French financial regulator Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) has issued a reminder to retail investors to be extremely cautious about Immediate Connect’s fraudulent investment offer.
The AMF said it continues to receive a large number of complaints from retail investors about this fraudulent offer of automated trading in Forex or crypto assets, following the emergence of new “clone” websites. The AMF already warned the public about Immediate Connect in June 2023 and then issued a joint warning with the Paris Prosecutor’s Office on 17 November 2023.
Many retail investors reported to AMF that they saw this offer on the Internet or in social networks, broadcast by advertisements using famous names from a wide variety of fields (company executives, TV journalists, comedians, singers, sports personalities, influencers, etc.). and well-known news websites or in articles purporting to be from major national daily newspapers. These articles referred to alleged interviews with celebrities on a television program who had inadvertently revealed the source of their wealth and extolled the merits of this offering.
After filling in their details on an online contact form, interested parties were quickly contacted by a purported financial advisor who encouraged them to join an unauthorized trading platform to invest in the foreign exchange (Forex) market, in crypto-assets such as bitcoin , or in cryptocurrency derivatives. But often, when they tried to collect their supposed profits, they were asked to pay a “capital gains tax” first.
Personal data collected by fraudsters can be trafficked for a second fraudulent purpose: refund fraud. Investors who have already fallen victim to fraud are contacted by an unknown person who most often claims to have a mandate from a public authority and to have recovered the lost funds. The scammer claims that these will be returned to the investor on payment of certain amounts.
To date, the losses reported to the AMF in connection with this offer amount to several hundred thousand euros.
Some of these new fraudulent websites have already been added to the AMF blacklists. Others are being investigated.
Addresses added to AMF blacklists:
- graminator.net
- immediate-avage.co
- immediate-genesis.com
- immediate-momentum.com
- immediate-peak.com
- immediatebitwave.com
- immediateeuraxai.org
- immediategranimator.ai
- immediatneupro.ai
- sandiegobraincare.com/?_lp
- paulwchow.com/?_lp