Is USFIA tied to Options Giant Ponzi scheme?
What a small world it sometimes is.
A reader sent in a call for review yesterday via a comment on our Options Rider Review.
For those unfamiliar with the scheme, Options Rider is a binary options Ponzi scheme operated by Bob Roberts.
Roberts is based out of China, where he believes he’s safe from US regulators.
The call in question pertains to Options Giant, which was launched when Options Rider began experience payment problems. At present it’s believed Options Rider investors are waiting months for a single withdrawal request.
Both schemes solicit funds from US investors and both then proceed to launder said funds through banks in Australia. As of yet no regulator has moved in on the scheme, despite claims of investors investing $500,000 at a time.
There are three primary speakers on the call, co-hosts “Mark” and “Garry” and the President of Options Giant, a man identified only as “Gabriel” from Australia.
The two hosts appear to have organized the call to help with their investor recruitment efforts. One of the hosts claims to have managed a downline of 40,000 to 50,000 in similar schemes.
After getting the usual Ponzi scheme questions out of the way “how long will this last?”, “are there investment limits?”, “how do you plant to deal with banking (money laundering) regulations?” etc, Gabriel goes on to explain Options Giant’s efforts to fly under the US regulatory radar.
In essence, Gabriel believes that by having US investors invest into a pooled fund, which Options Giant then launder through Australian bank accounts, the scheme won’t attract regulatory intention.
Gabriel claims on the call that “a Chinese guy, the head of one of the communist things in Shangai”, has invested $18.5 million USD into the scheme.
“This is currently legal in Australia” explains Gabriel.
Meanwhile, despite soliciting funds from US investors and the investment pool clearly a securities offering, Options Giant remain unregistered with the SEC.
Around halfway into the call, Garry asks Gabriel if he plans to visit the US:
[24:25] Do you travel much, Gabriel, to the United States? Do you ever come over here?
Gabriel answers:
[24:32] Um I have, I actually was just there a few months back.
And I was in LA, I was doing a presentation to uh, believe it or not, to the Chinese community based in uh, ahhh, what was the suburb? Arcadia.
According to the United States Census Bureau, Arcadia, a small city in California, had a population of 58,000 in 2014.
So out of the whole of the US, why did the President of a Ponzi scheme specifically single out Arcadia, California for an investor presentation?
Arcadia as it were is no stranger to Ponzi schemes. The small city is currently embroiled in a Ponzi scandal that has engulfed its political dialogue.
Facing mounting pressure to come clean regarding his business relationships with USFIA owner Steve Chen, local City Councillor John Wuo was suspiciously absent at an Arcadia City Council meeting last night.
For those unfamiliar with USFIA, the company operates the GemCoin Ponzi scheme. Through its GemCoin, USFIA have primarily targeted Arcadia’s Chinese community for investment fraud.
John Wuo has appeared at many USFIA GemCoin events, leaving his constituents wondering as to the extent he might be involved.
Wuo maintains he is not directly involved in USFIA or GemCoin, nor was he compensated for appearing at the scheme’s publicity events, or USFIA’s use of his name and image to market GemCoin to Arcadian citizens.
At the city meeting Wuo was absent from last night, a document was presented that showed Steve Chen and John Wuo were business partners in 24HD Surveillance LLC.
Whether or not any USFIA GemCoin funds have passed through 24HD Surveillance and into John Wuo’s possession is unclear.
USFIA’s recent planned promotional event on August 28th was abruptly cancelled, following a showing of Chinese investors demanding their invested funds be returned.
USFIA’s last Arcadia Ponzi gala was held in late May, which sort of fits Gabriel’s “a few months back” timeline.
Whether or not Gabriel attended the GemCoin event and presented Options Giant is unclear.
What are the chances of two Ponzi schemes being pitched in Arcadia around the same time to the same community at two different events?
Yeah it might be a coincidence, but in my experience there is little of coincidence that occurs in the Ponzi scheme underworld.
Was Options Giant sandwiched into the GemCoin event? Is USFIA investing affiliate funds in Options Giant whilst presenting a GemCoin facade to investors?
Somebody in Arcadia’s Chinese community has to know something…
In the meantime, a round of applause for Arcadia’s Chinese community. Y’all well on the way to establishing your little city as the west coast Ponzi capital.
A few more schemes under your collective belts and we might just have to recrown Massachusetts.
They wouldn’t be pitching if you weren’t investing…
IMHO, coincidence. Arcadia is known for McMansions and rich Asians.
All one needs to know about Options Giant is that the moronic ponzi pimping king, Ken Russo is trying to con his sheep into it! If that doesn’t yell “SCAM”, I don’t know what does.
Y’think?
Evidently common-sense goes out the window in such circles.
New stuff on John Wuo today. Scroll down to the second part of the article until you get to the signature comparison.
sierramadretattler.blogspot.com/2015/09/councilmember-sho-tays-arcadia-outreach.html
FWIW, Steve Chen’s EB-5 scheme is handled by his “Great Eastern Immigration Services”, an office in his Arcadia “complex”, upstairs.
When Edgar Motta did a video walkthru of USFIA office along with two Spanish-speaking promoters back in early 2014 “Geraldo” did say something about the upstairs office (labelled “Great Eastern Immigration Services”) be able to provide EB-5 residency visas for large investments (into Chen’s golf courses and real estate is implied).
amlmskeptic.blogspot.com/2015/07/usfia-update-what-was-usfia-doing.html
Let’s not forget that Phil Ming Xu also had EB-5 schemes regarding his various “enterprises”…
Epochtimes’ follow-up article is up, seems they are quite sure Gemcoin’s a scam. They got the lawyer who sued Luca Group ponzi to comment and it’s pretty much the same.
epochtimes.com/gb/15/9/3/n4519031.htm (in Chinese)
The advice roughly can be summarized as follows:
1) Relationships, not logic
Chinese people don’t hire investment experts, but relied on friends and family friends, who don’t know any better. Chinese also tends to join a bandwagon, what you can do I can do too, thus fall victim to recruiting scams.
2) Language barrier and cultural differences
Chinese are no stranger to scams, but when they move to the US, they suffer culture shock and their lack of English mastery and American culture acclimatization, plus the Chinese tendency to have savings, made them ideal victims, leading them to believe such ‘well-established’ institutions can’t possibly be a scam and lower their guard.
Examples given were various “proof” Steve Chen provided… which includes corp registration (everybody needs one), some paper in Spanish (had nothing to do with amber or investment), and so on.
Same with with Luca Energy… various maps, deeds, diagrams, predictions about oil output, lots of jargon. Few if any bothered to “visit” the Luca well sites.
3) Attribute substitution / mob effect
Gemcoin apparently used small gifts to entice people to join this “free seminar” then really make it exciting, lots of presentations, cheering and clapping, loud music, celebrations, lots of people claiming they made a ton of money, it’s good to make money…
then made the unspoken association that Gemcoin is *the* way to make money, using the mob mood to lower the victim’s guard, that any one can be rich like those people on stage.
4) EB-5 that is “no risk” is a scam
A lot of scams involve EB-5 investment visas, because a lot of Chinese wanted to emigrate to the US.
Luca Energy was promising 20-30% yearly return. The common factors among these EB-5 scasm were “high return, zero risk, cannot lose”.
Any one who had done some research into immigration should know that EB-5 requires INVESTMENT, and investment always carries risk. “Cannot lose” deals are loans, not investments, and can NEVER be approved by INS as valid EB-5 venues.
There is no “George Klau”. It’s George K. Lau. There is one such person in Arcadia, I’m trying to find a link between him and the Wuo and the rest.
I’m 67% sure he’s a CPA and gets put on companies as proxy owner.
I know some people who got scammed by Banc De Options a similar operation by the same Bob Roberts which is obviously an alias.
Texas SEC are interested in a guy named Kaison or Clifton Sneed Jr. (Convicted Felon) He scammed people out of their money and claimed to know these guys out of China.
He claimed he was helping the little guy but all he was doing was helping himself/Bob Jones to other people’s money.
So here is the scam:
Investment club fee 25,0000, 5,000 invested in an options platform.
Part of the fee is the ability to trade with Kaisan who is a marginal trader at best, to legitimize the ponzi. He also made sure that the people trading with him lost their trades so he could get paid by Boss.
Capital because he brought people into the platform and for every trade lost he would win because people had to recharge their accounts.
When people could see how hard it is to trade it makes it an easy mark because now you have the option for a Managed account and traders do it for the investor.
The 5,000 or more (some came in with much more) that was invested into a “Managed account” which the investor could log in and view their account. It would mostly post wins.
People were told they couldn’t withdraw wins for 6 months. Well with Options Giants, Options Rider and Bancdeoptions that 6 mos is long enough for them to disappear.
With excuses, such as a Chinese Bank bought out Banc DeOptions and they were changing over accounts, Options Giant and Options Rider “we are shutting down for the Christmas and New Year Holiday”.
Only to leave customers with unanswered emails and phony accounts posting wins at first then losses until the account is drained to zero balance, but the computer program keeps running and then posts negative amounts because if it were a live trader making trades on your behalf then it would stop at Zero balance
Part two of scam: wealth accumulations expert
Unsuspecting people who were recruited to ask their family and friends to get in on this great way to become a millionaire in less than two years.
They had to sign nondisclosure paperwork before their accounts were open so people couldn’t contact the trading platform directly. Another layer of false legitimacy.
The platform was never legitimate there were people who answered questions on the website and about the trades made but it was all fake.
On one of the training conference calls for the recruiting people, Clifton Sneed would threaten people by saying one of the recruiters was fired because that person asked too many questions and found out about the trading platform name and called to ask questions. And that anyone who goes around joining the platform without being part of the club would have their funds returned and permanently erected from the club.
The people who didn’t have the 25,000 dollar club fee were told to lay 2,500 and Clifton Sneed Jr. would fund the rest with a Chinese investor for a loan or you could come up with another 2,500 and pay into the trade platform which was unknown because people could be hit with a nondisclosure lawsuit.
This is Scheme was elaborate and complex. The recruited people were told by getting in as much business as possible there were commissions and bonuses and you could generate a six figure income by helping other people with such a great opportunity.
There were conference calls, testimonials of alledged investors who by the way were related to Sneed as being able to withdraw tens of thousands from their managed accounts.
Anyway long story short people with lots of money were scammed and people who had small amounts lost their money too and also the trust of their family and friends who believed in them which is far more damaging than loosing money.
The people who had hoped for a good job and a good cause were duped the most by this unscrupulous and unethical egomaniacal narcissist. Yes you can loose at investments but it is not an excuse to rob people of their money.
Anyone who professes that God gave them visions about helping people or says you are stupid for being cautious with investing money, or says that Binary Options is Forex Trading and that you can make a lot of money by having other people do it for you, run away, far away.
I am telling you all do not get involved with Option Giants, I tried it with the minimum amount and split about 3 ways so not a major lose.
I have so much on paper right it looks real good. They now have this express withdrawal only 12 percent and you get your money right away, but you have to send the 12 per cent first.
They do not operate like normal investment companies they take off your money you are receiving.
And one more thing, the minimum to withdrawal was 500.00 and gee now it has gone up to 5000.00, 12 percent of that is 600.00 friggin scammers stay away PLEASE.
For me this is a scam. In the last 51 trades on my account it has only been a winner 2 times. That is nearly impossible.
Even the flip of a coin would give you a 50/50 chance of a winner. They are just draining my winnings down to zero. They and those that promote O/G are SOBs and should be par for their thief.