Do not invest more money than you can afford to lose.
As the “Times of Israel” reported, the Israeli cabinet approved the bill to ban the entire binary options industry on Sunday, including the activity of local call centers offering its products abroad. Once the draft law is passed and comes into effect, it will allow the Israel Securities Authority (ISA) to prosecute and sentence anyone still offering binary options from within Israeli territory to basically anybody, anywhere.
According to the “Times of Israel”, the draft law was also immediately approved by the ministerial legislative committee of the Israeli government, and will now go to the Knesset plenary for a first reading.
The bill has been drafted by the Ministry of Finance, the ISA, legal experts from the parliament and the Ministry of Justice. Although the offering of binary options to people within Israel has been banned for over a year now and most Israeli-based brokers have moved out of the country afterwards, they kept their call centers running, targeting customers abroad. As a result, ISA received numerous complaints from a number of European financial authorities, expressing concerns that the regulator is allowing fraudulent activities in the industry.
“Beyond the terrible economic harm to citizens around the world, sellers of binary options are causing increasing, accelerating ruinous damage to Israel and are inflaming anti-Semitism and anti-Israel feeling,” commented Israel Securities Authority Chairman Shmuel Hauser after the bill was advanced.
The Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, is also a firm supporter of the proposed law. In a statement, the latter said he “has directed various law enforcement agents to act to eradicate the criminal phenomena associated with these online trading platforms, which in recent years mostly target people abroad.”
After Israel banned the offering of such products within the country, Cyprus has become the most popular hub for binary options brokers. However, previous month the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission announced it is considering banning binary options altogether.
Even technologies giants such as Apple have taken a firm stance against this controversial financial OTC product. Apple has recently updated its iOS application developer guidelines to explicitly ban binary options trading applications for its mobile devices from the iTunes app store.
