Two scam businesses offering a ‘binary options’ trading platform to investors have been shut down by the Insolvency Service after investors lost over £750,000.

Hampshire Capital Ventures Limited, and its successor Solaris Vision Ltd, a Bulgarian-registered company, have been wound up by the High Court this month following an investigation by the government’s Insolvency Service.

Hampshire Capital, followed by Solaris Vision Ltd, operated using the trading styles Magnum Options and Magnum Options EU, via a trading platform, using the websites www.magnumoptions.eu and latterly www.magnumoptions.com.

There were 41 complaints made to the police against Magnum Options in the period February 2016 to March 2017, with customers reporting losses of over £750,000.

The websites offered investors the opportunity to conduct binary options trading, a form of fixed-odds betting on movements in financial markets. The websites made numerous claims as to possible investment returns, with an 81% return rate per trade used as a headline throughout the websites.

Solaris Vision Ltd was placed into provisional liquidation by the High Court in London on 8 August 2017, on the application of the Insolvency Service, due to its concerns that the company was posing an ongoing risk to the public by operation of its fraudulent trading platform. The websites have not been accessible since 25 September 2017. Both companies were wound up in the High Court on 18 October 2017.

The investigation into both companies found that they had attracted customers through viral internet marketing, offering guaranteed fixed returns on the websites they used.

Customers were not made aware of terms and conditions at the point of sale. Those terms and conditions were deemed to be onerous and unfair on customers, said the Insolvency Service, requiring them to trade 30 or 40 times their account balances in order to make withdrawals. Even when some customers did so, no pay-outs were made.

Customers who sought withdrawals or repayments of their deposits were mainly met with silence from the companies, who were only contactable by email after the time customers signed up for trading.

In other instances the companies had made unauthorised withdrawals from customers credit or debit cards, a point which Registrar Jones stressed was of serious concern during the winding up hearing on 18 October. Neither company cooperated with the investigation.

The companies targeted customers worldwide while giving the impression that they operated out of the UK, by referring to UK trading addresses on the websites. Those addresses turned out to be accommodation addresses which neither company were authorised to use.

Hampshire Capital has previously come to the attention of authorities in other countries including Canada and Australia.