What is a Boiler Room?

A boiler room is a bit like a call centre, except they are the ones that do the calling. They call people who have 'expressed an interest' in trading, or in other words have been taken in by their advertising campaigns that make absurd promises and get your details whilst you are still stunned and in disbelief at their claims. This is the world of Brexit Millionaire, Immediate Edge, Bitcoin Circuit and Quantum AI.

They all sound pretty impressive, as they are claiming that for a deposit of $250 (or latterly $300) that you can make thousands in your first day, and again every day after that.

How Does a Boiler Room Scam Work?

Let's have a look at an email we received from a boiler room scammer just today in 2021:

 As you can see, the email is all about making a new life without working and being financially free. The promise is that with a very simple plan you can live a life of luxury without working and travel the world. This promise is consistent across all of the boiler room scams.

Who is Behind the Boiler Room Scams?

Well, at the bottom of the email, the company details are shown:

Optium LTD. Ajeltake Road, Ajeltake Island, Majuro, Marshall Islands, MH96960 Registration No. 110334

The company is registered in the Marshall Islands which are a remote island chain in the Pacific. The Marshall Islands have very special financial regulation to attract finance companies as well as being very difficult and expensive to get to. They also operate a huge number of mail forwarding services so that you can register a company there but have your offices elsewhere. This is a very common practice amongst brokerage companies. As with many of these boiler room scammers, they also happen to have a UK style phone number, but an 0203 number can be routed to anywhere on Earth.

As you will also be able to see, they are immediately associating themselves with huge US companies such as FaceBook and Zuckerberg, as well as telling you that this is your financial future. If you click any of the links you are taken here:

How Does the Boiler Room Scam Work?

Now on this site we can see that their only objective is to get your email address and phone number, that is all they need to begin their scam. They will phone you up and persuade you to make deposits into their system which you will then be able to trade with. They do not tell you what you are trading, they do not tell you who regulates them, they only tell you that they are going to make you rich. They do have the same phone number as the email though, so we could assume that they are also Optium Ltd but that may not be the case. If we look at an alternative site, beneffx.com we can see that there is a company with that name: Company information: This website is operated by Optium LTD. Registration No. 110334 with registered address at Ajeltake Road, Ajeltake Island, Majuro, Marshall Islands, MH96960

Payment agent information: Key Solutions LTD, registration number 206198441 , Address: Banishora, bl 56/A/5/15, 1233 Sofia, Bulgaria.

We would have to contact them to find out if they operate the stock dictionary site. The name could be a red herring to feign legality. There does not seem to be much else on this company except that one company with the same name was registered in Britain in August 2021:

OPTIUM INTERNATIONAL LTD | Company number: 13556570 | Registered office: 68 BRAMAH HOUSE, 9 GATLIFF ROAD, LONDON SW1W 8QD | Company type: Private Limited Company | Company status: ACTIVE | Incorporated on: 9 August 2021

But there may not be a connection.

How Do The Boiler Room Scammers Get Your Money?

As you can see in the above, the alleged product they are toting offers auto-trading of cryprocurrencies. 

Auto-CryptoTrading site scams are a common way to bring in people to the boiler room scams and are just the same scam as any of the Bitcoin xxxx scams with the same tactics, the same websites and the same scammers.

Profit Build and Profit Edge are ways of tempting you in to a boiler room scam which is one of the most dangerous financial scams around.

Through a combination of psychology and lies they force you to give them all of your money.

In the modern age this is often by gaining control of your computer and transferring you money into cryptocurrency so that they can move it between different cryptocurrencies and make it difficult to trace where it is sold. This is a simple way of laundering money into the Russian mafia or elsewhere.

Typically these companies are registered in places like St Vincent's and the Grenadines or other nations where the rules are demonstrably made specifically to harbour criminal enterprises.

The actual call centres are typically within your own country and the contact details for them to call (because the bullying and abuse required to get your money is most easily conducted by phone) are harvested across some of the most trusted sites on the web, including Google, FaceBook and Twitter.

How Do The Boiler Room Scammers Find Their Victims?

Let's look at an example.

Google's Google Ads system is a favourite of theirs, so let's see what keywords they are advertising with today:

Let's try Bitcoin:

 

OK so you can see that CFD brokers are advertising under Bitcoin, but they do announce on their ad that 72% of people lose money so we will have to put up with that being allowed. CFDs are highly complex trading contracts and not for beginners. They are also open to a lot of misuse br dodgy brokers and what you lose goes straight to them, so the temptation for them to defraud you is high, and it is difficult to prove as the brokers make the rules and the small print. It is good to see that Google are not advertising the boiler room boys under this search.

Now let's try Bitcoin Profit as our search term:

 

OK, so here they are. If you look at the bottom result, you can see it is supposedly a website called aliveinvestment.com telling us that Bitcoins work and they have 80,000 satisfied customers. Let's see what happens when we click that link:

OK so it takes us through to a page designed to harvest contact details for boiler rooms scammers to call. This one is called Bitcoin Profit and is at: https://bitcoinprofit.investment-club-eng.com/new2/

 

As you can see, every emotion is attacked by these people. Fear, insecurity and greed are all employed to get your details with a typical 'time is limited' message at the top to pressure you into making a terrible mistake.

These are the same scammers that use Good Morning, Martin Lewis, Elon Musk, Holly Willoughby and Akshay Philips to try and defraud people with their boiler room scams.

What is the Truth Behind the Boiler Room Scams?

There is no such thing as an 'autotrader'  that makes money every time without loss or risk. They would never ever sell it even if there was. Any computer that could predict the stock market would either change the market so that it became impossible for the computer to predict it, or allow the user to gain control of the US Federal Reserve and take over the world. Such an intelligence would have to have access to the world media and know what to believe and what not to. As such, the intelligence in question would have to understand human nature, psychopathic nature, greed and the world markets. In other words, such an intelligence would not be controllable by a boiler room scammer.

How Big is the Boiler Room Scammer Network?

The network that runs these scams around the world in many different languages all have similar strategies and share website templates and other strategies such as technology and data storage.

One obvious connection that confirms affiliation between all of the scams is that every one of these sites has the same disclaimer at the bottom:

This site is an affiliate of a boiler room scammer, pretending to be a CFD broker. The nature of CFDs allows boiler room scammers to hide behind the law as CFDs are such a scam that you can just point at the legal disclaimer and say I told you so' to get out of prosecution for fraud.

Why Are There So Many Boiler Room Scammers?

These affiliate companies are paying as much as $700 USD per victim to affiliates and so the lengths the affiliates will go to and the lies they will tell are unbelievable. If they can get three victims a day that is a million dollars a year! Just for running a website.

The most advanced website scammers actually have two factor authentication to be sure they are getting a real phone number so that the boiler room boys can be sure they can victimise someone and so be sure of their $700 fee for every successful contact number harvesting.

So you can see the problem...

But the scale of the problem is quite astonishing. Let's do an exact search of google for part of the disclaimer, as that is most likely provided by the affiliate system, and will be identical for all of their affiliates. We will search for "The success of those in the testimonials and other examples are exceptional results and therefore are not intended as a guarantee that you or others will achieve the same results."

As you can see at the top, there are 1,830 results with that exact text on. This is truly unbelievable for such a concise search of such length. Every one of those 1830 websites is either a scammer affiliate for a boiler room scam, or they are warning of the existence of these website scams.

What Can Be Done To Stop Boiler Room Scammers?

What is the solution? CFDs need to be outlawed for retail accounts worldwide to protect us. They do not need to be made illegal to professional traders, just to retail accounts. Once this is made law in enough countries, the scammers will have to remove all of these websites as they will be illegal in every country which reads the language in which they are written.

Is this an attempt to bring about internet legislation? Maybe..

It certainly seems ridiculous that so many people are involved in international fraud using skills that could easily make them good money in many legal applications.