Back on April 16th, a review of Options Rider appeared on BehindMLM. The company purports to be offering option trading out of New Zealand, but the address is that of a Regus virtual office. And no owners were identified on their website. Shady enough? Searching the interwebs revealed two names: Bob Roberts and Thomas Carter.
Bob Roberts appears to be associated with another virtual entity called BancdeOptions, supposedly HQ'ed in Hong Kong, but it's another virtual office.
Here's the really hilarious part though... At the time of BehindMLM's review (early April 2015) Options Rider showed a license number: FSP license number 207/13
Sometime after that review, they changed it to FSP license number FSP109805.
But I was able to locate a version of the Options Rider contract, on "WV Trading" that PREDATES the both of them that says: "CIF License number 207/13"
The Company is authorized and regulated by the New Zealand Securities and Exchange Commission to offer certain Investment and Ancillary Services and Activities under the Provision of Investment Services, the Exercise of Investment Activities, the Operation of Regulated Markets and Other Related Matters Law of 2007, Law 144(I)/2007, as subsequently amended or replaced from time to time (“the Law”), with CIF license number 207/13.The problem is New Zealand does NOT have a Securities and Exchange Commission. New Zealand investments is regulated by Financial Markets Authority. And the cited laws do NOT exist in New Zealand. And obviously, "CIF" number is meaningless in New Zealand. In NZ financial entities are licensed as FSP (Financial Service Providers), but its relevance will become clearer. There is no "Options - anything" licensed as FSP in New Zealand. Search the database yourself.
In fact, you should notice that by typing in a few test cases that NONE of the FSP number goes above 5 digits. Thus, the 6-digit number given by Options Rider is BOGUS.
By now it should be clear that this company is a scam, citing license by a nonexistent government agency for legitimacy. But wait, there's even more hilarity in the lies of Options Rider!
It's even more hilarious when I was able find the actual laws and regulations cited... in an REAL options trading company based in Cyprus (that's in Europe!). Feel free to compare that aforementioned paragraph, against this real company's information:
1.1. Rodeler Limited (“the Company”) is authorised and regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (“CySEC”) as a Cyprus Investment Firm (“CIF”) to offer the services and activities enlisted herein in this document, under the Provision of Investment Services, the Exercise of Investment Activities, the Operation of Regulated Markets and Other Related Matters Law 144(I)/2007, as subsequently amended from time to time (“the Law”).
1.2. The Company’s CIF license number is 207/13.These scammers didn't even bother changing the number. That's why there's a CIF number in a previous incarnation of the contract. Tsk tsk tsk. They try to tack on the FSP prefix, then realized it's in the wrong format, so they made up a number that's ROUGHLY in the right format.
It gets even more hilarious when these scammers claimed to have found BehindMLM's owner and paid him off to remove the negative review. Hahahahahaha.
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