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Problem Banc de Binary Mega Scam

I am having an issue with a company

AnneW

Master Sergeant
Messages
314
Hi all, I wish to God that I had come across your website and forum before I was scammed of USD$52,600 by Banc de Binary this week. OMG, how I regret the day I came across them last week on Thursday, 7th January 2016 - what a God awful start to 2016 for me ... it is my first time trading and what a disaster to start 2016, my 50th birthday and not to mention Chinese New Year next month! It's an extremely bitter lesson to learn and all my savings will have to go to paying off the amounts taken off my credit cards, and to top it off, I will need to borrow from friends and relatives to pay off the balance of the credit cards as I don't have enough in my savings to cover the USD amount taken after converting from my local currency! I could just cry over this but it will not help me recover the money from Banc de Binary.

It all started with Nicole Morrison contacting me on the 7th January after I had registered to download some trading platform which I can't for the life of me remember what it is now, as it never got downloaded at all, not realising that they were mega scammers. I had read earlier on Binary Options Watch Dog that they were a trusted broker and not a scammer, and that's why I even bothered to take Nicole's call and make the initial deposit of USD$250 with Banc de Binary.

She had also informed me that I would receive an introduction call from a Senior Account Manager for 15 minutes later that evening. The Senior Account Manager was Edward West, and boy, was he a smooth talker and completely aggressive when it came down to getting money out of me, and I was stupidly staying on the phone with him for over an hour with him describing the Protected Trades and giving him my credit card details until he had maxed out and even exceeded the credit limits on my cards to the amount of USD$52,500 (a total of USD$52,750 in all together with the initial deposit of USD$250). He had informed me that Banc de Binary were having an Apple Event on Monday, 11th January 2016, and that my funds would be 100% Protected Trades, as he knew how worried I was with the amounts being taken off the cards as he said they needed USD$100,000 for the Apple Event, despite my telling him that I did not have anywhere near that sort of money. During this period, he sent me a withdrawal of USD$150, to indicate how easy it was to withdraw the funds as they were mine to withdraw! So the total at that point came down to USD$52,600 for the Protected Trades which he told me were to be done over 3 days and I could then withdraw the entire amount this Friday, 15th January, after the Protected Trades had been completed.

After the credit cards were maxed out at USD$52,500, Edward got his Finance Manager to try and walk me through a bank transfer to "my" Banc de Binary account. Thank God that there was safeguards in place and the funds did not go through. Then he insisted that I had to go to the bank the following day when it was open to do a wire transfer to Banc de Binary as they had booked the Protected Trades, but which I did not do, so he then wanted me to pay off my credit cards from my savings accounts so that he could again get funds off the credit cards, which did not happen either, as I did not do so.

I was told that I had to get all my documents verified on Monday afternoon, 11th January, as I had not given them any details - I had actually uploaded the documents twice online to the BDB website on Thursday, 7th, and Friday, 8th January, and sent the same via email as well on Friday, 8th January, and had to resend everything by email on Monday, 11th January to Edward and the BDB Compliance Department, and then Edward wanted me to sign the Declaration of Deposit which I had withheld signing, as he said that the Protected Trades could not take place unless I signed the same, and I would not be able to get my money back. After that, Edward told me that I needed to sign the bonus document, I asked if I needed the bonus because wasn't it the case from their FAQ that I would not be able to withdraw my funds if I accepted the bonus? Edward's response was to tell me not to get the 2 confused. My entire funds which was to be used for the Protected Trade was mine to withdraw at any time, while the bonus could not be withdrawn, and would be used together with the profits obtained for further trading after they remitted the USD$52,600 to my bank accounts this Friday, 15th January.

I am however, now out of pocket to a total of USD$52,600, after the 3 days of Protected Trades - which Edward told me last night for the first time was not protected, and he told me tonight when I asked for my funds to be remitted tomorrow as promised throughout the entire trading exercise with him telling me what indices, commodities and currencies to trade and click on, the exit times to change and the amounts to key in to trade, that there was only 1 Protected Trade as they do not have unlimited Protected Trades! How easy it was to tell me that there were 3 days of Protected Trade when trying to get the money which he now denies.

Edward said that he kept records of every conversation we have had, and that he could send the same to me, so I asked that he please do so, but have received nothing as yet. Edward kept insisting that he had told me it was just 1 Protected Trade, while I said that he never said that because every time I spoke with him on the phone or on skype, and he kept asking me every time we spoke why I was so nervous and frightened of trading like a bride on her wedding night, because he has more than 8 years experience in the industry, he is the Senior Account Manager who would guide me and protect my trades with his experience and that he is in Banc de Binary's A team, the first team, the best team etc and why was I worried about anything. The part that tops it all was how he also told me that he wanted me to be safe and protected from scammers out there as there are so many scams for binary trading!!!

Edward told me that I was not to make any trades without his guidance and that is what we agreed on and what was done over the past 3 days (Monday, 11th January, to Wednesday, 13th January), and I relied on his trading expertise as Senior Account Manager, with him telling me what indices, commodities and currencies to trade and click on, the exit times to change and the amounts to key in to trade. Throughout the entire exercise, he kept emphasizing to me to stop being so nervous and afraid of trading as he would guide me and look after me and that my entire deposited funds were used for Protected Trades over the first 3 days of the week, at the end of which my funds would be remitted/reversed out to me by this Friday, 15th January. On top of that, he told me that he would help me set up a Swiss bank account to deposit my funds into so I would get better interest rates and would not have to live with such a bad exchange rate to the USD!!

Edward tonight stated that it was my fault that the money was lost because after telling me what indices, commodities and currencies to trade and click on, the exit times to change and the amounts to key in to trade, I was slow with clicking on the trades, and my slow computer (brand new HP laptop) and slow internet (which is my fibre optic and not a copper wire service at home or a direct connection to the LAN cable at the office) killed the trades, and when clicking quickly, an error message that the servers could not be accessed kept popping up. I regret not taking screen captures of all these error messages or recording our conversations, as i don't know how to do that over skype.

Edward told me tonight that the error messages were because of my slowness in clicking, the slow computer and slow internet which caused the BDB servers to time out and crash the trades! There was once he said he was confused as the trades had moved while we were waiting for the system to recover, and he also said that he told me that the BDB website logs us out every 5 minutes and we have to log back in to trade, but he never told me that on the first day! Edward said tonight as well that the slowness caused the bank to have to deposit more than USD$60,000 in bonus which they lost! I have downloaded my Account Statement which shows the times of all the deposits, including the deposits I never asked for.

Last night however, (Wednesday night) Edward told me that "we" had taken a lot of losses and that his manager had called him in to his office and after that he told me that his manager "want us to deposit 50k usd from your side, then he will add to the account 60k usd. then because you trading slow and its cost a lot of money. we going to trade only on stocks and long term. now i need you to use your savings to pay the card or to do a wire transaction. this is your money and we have to do that. ill do everything in my hand to fix it all for you".

So in my email this afternoon, I asked Edward why, if he and his manager believed that I was too slow in clicking, why did they not bring that up from day 1 to change the trading strategy??? After all they are the experts here! I also told him that I would like to believe that this is not some sort of a scam and fraud to make me lose all my money, since he has already misrepresented to me about the trades being protected for the 3 days this week!

Edward was not happy when I sent him and copied the BDB compliance team this afternoon setting out everything and on top of that I asked why he never informed me that the Trades were no longer Protected and to ask if I wanted to trade and risk all my money? Was it because he knew how risk averse I was, as I kept telling him throughout the entire period that I was scared of losing my money, and that I would have stopped trading immediately if I had know the trades were not protected, and that was why he kept on telling me "after 3 days of Protected Trades" you can withdraw your money this Friday, 15th January. He has now denied that he told me about the "3 days of Protected Trades". He said that I should have been aware that there were no funds in the account despite him telling me to scroll down the screen to place the trades and the amounts of the trade, and there was no change to the Account Statements since the funds were deposited up until the bonus was deposited as I see now from the statements downloaded on Wednesday, 13th and Thursday, 14th January.

Tonight Edward was not happy after my 2 emails this afternoon and the numerous skype messages last night when I could not sleep, asking for him to assist to withdraw the funds tomorrow as promised. Since I don't want to deposit any further funds with them and throw more money down a black hole, Edward said that the only thing he can do is put a Recovery Manager to work with me on my account. I asked if that was for them to drawdown on the remaining USD$780.77 remaining in it, and he was not happy with my response.

I have called the issuing banks, but they say that they cannot help as I authorised the payments. I am going to call both VISA and MasterCard to see if they can assist with a chargeback - I am hoping and praying that they can in Malaysia, and that they won't say that by signing the declaration of deposit will allow BDB off scot free. As I am in Malaysia, I have no idea of what else to do to recover my funds. I am hoping and praying that someone can assist with what else I can do.

I would appreciate any guidance and ideas of steps to take to recover my life savings for my retirement and for supporting my aged parent. Thank you all in advance.
 
I forgot to mention in my post above that on Monday, 11th January, I informed Edward West that I cannot proceed with this and needed to withdraw all the money deposited now as i was not able to use any of my credit cards over the weekend of 9th-10th January as all my credit cards have been maxed out - not only maxed out due to the combined credit limits on my cards, but in fact exceeded the credit limit on the cards, by as much as MYR12,000 on one of the cards due to the exchange rates between the USD and MYR! The banks have been calling to ask for payment of the excess on the cards and things are just getting absolutely crazy on my end. On top of all that, my entire family are upset with me as well that I blindly continued to cave in to Edward and allowed him to railroad me into taking the funds from the credit cards on Thursday night, 7th January, until he had maxed everything out! I told Edward that it had been a most unpleasant and harrowing weekend and I just cannot afford to continue like that. I told him that I had heart palpitations from all the stress and had to go to the hospital for a checkup as well, and that it looked like binary trading is just not for me at this point in time. I asked that he please assist me to withdraw all the funds deposited to date and hoped that this can be done unconditionally now and that there will be no hassles or blocks placed on this request. I am really sorry that I did not take the time to ask him to walk me through this and explain the entire process to me first, aside from his reassurances that the funds would be used for Protected Trades only and caved into his pressure and the funds were taken off my credit cards on Thursday night my time after a long day at work for me. I informed him that the banks were chasing me for payment of the excess and that the first lots of MYR112,429.20 and MYR56,203.63 are due in the next 2 weeks, with the other 2 lots of credit cards due by mid February 2016, and I'm completely stressed out over everything now with more than MYR235,000 owing to the bank on my 4 credit cards now. As he was made aware and told several times, I just cannot deal with such a huge debt owing to the banks, and worse, I cannot even pay the same off with what I currently have in my 2 savings account now, so I pled with him to please help me stop this process and withdraw my funds now before we even started trading and to please help me to withdraw the funds so that I an repay the banks for the credit taken out right now.

On a phone conversation, Edward's response was that the trades had been booked and we needed to make the Protected Trades for the 3 days (which he now denies saying - I am still waiting for him to send me records of our conversation where he said he told me there was only 1 Protected Trade) before the funds were to be remitted back on Friday, 15th January, as we now know will not happen.
 
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Gather all your evidence. Contact your credit card's issuing bank(s). Visit the bank(s) if possible. Ask to speak to someone in the fraud department. Explain that withdrawal is one of the services that's supposed to be provided and that BDB is blocking withdrawals. If anyone and BDB offered to train you to trade, that's another service you likely didn't get. Ask if a chargeback is appropriate under the circumstances.

Also, file complaints with Cysec, the Cyprus Financial Ombudsman, and eConsumer.gov. Ask you bank and local police about where to file online financial fraud complaints in your country. If you get a good answer to that, post it here.
 
Thank you, I will do that.

I have today received and email from the "Recovery Manager" Edward West has asked to contact me. His email contains the following:

Dear Anne,

My name is Nick Turner, Head of the Recovery Dpt. at Banc De Binary. I tried reaching you on the phone earlier, without success.

After going over the portfolio of your Account Manager, I can say that I am not pleased with the way in which your trades have been placed. If I could speak to you for few moments, I would like to discuss ways to rebuild your account, and recover the capital which was lost.

We will be taking a slow and steady approach in order to achieve this, while minimizing risk and maximizing profits.

I look forward to speaking with you and am very confident we will be able assist you.

Best Regards, Nick Turner
 
No doubt he will be unable to "recover" the deposited funds based on the supposedly remaining USD$780.77, and that he will also ask that I deposit a further USD$50,000 as Edward West has already requested for to try and recover the lost "Protected Trades" ... I will need to respond to him tonight to see what he proposes. I will not be stupid enough to dump a further USD$50,000 which I do not have into a bottomless black hole as I can't even afford to pay off the existing card charges with what I have left in my savings account - STUPID ME!!!!!!!!
 
Thank you for the link, oscarra.

I have actually responded to Nick Turner by email to ask him to put in writing how he can help. I didn't pick up his call and told him that I did not want to speak with him over the phone and wanted everything in writing after what Edward West did to me. Please be assured that I will most certainly not be depositing any further funds with them - all I want now is to recover the entire amount of USD$52,600 and be put back in the same place I was before I encountered these scammers and con artists!
 
I've just remembered one more weird thing in the confusion of one of the earlier conversations with Edward West was he telling me that I would be able to retire within 2 months, and wouldn't that be nice - of course I did not believe that would be the case!! He also said that he'd never been to Malaysia and that when he saw that I was from Malaysia (there must obviously be a list of gullible people to con that is released to them when we click on some link to download some trading software to test out), he told me that he wanted to train me up to become a good trader so that he could have a representative here in Malaysia! What a load of utter rubbish!!! All he wanted to do was to fleece me of every cent he could get his greedy hands on! I now realise that what Nicole Morrison and Edward West said about getting a bonus only if my trades were profitable and that's why they needed to ensure that we did well is all lies. They must get their bonuses from scamming people and draining them of every red cent from their trading accounts. This seems to be the case with the other complaints I have read of the others who have also been scammed here.

I have also been looking at the Banc de Binary website and see from this link (https://bancdebinary.com/accounts/account-types/#) that as Edward West had managed to obtain USD$52,600 off my credit cards, that the amount would make me a Platinum account holder with access to various services, which as Pharaoh was spot on the money, I didn't get, especially the offer to train me to trade. There was obviously also no trading alerts and event analysis, or an introductory private session with an analyst - unless we can classify Edward West's sitting on the other end telling me what indices, commodities and currencies to trade and click on, the exit times to change and the amounts to key in to trade as "trading alerts"?? Can Edward West's actions be placed under a Trading & Signals Violation, where I had unwillingly or unknowingly had my account balance depleted through the now very obvious losing “trades” that were also very obviously provided by Edward West, the Senior Account Manager of BDB. I am now trying desperately to recover the entire sum of USD$52,600 and that is all I want back from them. Nothing more, nothing less.

Obviously, there was no "smart money management plan" in place for my account, just a "smart money management plan" to fleece me of all my funds and line their own pockets! I still get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I think of how i have been cheated and conned out of my entire life savings.

Also as expected, Nick Turner, the Recovery Manager, has not replied to my email asking him to put down the recovery plan in writing for me to consider, which needs to be based on the balance of the remainder in my account with Banc de Binary.

I will email them again and also send an email to their complaints and disputes departments as I've seen someone do in this forum. I hope to God that they will sit up and take notice of what is going on, but I don't understand why despite getting so many complaints of the way people have been scammed and conned out of their life savings that the management of Banc de Binary is still allowing their employees to continue to fleece the unsuspecting public of every red cent. Is this their way of operation? Why haven't Cysec not just fined them but closed them down long ago??????? How can this still be allowed to go on until today??? What are the authorities doing??? I just don't understand this!
 
I think with all the complaints a lawsuit should be filed vs Banc De Binary I too was scammed by them and in the UK where I am from originally we have lawyers that can go to Israel/Cyprus and shut them down once and for all! I was reading an article here on one firm BinaryBook.com that is being shut down for the same exact thing that Banc De Binary has done all this time. Cyprus is not enough to stop these criminals. I think firms like Richard Howlett of "Selachii law group in London, UK" who are willing to sue dodgy binary option brokers, such as these need to be used more. Its time for these scammers to be shut down! Here is the article I was reading where I found this maybe this could be a solution finding law firms on our behalf?

forum.binaryoptions.net/discussion/2557/binarybook-is-a-scam-and-is-about-to-be-sued#latest
 
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You have my sympathy, these binary option scammers are very convincing. I lost 500USD to a scam from binary International in 2013 and some fake software with traffic lights and a load of other so called signals that meant you cannot loose.. Howevr it taught me a big lesson and the next time I invested I had researched vey thouroughly and stuck to a good broker and traded forex myself.I now trade forex full time and make a good living from it from April 2014, it is possible but you need to realise that 99.99% of traders loose unless you get the right mental attitude and look out for the scammers. The Forex Peace Army site saved me from so much grief. Best wishes with your case and hope you get some money back.
 
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