “lure victims by scam emails, with high-pressure salesmen persuading responders to invest small sums such as £250.

“A second team then lean on these investors to put in thousands more. Meanwhile further thousands are charged to their credit cards without authorization,” the article continues, and then admits that the “schemes are regulated or banned in the U.S., Israel, and Belgium”—without admitting the obvious hypocrisy of the scam being based in Israel.


The Daily Mail story was in fact generated by the “Bureau of Investigative Journalism” (BOIJ)—an organization started originally by South Africa-born millionaires David and Elaine Potter, who made their fortune out of the pioneering Psion home-computer manufacturing company.

The BOIJ version of the story revealed that the “fraudulent sale of binary options is now the biggest scam in the U.K., according to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau’s deputy director and financial crime specialist, DCI Andy Fyfe.”

This was likely just the “the tip of the iceberg,” Fyfe told the BOIJ, “as most people would not bother reporting in the knowledge there was little police could do. There have been no successful prosecutions because the fraudsters are usually located abroad.”

The BOIJ story does however reveal more of the Israeli connection than does the Daily Mail version—to no great surprise. All of the extensive references to Jews and Israel in the BOIJ version were edited out of the Daily Mail’s version of the story.


For example, the BOIJ article contains a section headed: “The wolves of Tel Aviv’s Wall Street” and continues as follows:

Last spring a young Englishman posted an Instagram video of himself singing and larking around in an office in the Electra tower, a 45-storey block in the heart of Tel Aviv. The man, Jonathan Baker, was born and raised in Birmingham before moving to Israel some seven years ago.

Baker’s LinkedIn profile says he works as a sales co-ordinator for Express Target Marketing. The Bureau has seen multiple pieces of evidence indicating Inside Option is closely linked to Express Target Marketing, operating from the same office.

InsideOption.com and ExpressTargetMarketing.com’s domains are both registered to Emir Yedibaslar, a Turkish businessman whose Facebook profile at one point featured a photograph of Leonardo de Caprio proudly holding a $100 banknote in the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street”.


His Facebook posts show how he tempted people into the business: around the time Inside Option started trading in autumn 2014, Yedibaslar was advertising for “money craving foreign language speakers for his “start up” binary options company with the promise of “tons of cash”.

“Do you want to make a lot of money every month while having mad fun in the office??” he wrote on one job site. “Come get our training, and become one of our brokers and make tons of cash in commission!!!!!!” One ad was accompanied by a photo of a room filled with stacks of banknotes.

When contacted by the Bureau Yedibaslar said he had worked for Express Target Marketing, not Inside Option, and insisted he was entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. “I have never not earned a straight dollar in my life!” he said.

Behind the brokers are the legitimate companies which provide a platform for companies like Inside Option, as well as regulated binary options firms, to operate. They can correctly claim to have no part in the hard selling but they take a cut of the profits. In June, SpotOption, an online platform which hosts Inside Option, announced a “grand opening” in the Royal Exchange in the City of London with the aim of “driving regulated binary options trading to its full potential”.

SpotOption is one of six major providers of binary option trading platforms, all of which are based in Israel. It claims to be the platform provider for some 200 binary option brands making up 65% of the worldwide market, with a combined trading volume of some $5 billion.

The company hosts the trading process “end to end”: from the front end user interface to account management and payments to the ultimate company owners. It charges brands like Inside Option a percentage commission on its turnover. One insider said the binary options company he worked for was charged about 12% on its turnover by SpotOption.


The founder and primary shareholder of SpotOption is an Israeli known as Pini Peter, whose full name is Pinchas Peterktzishvilly. He was convicted of money laundering in 2005 in connection with one of Israel’s largest ever financial crimes: the embezzlement of some 254 million shekels (£51 million) from Trade Bank, a commercial bank.
http://newobserveronline.com/jewish-...derly-scammed/

Last edited by littlefieldjohn; September 26th, 2016 at 04:31 AM.
 
Old November 14th, 2017 #42
Robbie Key
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Israel's Money Machine
Jewish oligarchs fund crimes against humanity


PHILIP GIRALDI • NOVEMBER 14, 2017 • 2,100 WORDS • 38 COMMENTS • REPLY

The stars came out in Hollywood on November 2nd, or at least some of them did. The gala event celebrated the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and raised funds to support its mission in Israel itself and on the occupied West Bank. The organization being fêted was the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), which has fourteen regional offices in the United States and operates under the slogan “Their job is to look after Israel. Our job is to look after them.” In attendance were Arnold Schwarzenegger and actor Gerald Butler. Entertainment was provided by the singer Seal.

Hollywood Jewish royalty was thick on the ground, the grub was strictly kosher and billionaires competed to see who could give the most to such a worthy cause. The 1,200 attendees at the Beverly Hilton Hotel donated a record $53.8 million, with Oracle founder Larry Ellison leading the pack with a contribution of $16.6 million. Israeli media mogul Haim Saban, Hillary Clinton’s most generous supporter, served as host of the event and donated $5 million. Two weeks ago, a similar gathering of 1,200 in New York City dubbed “A Night of Heroes,” attended by GOP major donor casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, raised $35 million, $7 million coming from Adelson personally. FIDF reportedly was sitting on $190 million in contributions for the year before the Hollywood and New York events.

Donations to FIDF are tax deductible as the organization is registered with the U.S. Treasury as a 501(c)3 educational and charitable non-profit foundation. One might well ask how it is possible that the American taxpayer should subsidize a foreign military organization that is regularly accused of war crimes in its ongoing brutal and genocidal occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem? One might also wonder how an organization that continues a military occupation in opposition to multiple United Nations resolutions that have been endorsed by Washington gets any kind of tax break at all? And finally, one might reasonably ask why an organization that already gets in excess of $3.8 billion annually directly from the U.S. Treasury needs more money to allegedly provide creature comforts for its soldiers?

The answer to all of the above would be that Jewish power in the United States makes it happen. But more particularly, it is Jewish money that does the trick since cash on the table provides access both to the media and to the people that matter in Washington. A tight circle of billionaire oligarchs, including Saban, Ellison and Adelson as well as Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus directly support organizations like FIDF as well as major pro-Israel groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the America Israel Political Action Committee, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. The billionaires are not shy about where their loyalty lies, boasting as does Saban, that he is a one issue guy and that issue is Israel. Adelson has stated that he wishes that he had served in the Israeli army instead of the U.S. military and wants his son to grow up to “be a sniper for the IDF.” Both have publicly advocated bombing Iran. In Adelson’s case, the bomb would be nuclear.

Sometimes both the Israel agenda and the financial support is deliberately hidden, as in the case of the recently launched “Christian engagement in the Middle East” anti-Iran Philos Project, which was funded by Singer. The billionaires also directly donate to the campaigns of politicians and support projects that engage in the message management that is used to justify pro-Israel policies in Congress and the media.

Much of the current agitation to “do something” about Iran comes, for example, from these groups and media assets. In truth, American aid to Israel has become virtually untouchable and is something like a goose that keeps on laying golden eggs. The operation of “The Lobby,” generally regarded as the most powerful voice on foreign policy in Washington, led Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer to ask, “Why has the U.S. been willing to set aside its own security … in order to advance the interests of another state? [No] explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the U.S. provides.” They observed that “Other special interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. interests and those of the other country—in this case, Israel—are essentially identical.”

The money committed by the Jewish oligarchs on behalf of Israel has turned out to be a good investment, returning billions for millions spent. Since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, it has been “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” according to the Congressional Research Service. The United States has provided Israel with $233.7 billion in adjusted for inflation aid between 1948 through the end of 2012, reports Haaretz.

The $38 billion over ten years in military assistance that the Obama recently promised to Israel is far less than what will actually be received from the United States Treasury and from other American sources, including handouts from Congress. To cite only one recent example, in September Congressman Alcee Hastings proposed a legislative amendment that would give $12 million to help settle Israel’s Ethiopian community. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), speaking in the most recent legislative discussion over Israeli aid, stated that the $38 billion should be regarded as a minimum amount, and that Congress should approve additional funds for Israeli defense as needed.

At its most recent meeting in March 2017, AIPAC announced the latest windfall from America, applauding “the U.S. House of Representatives for significantly bolstering its support of U.S.-Israel missile defense cooperation in the FY 2017 defense appropriations bill. The House appropriated $600.7 million for U.S.-Israel missile defense programs.” And there is a long history of such special funding for Israeli-connected projects. The Iron Dome missile-defense system was largely funded by the United States, to the tune of more than $1 billion. In the 1980s, the Israeli Lavi jet-fighter development program was funded by Washington, costing $2 billion to the U.S. taxpayer before it was terminated over technical and other problems, part of $5.45 billion in Pentagon funding of various Israeli weapons projects through 2002.

How Israel gets money from the United States Treasury is actually quite complex and not very transparent to the American public, going well beyond the check for $3.8 billion handed over at the beginning of the fiscal year on October 1st. Even that check, uniquely given to aid recipient Israel as one lump sum on the first day of the year, is manipulated to produce extra revenue. It is normally immediately redeposited with the U.S. Treasury, which then, because it operates on a deficit, borrows the money to pay interest on it as the Israelis draw it down. That interest payment costs the American taxpayer an estimated $100 million more per year. Israel has also been adept at using “loan guarantees,” an issue that may have contributed to the downfall of President George H.W. Bush. The reality is that the loans, totaling $42 billion, are never repaid by Israel, meaning that the United States Treasury picks up the tab on principle and interest, a form of additional assistance. The Bush-era loan amounted to $10 billion.

Department of Defense co-production projects, preferential contracting, “scrapping” or “surplusing” of usable equipment that is then turned over to the IDF, as well as the forward deployment of military hardware to an Israeli base, are considerable benefits to Tel Aviv’s bottom line. Much of this assistance is hidden from view.

In September 2012, Israel’s former commander-in-chief, Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, admitted at a conference that between 2009 and 2012 American taxpayers had paid for more of his country’s defense budget than had Israeli taxpayers. Those numbers have been disputed, but the fact remains that a considerable portion of the Israeli military spending comes from the United States. It currently is more than 20 percent of the total $16 billion budget, not counting special appropriations.

Through tax exemptions, the U.S. government also subsidizes the coordinated effort to provide additional assistance to Israel. Like FIDF, most organizations and foundations that might reasonably be considered active parts of the Israel Lobby are generally registered with the Department of the Treasury as tax-exempt foundations. Grant Smith, speaking at a conference on the U.S. and Israel on March 24th, explained how the broader Israel Lobby uses this legal framework:

“Key U.S. organizations include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Hundreds more, including a small number of evangelical Christian organizations, play a role within a vast ecosystem that demands unconditional U.S. support for Israel. In the year 2012 the nonprofit wing of the Israel lobby raised $3.7 billion in revenue. They are on track to reach $6.3 billion by 2020. Collectively they employed 14,000 and claimed 350,000 volunteers.”

The $3.7 billion raised in 2012 does not include the billions in private donations that go directly to Israel, plus billions in contributions that are regarded as “religious exemptions” for groups that don’t file at all. There are also contributions sent straight to various Israeli-based foundations that are themselves often registered as charities. The Forward magazine investigated 3,600 Jewish tax-exempt charitable foundations in 2014 and determined that they had net assets of $26 billion, $12–14 billion in annual revenue, and “focuse[d] the largest share of [their] donor dollars on Israel.” The Forward added that it is “an apparatus that benefits massively from the U.S. federal government and many state and local governments, in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants, billions in tax-deductible donations and billions more in program fees paid for with government funds.”

Money being fungible, some American Jews have been surprised to learn that the donations that they had presumed were going to charitable causes in Israel have instead wound up in expanding the illegal settlements on the West Bank, an objective that they sometimes do not support. Donald Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner has a family foundation that has made donations to Israel, including funding of West Bank settlements, which is illegal under U.S. law, as has Ambassador David Friedman.

Israel also benefits in other ways, frequently due to legislative action by Congress. It enjoys free and even preferential trade status with the United States and runs a $9 billion trade surplus per annum. Its companies and parastatal organizations can, without any restrictions, bid on U.S. defense and homeland-security projects—a privilege normally only granted to NATO partners. It’s major defense contractor Elbit recently was awarded a multi-million dollar contract to apply technologies to defend American tanks. It was a prime example of U.S. aid subsidizing an Israeli industry that then competes directly with American companies, producing a loss of jobs in the United States.

And the transfer of public money to Israel is common even at state and local levels. Some state treasuries and pension funds have purchased Israel Bonds, which are a bad investment, putting retirees at risk, as they have to be held to maturity and therefore have no secondary market and lack liquidity. Most recently, the Ohio Treasurer’s office bought a record $61 million in Israel Bonds on April 3rd. Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel admitted the purchase was in response to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, meaning that Ohio taxpayers are unsuspecting participants in a risky investment scheme largely intended to punish critics of Israel. Mandel is, not surprisingly, hardly a disinterested party on the subject of Israel. He was a member of AIPAC while attending Ohio State University and spoke at its 2008 Policy Conference in Washington. After denouncing Iran, he said that “Israel is our best friend and ally in the Middle East and it’s important that we maintain a strong and lasting relationship with them.” Eighty other state and municipal public employee pension and treasury funds have also reportedly bought the bonds.

The U.S.-Israeli bilateral relationship has been an expensive proposition for Americans, yet another instance where the perceived needs of a U.S. “ally” take precedence over genuine national interests. Tens of billions of dollars need not necessarily be spent to placate a wealthy foreign country and its powerful domestic lobby or to satisfy the pretensions of the billionaires who grease the machinery to keep Israel’s money machine operating.

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/israels-money-machine/
 
Old September 22nd, 2018 #43
littlefieldjohn
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Rachel Blevins
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As Social Security and Medicare Go Bankrupt, US Gives $10.5 Million A DAY to Israel


As the United States government admits that Social Security and Medicare services are going bankrupt and will both be completely depleted within the next 16 years, American taxpayers are giving around $10.5 million to a close ally that is routinely accused of human rights violations.

The latest report from the Social Security Administration revealed that Social Security funds will be depleted by 2034, and Medicare funds will be depleted by 2026—three years earlier than what was last reported. Last year, Social Security and Medicare funds accounted for 42 percent of federal program expenditures, and as the report noted:

“Both Social Security and Medicare face long-term financing shortfalls under currently scheduled benefits and financing. Lawmakers have a broad continuum of policy options that would close or reduce the long-term financing shortfall of both programs. The Trustees recommend that lawmakers take action sooner rather than later to address these shortfalls so that a broader range of solutions can be considered and more time will be available to phase in changes while giving the public adequate time to prepare. Earlier action will also help elected officials minimize adverse impacts on vulnerable populations, including lower-income workers and people already dependent on program benefits.”

While the increased reduction in Social Security and Medicare funds can be blamed on the federal government, it is not the only area where government spending should warrant serious concern. In December 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that federal debt held by the public was more than $9 trillion or 62 percent of GDP.

The federal debt held by the public is now $16 trillion or 78 percent of GDP, and the latest projections from the CBO show that it is estimated to increase to $29 trillion or 96 percent of GDP by 2028, which would mark “the largest since 1946 and well more than twice the average over the past five decades.”

As the Foundation for Economic Education reported, while the government continues to spend money it does not have as if there are no consequences, it has gotten to the point where it seems unlikely that the debt will ever be paid back:

“A fair amount of this trouble can be laid at the feet of the federal government and its seemingly insatiable habit of spending money it doesn’t have. It’s gotten to the point that there isn’t really anywhere else in the world that has the amount of money the US government needs to borrow. It seemed so easy to just take that money from the Social Security and Medicare trusts at the time, but with federal spending now higher than it’s ever been (regardless of whether you adjust for inflation or simply count it as a percentage of GDP), it seems very unlikely that that money will—or even can—ever be paid back.”

While the U.S. government’s failure to take care of its citizens may be viewed as a good thing because it lets them turn to solutions in the private sector to solve their problems, the government is still robbing citizens through taxes, and making it look as if it will benefit them in the long run through programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

In reality, the federal government is using the money it extorts from citizens to fund endless wars in the Middle East—with the price tag for the longest war in U.S. history costing double the estimate of what it would cost to end homelessness in the U.S. annually in 2018. Millions of taxpayer dollars are also being spent on questionable foreign aid programs, such as the United States’ increasing pledges of military aid to Israel.

Former President Obama set the record by pledging $3.8 billion to Israel every year for the next 10 years in 2016, with the largest military aid deal in U.S. history. President Trump increased the amount by pledging an additional $75 million in 2018, while Americans suffering from the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey begged for aid.

The United States’ commitment to Israel has stayed the same, even as Israel was caught opening fire on peaceful protesters near their border fence in Gaza, killing dozens and injuring thousands. While other countries accused Israel of war crimes and called for an investigation, the U.S. blatantly ignored the atrocities.

If countries such as Syria, Russia, or Iran, were targeting civilians in the same way that Israel is, the United States would be calling for a full-scale invasion. Instead, the U.S. continues to condone the country’s treatment of Palestinian civilians by sending Israel $10.5 million a day—even when Americans are in desperate need—all while the president in office gained support by promising to put “America First.”


https://rachelblevins.com/2018/06/17...day-to-israel/
 
Old November 19th, 2018 #44
Robbie Key
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Is Israel Turning a Blind Eye as Israeli Scammers Swindle Victims in France, US, Elsewhere?

ALISON WEIR • NOVEMBER 14, 2018 • 4,300 WORDS

http://www.unz.com/article/is-israel...-us-elsewhere/
 
Old February 12th, 2022 #45
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Israel: A Refuge for Swindlers

February 12, 2022/0 Comments/in Featured Articles, Jewish Ethics, Jewish Traits, Jews in Economy/Finance /by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.

“Most of the Jews are thieves.” Thus said the founding father of Israel, David Ben Gurion, when he heard about Jewish soldiers carrying Persian rugs from freshly looted Arab properties during the Arab-Israeli war. If he were around today, I don’t think Ben Gurion would find any reason to radically change his opinion, and he probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Israel has become a hub of international fraud. A recent hit for Netflix is the documentary The Tinder Swindler, which charts the outlandish career of Israeli con artist Shimon Hayut, the son of a rabbi, who manipulated a large number of predominantly Scandinavian women into collectively handing over more than $10 million. Hayut’s modus operandi is that old favorite of Jewish white-collar criminals — the Ponzi scheme, though Hayut inflected it with a romantic twist. Using the alias Simon Leviev on the dating app Tinder, Hayut told his gullible victims that he was the son of Lev Leviev, CEO of one of the world’s largest diamond traders. He would initially lavish the women with gifts and trips on private jets (funded by a previous victim), before introducing the idea that he was under threat from unspecified enemies, that his financial accounts had been inexplicably locked, and that he needed “loans” from the women that he would repay many times over when an “imminent deal” worth many millions was completed. The women were pressured into requesting, and then extending, bank loans in their own names, often until they were as much as $300,000 in debt. Once Hayut had extracted the maximum possible funds from a woman, he would begin using some of it to groom a new victim. Moving from woman to woman, and country to country, Hayut lived a lifestyle of private jets, international travel, caviar, and designer clothes until a Norwegian newspaper finally helped secure his arrest in Greece in 2019 for using a fake passport. He was then sent to Israel, where authorities released him after just five months. He remains a free man in Israel, and appears as wealthy as ever.

While the now-viral Netflix documentary is very interesting and well-made, it does a very poor job of contextualizing and framing Hayut’s behavior. Hayut’s career of fraud is presented solely in terms of the perils of online dating, and, ludicrously, as a kind of feminist revenge tale (despite the fact the women fell into Hayut’s clutches in part through their own thirst for a lavish lifestyle, and the final justice served on Hayut was ridiculously weak to say the least). Very little is made of the fact Hayut began his career in fraud as a teenager, sparking questions of cultural influence, and there is no comment at all on the peculiar manner in which Hayut seemed to target Scandinavian women in particular. But the more egregious oversight is surely that Hayut fits incredibly well into a pattern that is absurdly common — the ubiquity of Israeli con artists of international reach, and their habit of finding a very accommodative justice system in the State of Israel.

An Israeli Specialty

International fraud of all kinds is an Israeli specialty. Israel’s Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority receives frequent requests for information from financial intelligence units in at least 19 countries around the world. The main crimes that are the focal point of these requests are “money laundering, fraud, particularly investment scams, binary options and forex scams, bribery and corruption, forgery and illegal gambling.” If there is a way for someone to be parted from their money, you can be sure there is an Israeli working very hard to accomplish it.

In June 2021, an operation led by German police secured the arrest of ten Jews of various nationalities for operating fake investment sites that defrauded European investors of around $36 million. In a fraud scheme that Europol said was “organized mainly by Israeli nationals,” the criminals operated the fake investment sites Tradorax, Tradervc, Kayafx, Kontofx and Libramarkets. Tradorax used the platform supplied by Israel’s SpotOption, which was charged with fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2021. According to Europol, the Jewish network lured thousands of victims through advertising on social media and search engines. These victims were then encouraged to invest in high-risk options, CFDs or cryptocurrencies. However, according to German police, the money was never actually invested but simply taken by the Jews involved. During raids in several countries, police seized electronic devices, real estate, jewelry, high-end vehicles and approximately $2.4 million in cash.

The case was reminiscent of the story of the Canadian-Israeli Cartu brothers. In May 2020, the Ontario Securities Commission brought civil charges against David, Jonathan, and Joshua Cartu for soliciting Canadians to trade binary options. The trio scammed residents of Ontario alone out of $1.4 million, but the total value of their globally-operated scheme was estimated at $233 million. The brothers live lavishly today in Israel, safe in the knowledge that “Israeli prosecutors have yet to indict a single binary options suspect on charges of fraud.” The Times of Israel points out that the brothers’ story is only part of a much wider scenario in which “hundreds of companies in Israel employed thousands of Israelis who allegedly fleeced billions out of victims worldwide.”

Five months ago, 26 Israelis were arrested for running a cryptocurrency fraud scheme that targeted US investors. The suspects, known as the ‘Wolves of Tel Aviv,’ were said to be marketing products and investments, without providing returns, and keeping the victims’ money. According to a police statement, “all of the 26 suspects of the alleged fraud are residents of Israel, and the victims all live abroad.” The Israeli news station i24News commented that “Israel has been a major hub of online fraud in recent years.” A month after the arrest of the ‘Wolves of Tel Aviv,’ a further eight Israelis were arrested, including Moshe Hogeg, who owns the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club. Israeli police said the group were detained on suspicion of “of cryptocurrency fraud of as much as hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars.”

A Criminals’ Paradise

A poor history of complying with extradition requests together with generous tax breaks for millionaires has resulted in Israel, and Tel Aviv in particular, being perceived as a criminals’ paradise. Remarking on Israel’s “massive fraudulent online and scam industry” and its potential to “undermine Israel’s economic reputation and stoke anti-Semitism,” the Times of Israel pointed out that a 2008 piece of legislation had acted as a “a nudge and a wink to would-be tax evaders and money launderers worldwide to settle in Israel and launder their money here.” The law grants a 10-year tax exemption on income earned abroad to olim hadashim (new immigrants) as well as toshavim hozrim vatikim (returning residents who have lived abroad for at least 10 years) and other eligible new residents. It also gives a 10-year exemption on reporting earnings abroad to people in these categories. It’s a magnet for Jewish thieves.

Last week, plastic surgeon David Morrow and his wife Linda, dubbed “The Jewish Bonnie and Clyde,” faced the American justice system two years after it was discovered the pair had been operating one of the most extensive and sickening health care frauds in California history. In total, the Morrows are thought to have cost insurance companies between $25 million and $65 million for procedures that were medically unnecessary. According to the Jerusalem Post,

Quote:
They were active and highly respected members of the Orthodox Jewish communities in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and Palm Springs and very generous contributors to Jewish causes. … They were arrested in California on charges of cheating health insurance companies of more than “tens of millions of dollars for cosmetic procedures that were not medically necessary,” according to the US Attorney’s Central District of California office of the Department of Justice. Add to that a guilty plea of conspiring to commit mail fraud and filing a false tax return, Dr. Morrow was in huge trouble. He was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in federal prison and had his medical license revoked. In her ruling, Judge Josephine L. Staton noted that Morrow’s “greed knew no bounds,” and that he showed an “utter disregard for patients’ well-being and safety.”
The pair were sentenced in absentia because they quickly liquidated their assets and moved to Israel where they could be among their co-ethnics and not have their wealth probed or questioned. According to locals in Israel, before the FBI finally orchestrated a rare extradition (for Linda — David is still fighting the case from an Israeli prison) “they were very active in the congregation, went to shiurim (classes) and synagogue functions.”

In 2017, the Times of Israel commented on the arrest of “35 individuals for allegedly running a network of scam boiler rooms.” The gang operated secret call centers inside residential apartments in the cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Netanya, defrauding people in Europe and North America with a variety of different scams. One method was the CEO scam, where the fraudsters impersonated senior executives in a European company and persuaded employees to wire money to the Jews’ Israeli bank accounts. Other employees called companies in Europe selling goods and services that never materialized. A government prosecutor worried that “The phenomenon has become a national scourge in both Israel and abroad. It is causing damage to the reputation of the state of Israel as well as to Jews in other countries.” The Times of Israel remarked that many of those arrested were Jews from America and France, and that they were assisted by “thousands of Israelis.”

The most prominent example, of course, is the so-called “sting of the century,” in which over 1 billion euros was stolen via a tax scam between November 2008 and June 2009 from the French government. The theft was carried out by French Jews Arnaud Mimran, Marco Mouly, and Samy Souied from a Tel Aviv office. The trio were assisted by a significant number of co-ethnics, with the Times of Israel reporting that “six of the defendants were tried in absentia and are believed to be living in Israel.” In a May 2016 interview with the Times of Israel, Laurent Combourieu, director of investigations for the the Autoritй des marchйs financiers (AMF), France’s securities authority, said that there is overlap between the French-Israeli citizens who were involved in tax fraud carried out against the French government from Israel, and the perpetrators of the ongoing wave of online trading fraud targeting French speakers. In the past six years, according to the Paris prosecutor, French citizens had lost 4.5 billion euros to online trading and CEO scams, with many of these perpetrated from Israel.

That Israel is a hub for Jewish international criminality is further indicated by a random sampling of the bank accounts of new immigrants who had moved to Israel between 2008–2012, carried out by the Israeli state comptroller. It was found that “one in six were found to have irregular activity that caused the bank to flag them for suspected money laundering.” In 2013, the OECD Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes pressured Israel to cancel the exemption from filing tax returns by new immigrants and veteran returning residents, in an effort to remove what many saw as a clear incentive to international criminality. Israel agreed to change their legislation in May of that year, but almost nine years later it has yet to do so. In the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) issued by the U.S. State Department, Israel is discussed as a “a major money-laundering country.” The report adds that

Quote:
Israel’s ‘right of return’ citizenship laws mean that criminal figures find it easy to obtain an Israeli passport without meeting long residence requirements. It is not uncommon for criminal figures suspected of money laundering to hold passports in a home country, a third country for business, and Israel.
Some Considerations

Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler argued during a discussion of Zionism that “What [Jews] really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their international swindling and cheating. As a sovereign State, this cannot be controlled by any of the other States. Therefore it can serve as a refuge for swindlers who have been found out and at the same time a high-school for the training of other swindlers.” All things considered, this is obviously a very prescient comment that has an undeniable ring of truth in light of the facts presented above. Far from being an example of fortune-telling, however, the prediction rests on what would today be regarded as certain anti-Semitic assumptions based on stereotypical traits associated with Jews.

The first of these assumptions is that Jews have a special relationship with, or interest in, money. Assuming an ethnic group has a special relationship with, or interest in, money would obviously lead one to predict a number of things. The group might be, on average, wealthier than other groups. It might produce more billionaires. Its criminality might also be reflected less in violent offences than in those most directly correlated with the acquisition of wealth. By most metrics, Jews are indeed wealthier than other groups. In regards to crime, there is also a clear skewing towards wealth acquisition. In 1971 A. Menachem of the Berkeley School of Criminology published a study in Issues in Criminology titled “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview.”[1] In this study, Menachem argued that ‘the Jewish crime rate tends to be higher than that of non-Jews and other religious groups for white-collar offenses, that is, commercial or commercially related crimes, such as fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, and embezzlement.”

In 1988, Yale University’s Stanton Wheeler published “White-Collar Crimes and Criminals” for the Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. Among Wheeler’s findings were that while Protestants and Catholics were under-represented among white-collar criminals relative to their share of the population, Jews were over-represented to a very large degree (2 percent of the population, 15.2 percent of white-collar convictions). Wheeler states that “It would be a fair summary of our data to say that, demographically speaking, white-collar offenders are predominantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews.” While Stanton’s statistics are enlightening in themselves, a more detailed picture emerges in David Weisburd’s Yale-published Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (1991). Here Weisburd informs us that although Jews comprise only around 2 percent of the United States population, they contribute at least 9 percent of lower category white-collar crimes (bank embezzlement, tax fraud and bank fraud), at least 15 percent of moderate category white-collar crimes (mail fraud, false claims, and bribery), and at least 33 percent of high category white-collar crimes (antitrust and securities fraud). Weisburg’s updated data showed that overall, Jews were responsible for an astonishing 23.9 percent of financial crime in America.[2] Given the statistical data, not to mention the well-charted historical trajectory of Jewish financial behavior,[3] the argument that a Jewish predilection for financial misdeeds is a mere “canard” is unsustainable.

Desiring to acquire wealth, and actually acquiring it either legitimately or illegally, are obviously two different things. Jews are equipped for wealth acquisition, including criminal wealth acquisition, through the same background traits that facilitate their efficiency in social and political activism: ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggression.[4]

Ethnocentrism clearly plays a large role in international Jewish scams based in Israel. Many of these large-scale frauds are perpetrated by groups consisting of Americans, Bulgarians, Canadians, Romanians, Italians, and so on, whose only substantial common ground is their shared ethno-religious background. Criminal activity is inherently risky, so the level of trust among individuals from such varied national groups is all the more astonishing. Coupled with the almost exclusive targeting of outgroups (U.S. citizens, Canadians, Europeans, and others), the clannish quality of these Jewish groups drawn from the diaspora and based in Israel emphasizes the strength of Jewish ethnocentrism as a foundational base for Israeli international financial crime. In a further demonstration of Jewish ethnocentrism, or trust in one’s co-ethnics, the flight of many international Israeli swindlers to Israel, or their “disappearance” in the state, suggests a level of comfort and expectation from other Jews. Jews who have defrauded outgroups really do expect the government and state of Israel to be their refuge, and very often, through lenient sentences or lack of investigation, they are proved correct in having that expectation.

Intelligence is also key to the success and perpetuation of Israeli-based international fraud. Many of the schemes discussed above are relatively complex, requiring high levels of understanding of international financial markets, banking practices, legal loopholes, differing national standards and legislation, web and software design, search engine optimization, and all of the skills associated with money laundering. As mentioned above, Israelis are responsible for some of the biggest thefts in the financial history of several nations, often involving government-level fraud. These frauds have been executed thanks to the input of large numbers of highly intelligent and multi-skilled Jews who dedicated themselves to the criminal acquisition of wealth.

This extreme dedication to wealth acquisition is obviously driven by significant psychological intensity. In many cases, the frauds required an extraordinary level of audacity, e.g., involving the impersonation of major CEOs or even government figures. In one such example, in 2019 an Israeli scam operation obtained around $90 million after impersonating French foreign minister Jean-Yves le Drian, calling African heads of state, ambassadors, clergy and business figures, and asking them to help France pay ransom for French citizens abducted by ISIL or other terrorist groups in Syria. The impersonator donned a custom-designed silicone mask of the French minister’s head and spoke to his targets via Skype from an office decorated with the French flag and a portrait of French Prime Minister Emanuel Macron. The four ringleaders were eventually arrested in Netanya, which seems to be second only to Tel Aviv in the number of international scams it has hosted. The French were sufficiently incensed for an Israeli police officer to tell a local judge that ““This is a case with international diplomatic repercussions. This is not an ordinary case but one with great international sensitivities that has caused a diplomatic incident between our two countries.” The Times of Israel laments that “An Internet search for ‘scam’ and ‘Israel’ in French yields hundreds of articles, many of which are accompanied by anti-Semitic slurs in the comments section. … Despite the damage such fraudulent activities are doing to Israel’s reputation, Israeli law enforcement has made very few arrests and prosecuted even fewer suspects in the decade or more since the phenomenon first arose.”

Finally, Israeli international financial crime requires aggression. An interesting aspect of The Tinder Swindler involved the manner in which Shimon Hayut dropped the veil once he realized a particular woman had given him all the money she could or would. Threats and insults were immediate. The fundamental drive behind most of the discussed Jewish International scams is aggressive, involving forms of coercion and manipulation against a backdrop of callous disregard and disdain for the targeted outgroups. These aggressive aspects, of course, only highlight those instances in which some of the ill-gotten proceeds, as in the case of the Morrows for example, generously find their way to Jewish charitable causes — which brings us full circle to ethnocentrism.

The concern shown by the Israeli press, and some government officials, that such activity will lead to an increase in anti-Semitism is based for the most part on the implicit understanding that “anti-Semitic” assumptions about the traits associated with Jews (special interest in money, ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggression) have a basis in fact. Such concerns also imply the fear that wider knowledge or discussion of these large-scale frauds based in Israel will undo many decades of propaganda that has convinced outgroups that such assumptions are false or bigoted, and that Israel is a natural friend and ally to Western nations. The reality is that Israel is happy to welcome internationally looted funds into its economy, and cares little for the opinion of other nations. The nation’s founder wouldn’t be surprised.

[1] A. Menachem, “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview,” Issues in Criminality, Volume 6, Issue 2, (Summer 1971), 1-39.

[2] D. Weisburg, Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (Yale University Press, 1991), 72

[3] For example, across Europe, between 1881 and 1914, Jews were over-represented in bankruptcy, forgery, fraud and libel. See P. Knepper, The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making, 1881-1914, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 80. The trend, of course, went much further back in history.

[4] K. MacDonald, “Background Traits for Jewish Activism,” The Occidental Quarterly: A Journal of Western Thought and Opinion (Summer 2003): 1-37.

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