New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority Update “Warnings And Alerts” List

By Rishma Banerjee

The New Zealand Financial Markets Authority, has a list, that they refer to as “Warnings and Alerts”, and provides the names of those who are suspected of scam or have been proven to have been involved in unlawful activities. The list was recently updated by the agency, with the names of three crypto and forex related businesses. They are Zend Trade, Cryptogain and Russ Horn.

The FMA elaborated about made this inclusion, to the list which already consists of several other such names, in a statement which reads:

“We think the operations of the business/person bear the hallmarks of a scam. We strongly recommend that you do not deal with them.”

The press release by the FMA also gives out details of offences made by these companies who had participated in the scams. CryptoGain, based on how it operated and many other such red flags was was linked to BitConnect and had promised its investors a return on about 2.6 per cent regularly.  As per the information available on companies webpage, CryptoGain had a plan called the retirement plan, as well as cloud mining packages with promises of weekly returns of about 30 per cent on investments. It also claims that it is a part of a registered company called CryptoGainLimited, however, this has so far been rejected.

The other companies, Russ Horn, Forex Equinox, and Zend Trade were suspected to be under the leadership of Russ Horn. They were accused of imparting deceptive information to prospective buyers, in order to sell their products. On their website, they advertised statements like “How To Legally Cheat The Forex Markets And Literally Line Your Pockets With Cash.”, ForexEquinox.com website claimed that their product as sold on their website would “double your money every 30 days.” These statements have however been reported as false, and as a result, these websites were enlisted by the FMA, on their warning list.

.