Complaint Review: rushmarkets - New York City New York

I was contacted by a guy named, Elliott Gould, who asked that I send money to enable them to make profitable trades for me in the binary options market.  Note the use of the name, Elliott Gould.  The scammers will often use very common names or those of movie stars to make internet searches pertaining to them difficult since so many instances of that name will show up on a Google search it will be impossible to wade through them all.

After sending in a couple of thousand, he made about a thousand in the first week.  That was an extraordinary rate of return and I was told that they were paying a programmer genious $3M/year for special market-trading software he developed that had about a 80% return.

With that, I invested more, and received more remarkable results, and after about 100 trades, I was up $40K with only three losses.  I then asked Elliott to meet with him last Monday in NYC, which he agreed.  I was so astounded at the results, I figured I had better visit the place just to do a sanity-check.  But he then postponed the meeting to the next day because of a big coffee trade coming up.  Red flags then started to go up.

When Tuesday came, I then got an email saying that there was an important meeting that just came up with the SEC and he had to attend.  At that point, I knew something was seriously wrong, so my wife and I both drove up there anyway.  If nothing else, we just wanted to see if we could find a door with the name RushMarkets on it.  What made it more suspicious to me was that the address is on Park Avenue.  A building number was given, but no floor number.  I knew that all the buildings there are high-rises, so this just seemed too weird. 

Another thing that had been bothering me was that each time I called RushMarkets, all those who answered had real, original English accents, not the kind that an Asian or European might get from studying English in school.  They were clearly all from England, but yet each person who answered the phone was supposedly in the same office in NYC.  And if in NYC, why were my payments going to a place in Surrey, England?  It wasn't an impossible situation, but just a bit unlikely.

Arriving in NYC, and upon entering the building, I inquired with the guard at the front desk who informed me that there was no company there by the name of RushMarkets.  I then called up to Elliott who screamed at me for interrupting his meeting with the SEC.  I said that all we wanted was for someone to come down to meet with us and just escort us to the "trading floor" so that we could just verify that the place exists.  He refused to do that and (supposedly) went back to the meeting in a huff and puff.

I called RushMarkets again from the downstairs lobby.  A young guy answered, and when I asked what floor they are on, he said that they are on the 5th floor and would see if the director would send someone down to meet us.  The phone then went dead.

I called again and someone named Dave Jones answered.  He claimed to be a Finance Dept manager.  (I saw on another complaint here that he claimed to be a trader.)  He just ran off to contact Elliott, against my wishes.  I hung up this time.

My wife then called and someone else answered the phone.  She just asked the guy what floor they are on.  He refused to answer the question and hung up on her.  She called again, someone else answered, and same response.

At that point, after hearing our predicament and realizing we had come a long way, the security guard helped us out and let us up to the 5th floor.  An unrelated busines was indeed there (I forgot the name), but when inquiring at their front desk, they never heard of RushMarkets.

At that point, we drove back to Philly, realizing we had been scammed.  I also noticed that a whole string of bad trades had been made on my account, losing $10K in one session of about 20 or so $500 trades.  It was so irresponsible that I insisted that they stop trading my account and asked to speak with the director.  Elliott said that the director was gone for the next two weeks and that just prior to him leaving, had transferred my account to a junior trader as a "practice account".  He said that if I just deposited another $10K, he felt that he would have enough pull with the director to get my account assigned back to him where it would continue to make money.  Otherwise, he knew for sure that the junior trader would blow through my balance since "it had happened before."  As for demanding that my account no longer be traded, well that was not possible since I had authorized them to trade it and that is what they were going to do -- no matter what!  And as for getting my money back, well, that was a problem as well since according to Elliott, I was obliged to let them trade it for up to 20x the balance according to special U.S. trading regulations.  That of course was nonsense, but he insisted that was true.

And that was when I filed a complaint with the SEC.