The firm also surrendered its brokerage license with the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) removing its ability to legally trade in the European Union.

[8] The company operated an online trading website through which customers could buy binary options, predicting whether the price of a certain commodity will go up or down in a specific time period, as short as 60 seconds.

According to an advertisement for Banc De Binary, its CEO Oren Laurent was a founder of SpotOption, the firm that set the option prices.

[18] In January 2017, Option.fm, a brand associated with Banc De Binary, was named by BuzzFeed as the operator of a bizarre scam known as the "Hawking code".

According to the fake news site, Hawking developed a trading algorithm which would in effect transfer wealth from the top 0.1% of the world's wealthiest people to the other 99.9%.

[3][4][5] The firm also surrendered its brokerage license with the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) on January 9, 2017, removing its ability to legally trade in the European Union.

[5] The Times of Israel reported that some industry insiders were skeptical that Banc De Binary was really closing, but was rather relocating and changing its name.

[7][46] Charges filed on August 7, 2013, stated that Banc De Binary "may be criminally liable under the federal RICO statute".

Among the allegations made by the SEC was that Banc De Binary induced people with limited funds, including one unemployed person with less than $1000,[56] to open accounts.

In response to the U.S. charges the company put out a statement that made no mention of its legal problems, but instead incorrectly implied that they were in negotiations and that they had voluntarily left the U.S. market, when in fact the SEC had taken an injunction out to stop them.

We are currently in discussions with the CFTC and SEC about these issues, but in the interim, we have discontinued all business with U.S. residents.On January 26, 2016, Banc De Binary agreed to a court order to pay $11 million in restitution and penalties to settle this case.

They allegedly impersonated SEC employees promising to help victims of Banc De Binary's scams obtain repayment of lost funds.

[62] As of October 2013, the company was rated "F" by the United States' Better Business Bureau (BBB) because 31 complaints had been made against it, including 9 of which were unanswered.

The BBB report also wrote that the "site essentially allows investors to gamble on the future price of something at a point in time".

The AMF also pointed out that, due to the "all or nothing" nature of binary options, an investor who wrongly predicts market movement will lose his entire investment.

The AMF also, like the CFTC, included a more general warning about the risk of fraud in binary options trading in the same press release.