Fulham Focus
Fulham and IUX Update with Martin Calladine
Following our last podcast with football writer Martin Calladine about Fulham Football Club's new partnership with CFD trading outfit IUX (Part 1 available via the link below), Martin returns to give us an update on his investigation, which finds more concerns about IUX.
-Read the full update on Martin's Ugly Game blog here: https://theuglygame.wordpress.com/2024/09/09/due-negligence/
-Listen to part 1 with Martin here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/fulhams-cfd-problem-with-martin-calladine/id1326794467?i=1000668512133
-Follow Martin on Twitter/X at: x.com/uglygame -Buy Martin's book, No Questions Asked: How Football Joined the Crypto Con, at Amazon here: www.amazon.co.uk/No-Questions-Ask…ed/dp/B0CRL7GZ4R -Read an excerpt from No Questions Asked here: theuglygame.wordpress.com/wp-content/u…alladine.pdf
-Join the Fulham Supporters Trust here: www.fulhamsupporterstrust.com/
- Duration:
- 17m
- Broadcast on:
- 10 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
[music] It seems but a moment ago that we last spoke to Martin Calladine and he's back dear Fulham Focus listeners because the Fulham partnership with IUX as their official CFD trading partner continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. So following Martin's blog post yesterday, which we thoroughly recommend you go check out, we'll put some links into the description below, go listen to part one to get yourself up to speed on this mess that we find ourselves in once again because it'll make sense. We're going to recap and go through the latest here with Martin, but it's probably worth you dashing off and doing that. There you go. Have you got to listen to it? Great. Welcome back to Fulham Focus. As I was saying to you before we said a recording, kind of not happy to see you again so soon, but thank you for your diligent work on this. Where are we? And if I sound weary, it's because I look forward to hearing from you with dread and excitement in equal measures. Thank you. It's lovely to be back and I do understand your feeling. So when we last spoke, which was about a moment ago, I kind of framed the way that the the kind of the IOX relationship was as being concerning, but nothing on the same scale as Python, which is unquestionably fraud. And it's still not. I think there are plenty more red flags, the alarm bells are growing louder. Last week, I think it was fairly kind of, it might consider relatively minor and titillating stuff, but it was there, their trust pilot rating was suspended for fake reviews. All 10 of their staff on LinkedIn that were UK or US based were fake and were created in the same month. IOX has products that have 3000 times a leverage, which is 300 times more than would be allowed in the UK. Now, that last one, I think is very significant, but that is open and upfront, but what's come out since I think is vastly more concerning, which is that as a result, they should state in which said that they had no employees in the UK and didn't target UK customers. They were very clear about that. And then they said they would take action against the people who put the false profiles up. And it got me thinking, well, you know, just who are they? Who did they employ? Where are they? And I won't bore you with the details, but I've been back through all their old archive websites, tracked back through, you know, dozens and dozens of registries and looked at stuff. And what we found is that what they claimed to have no staff in the UK and not to be targeting them until 2023, the company's website claimed, in fact, that it was founded in the UK based in the UK, processed trades in the UK, and was regulated in the UK. And from what I can tell, there was a company in the UK, and however, they were not regulated in the UK. So there's a problem there. If they were accurately at that time reporting all of that information, it seems possible that they were trading CFDs without necessary legal approvals. And I've looked back at their archive website, and it says presently that you can't trade using their platform if you're in the UK. That was added to their website sometime in the last three weeks. I found videos on YouTube of, sorry, just on that. So that was updated shortly before the announcement of the partnership with Fulham as recently as that. It was updated some looking back at archive versions sometime between the 26th of the last month and the 3rd of this month, which was by coincidence, the day that the partnership began. Now, that's not to say that you were able to use it. It's just that only now with the formal kind of bit put on the website, it says you can't. However, I have got videos, people, when YouTube traders opening accounts, and in 2022, the UK was shown as an option in the dropdown when you go to it. And so it seems at least possible that whether you could or could not trade CFDs illegally in the UK, that they were claiming that you could. And I don't know why you would have on your website that you were founded in the UK based here and regulated if that wasn't the case. I don't know. You can only speculate as to what their motive would be for doing that. But it's clear that they were not at any point approved as an FCA regulated person or organization for selling financial services. On that, their website also claimed for a period that it was a member of the US National Futures Association, which is a body which has the authority to regulate and register members who sell futures. They displayed a certificate on their website, demonstrated their membership. Now, I spoke to the NFA yesterday and they confirmed that IUX are not and have never been members. And they say that any statement made to the country are inaccurate, which raises a question, what is the status of that certificate? How did that come to be on their website? Further, on some of their marketing material in 2020, they claimed that they were licensed to offer CFDs through a company called Charles Gate, which is an international broking firm which runs a number of sub brands. So you may not have heard of them, but they have a number of other brands you might recognize. I spoke to Charles Gate today and they said that they were definitely not regulated through them, they were not licensed as any kind of white label provider, and that it was a false claim. So there's a kind of a range of stuff stacking up there. And as part of that, I was able to identify the person who I think did found the UK version of IUX, which is a Thai gentleman called Taxin, and apologies to any Thai people for my spelling here. Sorry for my pronunciation. Jijan, and he's a person with a very limited digital footprint, but I can tie him to having founded at least two other companies working in this sphere, one of whom has its trust pilot rating suspended for failure as well, and a number of whose staff are actually people who appear in IUX trading videos and kind of analysis ones. So it seems to be part of a larger group of other companies, also trading CFDs, whose regulatory kind of arrangements are not entirely clear to me. Now when I put these allegations to the facts that I had established, including why were you claiming this to be based in the UK and so on, two of them a couple of days ago before I published my recent article, they did not respond. I have had no answer to them from that, so you'll have to draw your own conclusions. That's a lot to unpack. So we've sort of moved beyond questionable false accounts on LinkedIn to which they claim they have no control over who says they could work for them, that was the statement they made. You've now been able to establish that certificates that they have shown as right of authority to trade are incorrect. We will say incorrect as we don't know where they've come from, but Trog is saying we have no record of these folks at all. There's a number of other companies which you go into detail in your blog post about it as well, which are all doing the same sort of thing in similar sorts of ways. So we have a company that is not able to provide answers to some pretty straightforward questions here. That's basically what we're coming down to and we're not able to link them to the safeguards that would be in place for a UK customer, even though they have kind of said they might be in the past. It seems to me that it's hard to see how all of the things that they have said about themselves over time can all be true because they appear to be mutually inconsistent. And I think the worst case scenario is either they were trading CFDs illegally in the UK or they were misleading customers elsewhere around the world that they were UK based potentially for the purpose of appearing kind of better established and more trustworthy. Now, I can't prove either of those, but as I said, it's clearly the case that they did claim to be based in the UK and it is the case that they were not. Suppose I can tell FCA registered in addition to the other problematic claims to their registration you mentioned. Now, they do have other establishable registration credentials in smaller territories around the world, but it seems strange to me that they should have made these claims which apparently do not turn out to be correct and must raise questions. I think about their credibility to provide high risk financial services to Fulham fans around the world. This is the point, isn't it? This is why companies would want to partner with a premiership football club, a premiership brand, sorry, Premier League brand, we're not supposed to say premiership anymore. Because of that global access within it. So, again, you quite aptly, I did smile because I was quite annoyed I didn't come up with it. You named your blog post "Do negligence" because we were promised better due diligence from Fulham Football Club going forward. On the train yesterday after I was reading your post and just before I text you with three letters that basically summed up my thoughts, I had a quick look at on LinkedIn of the Fulham partnership team. No one from the commercial director down has made a post about this partnership. Wouldn't you celebrate having a new global partner if you've just signed a deal as a member of a partnership team? Having not ever been one. But if I've ever closed a big deal, it's jumping up and down and waving my hands. Is that along with the press release that didn't actually have the names of anyone from IUX on it another red flag that we should worry about? Well, I can't say what's in the minds of the commercial team. It surprises me. I would have thought, again, you would celebrate every big pie up. But it's certainly the case as you pointed out that on the IUX side, no named person from their side on the announcement and the identity of the person who is named as their press contact also appears to be a false identity or at least somebody with no digital footprint. So it is a bit mysterious. I think the biggest story in the background which football has to address is that the third party agency which did introduce IUX to Fulham did celebrate this very substantially. And a number of the other, they're the same agency that introduced stake to Everton, which is the crypto currency casino that offer absolutely insane incentives to people to gamble and whose behaviour has been repeatedly called into question in the press. So it does seem to me that as we speculated before that Fulham have outsourced their judgement, it seems to a third party agency which in my view seems to have let them down again. And I can understand that happening to you first time, but as we said before, after after Python, it's unconscionable that you would take anybody else's word for it, that you wouldn't check it and that you wouldn't do work that you'd be proud of because, you know, you're using that badge that even if it doesn't mean necessarily much to the commercial team, I'm sure some of them it does, it means a hell of a lot to fans around the world and above all, it will be used around the world by your commercial partners to open doors and to establish that they are people of good faith and trust. They're going to trade off it. So I think, you know, everybody should be able to be proud of these deals and it's perhaps telling that Fulham's commercial team are not. Have you had any response from Fulham yet? I'll be perfectly honest with you, I haven't contacted Fulham. Okay. And that might sound negligent, but I've been so busy, I've been concentrating on finding information out and trying to contact IUX. Last time when I contacted Fulham about Titan, they simply didn't get back to me and it seemed to me that rather than harassing Fulham and asking, "Why aren't you doing anything? Why aren't you doing anything?" I think I leave that to Fulham stakeholders and if instead concentrate on establishing the truth about IUX, I don't know what Fulham think about this, perhaps they'll make a statement. They didn't make many statements last time except the one announcing it and then the one announcing it was cancelled. So that's kind of where I think we'll probably hear it from them. When we spoke last week, you said there's likely more to come out. This seems like it's solidifying a root of investigation for you now. You've got some decent breadcrumbs to follow. I'm going to ask again, do you think there's more to come? I asked that with dread because parts of me would just like them to announce as soon as possible that they've cancelled this deal as well and they're going to promise to do better due diligence in future and we can wait two years until this all comes again. Do you expect to find more as you start to investigate this, or given the lack of digital profiles for a lot of the people that you've found so far, do you think you might start running out of trails to go or is there going to be enough breadcrumbs for you to follow? I'm reluctant to say too much, or to promise too much, but I am, I suppose like a police officer, exploring further lines of inquiry and there are a number of other significant bits that I'm looking into, what they will come out as, I don't know whether they would substantially add to the picture we have today. I also don't know, but yeah, this is I, this is definitely not the end of my reporting on iUx. Okay. Will you come back to tell us what you found? I don't know if you want no one to ever listen to your podcast every day. I do listen, funnily enough, we were going to talk about Wes Ham and things like that, but we've decided that we won't preview the game on the weekend because we'll just talk about this for a quick update from Marson because we feel that this is an important thing to be covering because, as Martin was saying, Fulham will be used to help sell iUx abroad, hopefully. Sorry, that's terrible. If you are abroad and listen to this, I personally, this is Matt Bones speaking, you can find me at Boney abroad on Twitter and places like that. I would say it's probably not a good idea to deal with these folks. You can do whatever your conscience allows, but Fulham will be used to promote them. And as we saw with Tyson, would we continue to use probably post the deal? Please be careful and if you are a Fulham supporter, ask questions of the club, please. That's all we're asking you to do. Get in touch with the Fulham advisory board. Get in touch with the Fulham supporters' trust. I know Simon Duke, the chair is following this very closely indeed with questions to go to the club soon, so please get in touch with them with your concerns because I think the more people who raise concerns, the more likely we're going to hear something from the club. But the best of luck with your continued digging on this because what you're finding is concerning and I think needs to be shown up because it's a dark side of the world for outfits like this. As someone who's never traded CFDs or even had to eye to Google what a CFD was again after looking it up last time. Thank you very much for that. And we dread what you find next, I think is probably the best way to put it. Well, thank you so much for inviting me back on again and hopefully we won't have to repeat this next week. Well, if we do, you're welcome, you can even come on and chat football when we inevitably beat Western. We went five-nil at home last time, so who knows what's going to happen there? My wife didn't think we were going to win and we did, even at halftime at three-nil lap. I'm convinced we were going to screw that up somehow. There's some football chat for you, dear listeners, well. Martin, once again, where can people find you and where can people keep tabs with the investigation as it progresses? You can find me on Twitter at UglyGame where I post updates as and when and also links to full of pieces on my blog. We will put those in the description to this episode as well. That's all we're going to cover today, folks. It was important just to keep this story going on. We hope to have Martin back to talk about whatever happens next, if he can squeeze us in like he did this evening. Thank you, Martin, and best of luck. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure again. [music] [music] (upbeat music)