LeapRate Exclusive… LeapRate has learned that a court ruling made in Israel last week refused an appeal made by Binary Options peer-to-peer platform Fairtrade, in which Fairtrade tried to avoid being shut down by Israeli financial regulator ISA.
The ISA has been very vocal about its aiming of shutting down the Binary Options sector in Israel, due to non-ending claims of rampant fraud and outright cheating of clients by Israel based binary options brokers, giving the Israeli financial sector overall a bad name.
However Fairtrade’s story involves a different twist. Fairtrade positioned itself as a way for retail clients to trade binary options while eliminating the broker, in a peer-to-peer exchange format.
The ISA though didn’t see things that way, and argued to the Israeli court that Fairtrade was illegally running a financial exchange. And, that even if it were allowed to run an exchange, the binary options product did not qualify for exchange trading in Israel due to the gambling-like nature involved in binary trading, especially short-duration binary options.
Tel Aviv District Court (Financial Division) judge Ruth Ronen accepted the ISA’s arguments, stating in her decision given last Thursday March 2 that Fairtrade was indeed operating an exchange without a license, and as such the court will not stand in the ISA’s way in shutting the company down.
While the court allowed Fairtrade to remain operational while its appeal was being heard, with the appeal now being denied LeapRate has learned that the website fairtradex.com, and Hebrew version fairtrade.co.il, have been taken down and are no longer operational.