THE FPA IS AT WAR

The scammers in the forex industry don’t like the FPA very much, and for a very good reason. We warn people about scams. We cost the scammers a lot of money. Information is the best defense against scam. Scammers thrive when traders don’t have access to information.

You’ve probably noticed some problems accessing the FPA’s website for the last week or so. The reason is that we have server issues. The reason we have server issues is that there has been a distributed denial of service attack against our website. This was done to keep people from seeing what the members of the FPA and what our reviewers have to say about companies. A good company has nothing to fear from our reviews and forums. A scam company can lose a lot of business when people read about their unethical actions here.

At its peak, we recorded over 15,000 different IP addresses all attempting to load FPA web pages hundreds of times per minute. This attack used computers belonging to innocent people. A bot net was remotely controlling their computers. Some computer viruses can be used to do this to computers. The only thing the owner of an infected computer will notice is that the computer seems to be running a lot slower than usual.

You might be wondering who did this. We have our suspicions. Although PoltekFX is supposed to be located in Belize, the manager of PoltekFX is based in Russia. The attack started in Russia, then spread to computers in other countries once the programming staff temporarily blocked all access to the FPA’s website from Russia. The attack started shortly after the article about PoltekFX equating profits to cheating. We can’t prove PoltekFX started the attack, but the timing and point of origin have them on top of our list of suspects.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been attacked. There are a hundred or so blogs filled with hatred and bizarre lies about the FPA and Felix. Some of them claim he’s really an American who owns MB Trading. Anyone can go to NFA’s website and see that this is completlly false. Some of these sites even claim that our very talkative member Pharaoh is really either Felix or Rob Grespi. Rob’s written two articles for the FPA, and we only get one or two posts per month out of Felix. The lies get even stranger after that. Those websites are less grounded in reality than supermarket tabloids.

We know most of these blogs are the work of ForexGen or someone working for them. Lt. Ken is one of our investigators. His very first case after joining the scam investigations team was dealing with ForexGen. Within a few days of trying to open negotiations with ForexGen, his name and email signature started showing up on those blogs. He had not sent emails to anyone else using that signature at that time.

One of these blogs had some lies about Etoro. When an Etoro representative contacted the blog author, he tried to blackmail Etoro, demanding money to remove the lies. We can’t prove that this blog is one of the ones directly controlled by ForexGen, but this sort of criminal behavior would be in character for a company that regularly steals from traders.

Back in June, several of FPA’s email accounts were mailbombed. Since the start of that attack, tens of thousands of messages have poured in. It took a couple of days to prepare all the filters needed to make all those messages disappear by pressing one button. Many of the messages were attempts to register FPA webpages with different companies, and all the companies recorded 193.90.55.25 as the IP of the computer that submitted the requests. We were not surprised to find that this IP is from Norway. ForexGen is also from Norway. This isn’t proof they did it, but we find this very suspicious.

Someone has also been spamming innocent people with information copied from the FPA’s homepage. This is designed to make it look like the FPA spams people. We NEVER have and NEVER will advertise this way. If you have gotten a message like this, use the Contact Us link on any page in the FPA website to send us a copy of the message. Please include the full headers of the message if you can.

We can solidly link many of the bogus blogs to ForexGen. We are very suspicious of ForexGen in the mailbomb attack and the blackmail attempt against Etoro. We strongly suspect PoltekFX of being involved in the denial of service attack. Both of those companies have a pattern of deception that would fit well with spamming in order to try to damage the FPA’s credibility.

We can’t prevent these attacks. Even huge companies sometimes have their websites taken and have other problems caused by these sorts of internet crimes. It is likely that the FPA web page will be taken down from time to time. Our defenses will try to keep up with changing attack methods, but we will not win every battle. We are gathering information every time an attack is made against us. We will share the information with law enforcement and hope that the people behind these attacks will get lengthy prison sentences.

There is one other thing we can do. We are convinced that some company we’ve revealed to be a scam is behind these attempts to keep our troops and the general public from reading about the scams we’ve revealed. So we will now post links to all of the scam findings of the FPA Scam Investigations Committee, many of the articles written about scams, and also two excellent articles about how to avoid getting scammed.

Scam Findings

PoltekFX Case 1
PoltekFX Case 2

ForexGen Case 1
ForexGen Case 2
ForexGen Case 3

Legendtrader

The Forex Project of Luis Rivas

TradeOracle.ch

Hong Kong Forex Co. Ltd

InterbankGroup, InterbankUSA, FxTrader

Refco

Scam Articles

PoltekFX thinks that profits are a sign of cheating

Overview of the 3 confirmed scam cases against ForexGen

LegendTrader closed and the people involved get deported

Poll on whether TradeOracle.ch is a scam – TradeOracle then tried to cheat in the voting

3 Companies tied into one scam case

Forex account manager steals client money and gets a 9 year prison sentence

Scam Avoidance

How to avoid getting scammed when buying forex products

How to avoid getting scammed with managed forex accounts

There is something you can do. Leave honest reviews for forex companies you’ve dealt with. Share your forex trading experiences in our forums. Use the FPA’s resources to help you avoid scams. Tell other forex traders about all that the FPA has to offer. If you are a member of another forex forum, warn the administrators that they should be ready to defend their computer systems against this kind of attack. Warn your friends not to do business with companies that commit scams against forex traders.

If you are just a lone trader, the scammers will think of you as nothing more than a victim. As a member of the Forex Peace Army, you are part of an organization fighting to end forex scam.

Spread the word.
Fight back against the forex scammers on all fronts.
Don’t let the scammers control which information you have access to.