It’s incredible but unfortunately true. For many years, the CySEC-regulated Leverate Financial Services Ltd has been operating an infrastructure and trading network used by dozens of scam brands, in addition to its own regulated broker brands. Leverate works together with the people from PumaTS (www.pumats.com) and provides its technology, infrastructure, and trading services to scam brokers such as CapitalFX (read here). FinTelegram has carefully reviewed documentation that supports this allegation beyond any reasonable doubt. A corresponding request to Leverate Financial Services has remained unanswered so far.
Officially, the regulated leverage has nothing to do with the scam brokers denies any allegations in this context. The CySEC regulated Leverate which the call LFS for short is based in Cyprus under the leadership of CEO Alkis Hilton. The Leverate group’s CEO and beneficial owner, Ran Strauss, 34, resides in Ramat Gan, a part of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area in Israel.
Israel is also home to Leverate’s second business unit, which manages the network around PumaTS and similar clients. From its offices in Bnei Barak east of Tel Aviv, Leverate incubates, jump-starts, and facilitates forex broker scams through the provision of technology and infrastructure services. One of the responsible managers in Israel is Maoz Tenenbaum (see LinkedIn profile), VP Sales for the brokerage business.
FinTelegram has established an Excel table with access and connection data to the Leverate servers and web services, which are used by the individual scams.
The PumaTS–Leverate venture operates an international network of illegal boiler rooms with offices in Georgia, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, or Ukraine. Every single day hundreds of potential victims are contacted by the boiler room agents by phone. The data of the potential victims are listed and shared between the boiler rooms.
CySEC called to action
It is time for CYSEC to assume its responsibility as the responsible regulator for the leverage. In this respect, the management around Ran Strauss, Ariel Beck, and Guy Paz should ask critical questions. Regulators in other EU jurisdictions are increasingly issuing investment warnings against scams from the PumaTS leverage. More and more victims are losing money to these scams in the EU.