Investors Beware! Behind the Phantom Stock Trading Academy Hides TradeWin24
Over the past few weeks, we spoke with several novice investors who claim that they too easily fell for TradeWin24’s marketing connected with the so-called Stock Trading Academy, and in exchange for stock-market fog ended up filling the pockets of the people running TradeWin24.
To remind readers, after the total collapse and bankruptcy of Sinteza Invest Group, where they harmed investors who had used them to invest in foreign financial markets, in the winter of 2018 the people behind Sinteza Invest Group, using their suspicious capital, as well as ignorance and perhaps corruption among certain employees of the Securities Commission, opened a new brokerage house under the name TradeWin24, in direct contradiction to the law and to the rulebooks of that same Commission. Given that information about Tradewin24’s schemes quickly spread among domestic investors, and given that Tradewin24 is by far the most expensive broker compared with any foreign or domestic broker, they directed all of their marketing strength toward falsely discrediting foreign brokers, above all Interactive Brokers, in order to discourage investors from using the cheapest and most reliable options for brokerage services and to deceive them into investing through Tradewin24, so that the Sinteza Invest Group scenario could be repeated and Serbian investors deceived all over again.
Considering that in today’s world, where information is quickly and easily available to everyone, it is simple to verify everything concerning a broker’s reputation, services, and fees, almost all investors abandoned TradeWin24 and turned instead to Interactive Brokers or to some other more reliable brokerage house. In order to stop the outflow of clients, TradeWin24 submitted a series of objections to the Securities Commission during the public debate on the new Capital Market Law, by far the highest number of objections filed by any domestic broker, and through all of them they asked for only one thing: that domestic investors from Serbia be FORBIDDEN from investing in foreign financial markets through foreign brokers. All of these objections were flatly rejected, because any other decision would have amounted to the abuse of domestic investors and yet another petty extortion scheme in a small, undeveloped market such as Serbia. It would also have raised serious questions about corruption among the leadership of the Securities Commission, and such a decision certainly would not have survived, because investors would have sued the Commission over such a harmful ruling, one that would have been in total contradiction with EU law and the regulation of financial markets. But we will write about such a corrupt and malicious intention of the schemers from TradeWin24 in a separate article. After that public embarrassment, in which all of their objections were rejected, the scheming gang led by the complete fool Miroslav Radaković and Srdjan Bošković, the men behind TradeWin24, came up with a new idea for manipulating domestic investors and taking even the little money they had managed to preserve for possible stock-market investing. The project called “Stock Trading Academy.”
The Stock Trading Academy project was first launched through the Tradewin24 website and then across social networks. In order to promote their new financial creation for plucking gullible investors, the people behind Tradewin24 even used some new faces who presented themselves as financial influencers, although they were far from the true meaning of that term and in many cases were actually employees of Tradewin24. Given the reputation of TradeWin24, formerly Sinteza Invest Group, and the way they had deceived investors there, the leading people behind TradeWin24 avoided any public media exposure, so it made perfect sense for them to pay someone such as a “financial influencer” to promote Tradewin24 in the most convincing way possible and to present the phantom Stock Market Academy as a treasury of practical knowledge and a kind of faculty for finance and stock-market business. In that sense, a gallery of characters appeared, including among others the following example of a financial influencer, who, if he had even the slightest amount of financial and legal knowledge, would have recommended anyone but Tradewin24, yet money makes the world spin where principle will not.
To remind readers, after the total collapse and bankruptcy of Sinteza Invest Group, where they harmed investors who had used them to invest in foreign financial markets, in the winter of 2018 the people behind Sinteza Invest Group, using their suspicious capital, as well as ignorance and perhaps corruption among certain employees of the Securities Commission, opened a new brokerage house under the name TradeWin24, in direct contradiction to the law and to the rulebooks of that same Commission. Given that information about Tradewin24’s schemes quickly spread among domestic investors, and given that Tradewin24 is by far the most expensive broker compared with any foreign or domestic broker, they directed all of their marketing strength toward falsely discrediting foreign brokers, above all Interactive Brokers, in order to discourage investors from using the cheapest and most reliable options for brokerage services and to deceive them into investing through Tradewin24, so that the Sinteza Invest Group scenario could be repeated and Serbian investors deceived all over again.
Considering that in today’s world, where information is quickly and easily available to everyone, it is simple to verify everything concerning a broker’s reputation, services, and fees, almost all investors abandoned TradeWin24 and turned instead to Interactive Brokers or to some other more reliable brokerage house. In order to stop the outflow of clients, TradeWin24 submitted a series of objections to the Securities Commission during the public debate on the new Capital Market Law, by far the highest number of objections filed by any domestic broker, and through all of them they asked for only one thing: that domestic investors from Serbia be FORBIDDEN from investing in foreign financial markets through foreign brokers. All of these objections were flatly rejected, because any other decision would have amounted to the abuse of domestic investors and yet another petty extortion scheme in a small, undeveloped market such as Serbia. It would also have raised serious questions about corruption among the leadership of the Securities Commission, and such a decision certainly would not have survived, because investors would have sued the Commission over such a harmful ruling, one that would have been in total contradiction with EU law and the regulation of financial markets. But we will write about such a corrupt and malicious intention of the schemers from TradeWin24 in a separate article. After that public embarrassment, in which all of their objections were rejected, the scheming gang led by the complete fool Miroslav Radaković and Srdjan Bošković, the men behind TradeWin24, came up with a new idea for manipulating domestic investors and taking even the little money they had managed to preserve for possible stock-market investing. The project called “Stock Trading Academy.”
The Stock Trading Academy project was first launched through the Tradewin24 website and then across social networks. In order to promote their new financial creation for plucking gullible investors, the people behind Tradewin24 even used some new faces who presented themselves as financial influencers, although they were far from the true meaning of that term and in many cases were actually employees of Tradewin24. Given the reputation of TradeWin24, formerly Sinteza Invest Group, and the way they had deceived investors there, the leading people behind TradeWin24 avoided any public media exposure, so it made perfect sense for them to pay someone such as a “financial influencer” to promote Tradewin24 in the most convincing way possible and to present the phantom Stock Market Academy as a treasury of practical knowledge and a kind of faculty for finance and stock-market business. In that sense, a gallery of characters appeared, including among others the following example of a financial influencer, who, if he had even the slightest amount of financial and legal knowledge, would have recommended anyone but Tradewin24, yet money makes the world spin where principle will not.
False Promoters
One of the loudest promoters of the phantom Stock Market Academy, and of TradeWin24 in general, is the self-proclaimed “first financial influencer” in Serbia, Uroš Kostić, who stands behind the obscure website officially called Finansijski Putokaz and who, for some reason, constantly hides his own name in public and hides behind the portal Finansijski Putokaz. Needless to say, in every video he publishes on his YouTube channel or Instagram page, he never fails to invite investors to invest through TradeWin24 and to encourage inexperienced people to “educate” themselves through the Stock Market Academy. Given the question of how much Tradewin24 pays him, and whether they pay him at all, one has to wonder when this financial romance will end and how the influencer will climb out of the mud into which he has thrown himself by associating with Tradewin24. But since he has a “signpost,” perhaps his deliverance will come more easily. Still, rather than waste time on the eternally unsuccessful marketing story of Tradewin24, it is better to focus on the more important facts concerning the Stock Market Academy.
Unrecognized Academy
The Stock TradingAcademy run by TradeWin24 is a phantom academy in the truest sense of the word. There are no licenses or approvals from the Ministry of Education or the Securities Commission authorizing this phantom organization to call itself an Academy. There are no diplomas, no official certificates, and nothing whatsoever that would indicate that this organization operates in accordance with Serbian law or has any right to call itself an Academy. There are no premises adapted to the standards of Serbian higher education, and, most importantly, there are no authorized lecturers, professors, or instructors capable of passing on any actual knowledge to participants. The only thing that does exist is a price that must be paid to the bankrupt TradeWin24 so that inexperienced investors can fill the pockets of the people running it.
The TradeWin24 website states that the price charged by the phantom organization Stock Trading Academy for its so-called course is EUR 299, but that it offers a 40% registration discount, while on its Facebook page it even offers a 60% discount. It seems that investor interest in buying this kind of fog was extremely low, given that just a few months after launch the price had been cut by more than half, and after more than a year of existence the Facebook page remains ghostly empty, with no meaningful interaction from any potentially interested audience. In any case, people do not have money to throw away, and even a 60% discount on nothing is still nothing and hardly sounds attractive.
Nevertheless, we got in touch with some of the disappointed participants who naively believed the marketing tricks of the TradeWin24 schemers. Among them was investor A.J. (name known to the authors), 26 years old, from Belgrade. A.J. told us that he naively trusted the advertisements of TradeWin24 and that they led him into a deeply unpleasant situation. In his statement, he revealed how the Stock Trading Academy works from the point of view of a participant, as a warning to others.
“Everything they advertise is an absolute lie. I contacted them because I wanted to improve my knowledge in the field of stock-market investing, but it turned out to be nothing more than taking money, and I came away with no knowledge whatsoever, nor can I say that I learned any real investing skills. The school has a single office inside TradeWin24’s premises, they asked for payment in advance and with no possibility of a refund if I was dissatisfied. There were only two of us, a guy from Čačak and me,” A.J. told us, and then continued, visibly shaken: “The course, as I called it, lasted two weeks, twice a week for around 60 minutes each time. Most of what they told us was that if we wanted any kind of profit, we had to invest in cryptocurrencies, because everything else was slower, less stable, and there was no chance of getting rich. After the course they offered to sell me an additional NFT crypto product, which they claimed would soon rise in value and for which they guaranteed profit. We also had two lessons in technical analysis given by instructor Miroslav Radaković, and at the end of the course the owner of TradeWin24, Srdjan Bošković, visited us and gave advice about crypto investing and encouraged us not to give up,” recounted the shaken and disappointed A.J. Similar stories were told to us by other manipulated and deceived participants, some of whom also contacted the police.
We asked TradeWin24 the following questions:
- Are the claims made by deceived investors, whose experiences we have heard and are presenting here, true?
- Does the so-called Academy have a permit from the Ministry in order to advertise itself as an Academy?
- Who are the professors and instructors in this organization?
- Who issues the certificates or diplomas, and are they authorized to do so?
- Are they registered as an educational institution? Do they have any permits at all for what they are doing?
We also asked TradeWin24 several additional questions, but they did not answer any of them by the time this article was published. We invite them to respond even through our website, and we will publish their response promptly. The Ministry of Education informed us that the Stock Market Academy is unknown to them and that they have no information whatsoever about it. This comes as no surprise to anyone already familiar with TradeWin24’s modus operandi. In the coming period, we will insist that the Ministry and the Securities Commission address this fake Academy and others like it that deceive domestic investors and undermine trust in Serbia’s financial system.
UPDATE NOTE: After the publication of this article, Uroš Kostić contacted our editorial team and demanded that we not mention Finansijski Putokaz in the context of his cooperation with TradeWin24, claiming that he had little connection with Finansijski Putokaz and that TradeWin24 had merely paid a certain sum to Finansijski Putokaz for advertising, but that they no longer had any cooperation. Uroš Kostić lied when he claimed to have no connection with Finansijski Putokaz. A simple review of the business registers established that Uroš Kostić is the 100% owner of Finansijski Putokaz. We remind readers that in the previous version of this article we did not even publish Uroš Kostić’s name, but we are publishing it now because we are certain that he attempted to manipulate and that he is clearly not telling the truth. In addition, a well-intentioned visitor to our website provided us with a screenshot from the Instagram profile of Finansijski Putokaz clearly showing that TradeWin24 and Finansijski Putokaz are still in a partnership relationship, and that Finansijski Putokaz will certainly continue to publish false and malicious information fed into public circulation by the schemers from Tradewin24.
Shown in the photograph is Stefani Marunović, the self-styled CEO of TradeWin24 and formerly a secretary within the same scheming team, who was placed in the role of director of TradeWin24 so that the real schemer-directors, Miroslav Radaković and Srdjan Bošković, would not expose themselves and so that potential investors would not realize that these two financial fraudsters are the real figures behind TradeWin24.