How a family of fraud artists from St. Catharines jilted investors around the world and made off with millions
n a quiet October morning in 2015, Elaine Hoffman, a 71-year-old grandmother, sat in her suburban Indiana home and turned on her computer. She read through a few messages from friends and family, deleted some spam, wrote a couple of emails and was about to walk away from her desk when a banner ad caught her attention. Its claim seemed unbelievable: that she could make money with the click of a mouse.
Hoffman had never heard of binary options, but Brian made it sound simple. For a few hundred dollars, she could set up an investment account and place bets on whether the value of currencies and commodities—gold, Nike stock, crude oil, Google shares, the US dollar and so on—would go up or down by a set date and time. If she predicted correctly, she’d receive a set return: $500 could, for example, turn into $850 in a matter of minutes. But, if she guessed wrong, she’d lose her entire bet.
Then, suddenly, the Glenridge website went down. When she called, they told her they were moving offices and that it was a temporary service disruption. Then they stopped taking her calls entirely. Soon she was oscillating between feelings of outrage and shame. The truth of the situation—that she’d been duped—was dawning on her. She told no one, not even her husband. “I didn’t want him to know about this,” she says. It was her mistake, she thought, her problem to fix.
It wasn’t just gamblers who were stiffed. In 2013, two financial backers from Wyoming launched both a civil and federal court case accusing Cartu of withholding dividends from Rome’s investors and using his position to direct company money into his own bank accounts. A judge dismissed the cases for lack of personal jurisdiction, and the allegations were never proven in court. Cartu was a dual Canadian Israeli citizen believed to be living in Israel and working for a Panama-based company.
It was into this burgeoning scene that Cartu inserted himself in 2010. With his brother David, he chose the 68-storey Moshe Aviv Tower, then the tallest building in Israel, as their new base of operations. Glistening in the Levantine sun, the rounded glass structure dominates the city skyline, visible from the sea to the west and the desert to the east. They moved onto the 46th floor and established a business called Sandbox Media. Josh, then 31, acted as CEO and claimed the largest office.
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