Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi. My guest today is going to

help us understand the extensive binary options trading scam that she first reported on in Israel,

which seems to be the epicenter of this

widely fraudulent industry that generates over $10 billion a year.

Simone Wineglass is an investigative journalist for the Times of Israel. Her work often explores

the intersection between technology and fraud, covering cryptocurrencies, money laundering, and electronic disinformation. I was delighted to

first meet her earlier this year when she was honored by the Trace Foundation for her investigative

reporting. Simona, thank you for joining me. Thank you very much for having me. Because the nature of

this fraud is really quite technical, let's start by getting some of the basics down.

It's the very layered nature of the fraud that makes this appear legitimate to unsophisticated

investors and also makes it difficult to detect, although governments don't seem to be trying

all that hard, we could talk about that as well. But for non-experts, how should we understand binary options?

Setting aside the scam for now, the options themselves. You can trade in a legitimate stock market,

you can trade in options. And a binary option is a very specific kind of option where you're

predicting whether something will happen in the future. So you could say,

for instance, I predict that the price of gold will go up in the next 24 hours. And then at the

moment that option expires, if you're correct, you would earn money on the investment in that

trade, right? Because you predicted correctly. And if you're

wrong, then you would lose money on that trade. And that's, it's not a common financial instrument,

but it exists. And it exists in legitimate markets. There's a company in the UK called IG, I believe,

where you can trade in binary options. So it's something that traders, usually more experienced traders,

can use as part of their investment portfolio. And it isn't an investment exactly. It is just,

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