“Financial Market Authority”: Beware of rip-off emails!

Have you ever lost money on a dubious trading platform? No? It doesn't matter, because an alleged company called "Financial Market Authority" simply claims by email that you may be the injured party and offers help - for which you have to pay first, but you never get anything!

The email from the false “financial market supervisory authority”

The currently circulating email from the “Financial Market Authority” seems serious at first glance: you are addressed with your first and last name, a file number is given, and only upon closer inspection can you discover minor spelling errors:

Subject: [First name] [Last name] File number 520 Js 345/16

Dear [First name] [Last name] ,

we are contacting you in connection with a crime.

Your personal data was decrypted from confiscated hard drives by fraudsters. You may be a victim in a fraud case. Due to the high number of victims, we assume gang crime.

With the confiscation of hard drives and the arrest of several people involved by the Osnabrück Federal Police, we would like to ask you to support us in the ongoing proceedings. For a successful conviction, we need help and in-depth information about your case.

Fill out our online form or contact us personally at the phone number below.

The first link in the email leads to an article in the Tagesschau from February 2022 (see HERE ), which reports on the difficult investigative work against the operators of dubious trader platforms. The second link leads to an application form from the alleged “Financial Market Authority”.

So many red flags!

If you take a closer look, you will find a lot of “red flags”, i.e. indications that the whole thing is not kosher. This starts with the minor spelling errors in the email, which can still be overcome. Here we show which flags sometimes fly more, sometimes less clearly:

The URL

With the site https://whois.domaintools.com/ anyone can check for themselves how long a site has existed and who the owner of the domain is. Then let's see what comes out :

There is no owner registered, the site has only existed since September 29th, the servers are in Canada, even though the headquarters of the Financial Market Authority is supposedly in Berlin according to the legal notice (we'll get to that later).

In Austria there really is a financial market supervisory authority whose logo is used by the fraudsters, but whose URL is https://www.fma.gv.at/ . In Germany, however, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority ( https://www.bafin.de/ ) is responsible.

A company with a stolen logo from the Austrian authorities and a German address with servers in Canada – makes total sense, right?

The telephone number in the imprint

There is also a telephone number in the site's imprint.

We don't even have to call there to check, because the number block "800932" with the Berlin area code is known as a scam number. Under “Caller Information” (see HERE ) there are many complaints that describe the calls, which appear to come from a call center, as advertising for Bitcoins or stock funds, depending on the final digits.

The address

It's good that we have an employee based in Berlin! So our employee and author Elke set out to check the address given in the imprint directly on site.
The good news: the address exists:

The IHK has had its headquarters there since 1998, and the IHK has been the sole owner of the building since 2018 In addition to the IHK, there are other companies in the building - but the IHK does not have a “financial market supervision” either .

The bad news: There is no “financial market supervision” there:

So Elke couldn't even ring the doorbell to ask what exactly was going on there. A pity.

Although the address exists, there is no “Financial Market Authority” there.

A well-known scam: advance fee fraud and identity theft!

Fraudsters have already been noticed in the past, repeatedly pretending to be financial market regulators using different websites and telephone numbers (we reported HERE ). The scam, a combination of advance fee fraud and identity theft with the claim that you can get money, is called a recovery scam.

The scammers lure people with free advice over the phone. After the first conversation, the criminals demand advance payments so that the lost money can be recovered. What is not mentioned is that the criminals do not even try to get the investments back. Rather, they take every last bit of money out of those affected' pockets.

In addition, a copy of your ID is often required, which enables criminals to commit complete identity theft, for example by opening bank accounts and placing orders in the victim's name.

Conclusion

As early as May 2021, the real Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA) warned about fraudsters who falsely pose as FMA employees (see HERE ), and a few days ago the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority also warned about the fake emails (see HERE ).

This will certainly not be the last appearance of the false financial market regulator, as it is a professionally organized fraud scheme by criminals who apparently employ entire call centers to scam potential victims out of their money via email and telephone calls.