OptionsXO and Toro Media — when the "Goldman Sachs experts" turned out to be a fiction

Imagine a call from a "former Goldman Sachs trader" offering a programme with the telling name "The Secret Millionaires Society" and promising a 90% return for an entry deposit of just $250. That is exactly how Hong Kong resident Sik Mun Simone Lok came into contact with the Israeli companies OptionsXO and Toro Media in 2015 — and over the course of eighteen months, she claimed in her lawsuit, lost a sum she estimated at nearly $10 million. The name of the legendary investment bank in the "adviser's" biography turned out to be a fabrication: no one on the team had any genuine connection to Goldman Sachs. The case reached the Tel Aviv District Court and ended in a settlement — with no admission of guilt and no disclosure of the compensation amount.

The binary options industry in mid-2010s Israel was built on one and the same technique: a client's trust was bought not with results, but with names. Toro Media, headed by Tomer Levi, promoted its product through the OptionsXO brand — with advertising along the lines of "The Secret Millionaires Society Program," which promised a 90% return on a $250 investment. When a prospective client left their contact details, they were contacted by a "broker" who introduced himself under a made-up name and told a story about years of working at Goldman Sachs — the bank's prestige was meant to dispel any doubts about the person's qualifications before the conversation even turned to the first deposit.

According to the lawsuit later filed in court, one such Toro Media call-centre employee was Glen Nitan, who introduced himself to the client as "Glen Nelson" and claimed to be an experienced broker with a background at Goldman Sachs. This, the plaintiff said, was what led her to trust the company and gradually increase her investments over roughly eighteen months. The lawsuit also alleged that Toro Media operated under a number of other names, front companies and offshore entities, among which the OptionsXO brand also featured.

The resolution came in 2017, when Lok filed a lawsuit with the Tel Aviv District Court seeking compensation of around $10 million. That same year, OptionsXO ceased operations. The legal dispute over the very structure of the business — whether OptionsXO was part of Toro Media or a formally independent company — never received a clear judicial answer: the parties reached an agreement before the court could establish the facts on the merits.

In 2018, the parties concluded an out-of-court settlement, to which the court gave the force of a judgment. The amount of compensation was not disclosed, and the agreement contained no admission of wrongdoing by the defendants.

Published 28 November 2023