The binary options "trades" that were coin flips the house controlled

In four CFTC matters between 2018 and 2024 — Option Mint, BeeOptions/Blue Moon, Blue Bit Banc and Yukom Communications — regulators found that platforms configured settlement software, or ordered staff, to set a customer's trade result rather than read it off a real market price. Combined CFTC relief exceeds $216 million, almost all from the Cartu brothers default judgment.

Published 2026-09-29 · 7 min read

A customer opens an app. A price ticks across the screen — gold, or EUR/USD, or a named stock index — and a countdown starts. Above or below in ninety seconds. The customer picks a side and stakes $250. Whatever happens to the real market in that ninety seconds is beside the point, because in four matters the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has pursued since 2018, the platform’s own software — not the market — was deciding who won.

That is the specific, narrower allegation running through Option Mint, BeeOptions, Blue Bit Banc and Yukom Communications: not merely that the odds were stacked against the customer, which is true of binary options generally, but that an operator configured settlement software, or personally instructed staff, to make a customer’s trade lose independent of where the reference price actually finished. The CFTC’s order against Blake Kantor and others at Blue Bit Banc put it plainly: a computer program “fraudulently altered data associated with their binary options investments so that the probability of investors earning a profit favored Blue Bit Banc and disadvantaged investors.” The order against Yukom Communications’ Yakov Cohen went further — the options were, in the order’s words, “merely book entries whose outcomes were manipulated by the defendants or others acting at their request,” not real transactions administered dishonestly, but never real transactions at all.

Four platforms, one mechanism, different packaging

The branding varied. Jared Davis ran Option Mint, Option King and Option Queen out of internet marketing campaigns and call centers, soliciting at least $10 million from customers between 2012 and 2016 before pleading guilty to wire fraud and tax evasion and being sentenced to 30 months. The Cartu brothers and their partners built BeeOptions, Glenridge Capital, Rumelia Capital and Blue Moon Investments on top of a single internet trading platform operated out of Israel-based call centers, promising customers “quick” returns of “between 60-85 percent” while processing over $165 million in credit card payments through an Irish payment processor. Blue Bit Banc converted some customer holdings into a cryptocurrency called ATM Coin, described in the CFTC’s order as worthless, on top of the software rigging. Yukom Communications sold binary options under the BigOption, BinaryBook and BinaryOnline names, and the CFTC’s order against Cohen records that approximately 95 percent of Yukom’s customers lost money.

None of that variation changes the underlying structure. Every one of these platforms was the sole counterparty to its own customers’ trades — there was no exchange, no independent liquidity provider, no clearing member standing behind the “market” a customer saw on screen. That structure is what makes the rigging possible in the first place: a broker who routes a customer’s order to a real exchange has no software setting that can change the result, because the result was set by other market participants before the order ever reached the broker. A platform that is both bookmaker and scoreboard has no such constraint.

Why this is not the same as a boiler room, even though the tactics overlap

Every one of these matters used telemarketing tactics familiar from stock boiler rooms — scripted pitches, misrepresented credentials, pressure to deposit more. It would be easy to file them under the same heading. They are not the same conduct, and the technique page on this site sets out the boundary in full: a boiler room sells a real block of stock the customer actually owns, however overpriced. A rigged binary-options platform delivers nothing that reaches any market at all — the “trade” is, per the Yukom order’s own language, a book entry. Strip away the misrepresentation from a boiler room and a real security still changed hands. Strip it away here and there was never a transaction to begin with.

It is also worth separating this from ordinary binary-options losses. Binary options are structured so that most retail customers lose money even when a platform settles honestly — the payout on a win is smaller than the loss on a loss, and the platform prices in an edge, the way a casino does. Losing is not, by itself, evidence a platform rigged the outcome. What distinguishes these four matters is that each rests on evidence internal to the operation: a software setting, an admission by a defendant, or documented instructions to staff, rather than an inference drawn only from how often customers lost.

What the money says, and what it does not

The scale differs by two orders of magnitude across these four matters, and the reason is not that Blue Bit Banc’s or Davis’s conduct was less serious — it is that the Cartu-brothers matter processed a much larger volume of customer money before it was stopped, and the $204.6 million figure is a default judgment against only four of the ten original defendants, disgorgement and penalty combined. The Blue Bit Banc figure combines Kantor’s and Olson’s separate orders; a $846,405 restitution obligation the two share jointly with each other is not double-counted into that total, because this library’s case schema records penalty and disgorgement separately from restitution and does not restate the same customer loss twice across two records of the same matter. The Yukom figure reflects only Cohen’s own consent order — his co-defendants, including Yukom Communications itself and its BigOption, BinaryBook and BinaryOnline brands, remain listed as pending in the CFTC’s 2019 complaint and are not included here, so the true scale of that matter alone is understated by this figure, not overstated.

What none of these four totals supports is any claim about how common software rigging is across the binary-options industry generally. This library’s cache holds CFTC releases, not a survey of every platform that has ever operated, and the CFTC’s own boilerplate fraud advisory — warning that “the perpetrators of these unlawful schemes… manipulate software to generate losing trades” — is appended to dozens of releases that allege nothing of the kind, mostly plain unregistered-solicitation and misappropriation cases. Four verified matters is what the record supports; it is not a rate, and this site does not present it as one.

What happened to the people who ran them

Every matter with a resolved outcome in this group carried a parallel criminal conviction for at least one defendant, and the sentences track roughly with how central a role each played. Davis pleaded guilty to eleven counts of wire fraud on behalf of his company and three counts of tax evasion individually, and was sentenced to 30 months, on top of a $300,000 fine and further restitution to the IRS and to victims. Kantor, who ran Blue Bit Banc and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and to obstructing the CFTC’s own investigation into the scheme, was sentenced to 86 months — the longest custodial sentence among the matters this library has recorded here, and consistent with the additional obstruction count. Cohen, one of several people named in the Yukom Communications complaint, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 66 months, with his $7 million CFTC disgorgement earmarked for return to victims through a Department of Justice victim fund rather than the U.S. Treasury. The Cartu-brothers matter is the outlier: the $204.6 million default judgment resolved the civil case, but the CFTC’s releases in that matter do not record a parallel U.S. criminal conviction, and this library has not found one in the cache to report.

The CFTC itself repeatedly cautions, in nearly identical language across all of these releases, that a restitution or disgorgement order does not guarantee a victim actually gets money back — by the time a case resolves, the funds have often already been spent or moved beyond the reach of a receiver.

What to check before funding an account

Every platform in these four matters was operating without CFTC registration, which is independently checkable through NFA BASIC before a customer ever deposits a dollar. Beyond that, the pattern that shows up across all four matters is a platform that is also the house, quoting its own prices, with no named exchange a customer can independently verify a trade against — and, once a balance exists, unexplained friction the moment a customer tries to withdraw it. None of these checks require any special expertise, and each one is exactly the kind of fact that, per the releases above, every one of these four platforms would have failed.

Techniques referenced

• Rigged binary options execution — Rigged binary options execution is a platform operator programming, or ordering staff to alter, the trading software so a customer's "trade" settles as a loss regardless of the real market price, because the transaction was never sent to any market at all.

Cases referenced

Reviewed September 29, 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us.