DPEI Max Trading Scam

Help For A DPEI Max Platform Victim

A project manager anxious to pay off her student loan lost more than £6,000 in savings to a sophisticated trading scam involving the DPEI Max platform.

Manilekha Boxi, 37, of Poplar, London, said she was left feeling “betrayed” after trusting fake investment managers who convinced her she had hundreds of thousands of pounds in profit..

But when Manilekha tried to make a withdrawal, she was told she needed to pay another £20,000 to upgrade to a VIP account.

She said: “I felt terrible, because it was a lot of my savings that could have gone towards the student loan. I felt betrayed, anger, some anxiety, all sorts of emotions.”

Manilekha has now tasked National Fraud Helpline, a trading name of Richardson Hartley Law, to help her to recover her money.

In June, 2024, Manilekha transferred £6,630, from her Lloyds account over a two week period. This was an unusual amount for her to transfer and banks have obligations from regulators to help protect their customers from fraud.

A project manager for an online business, Manilekha decided to try investing to pay down her £25,000 student loan from her time studying in India.

She responded to an advert an Instagram, promising “significant returns” under the guidance of someone called “Professor Robert” who claimed to be from an investment firm.

After joining a WhatsApp group, the so-called investment expert would provide daily trading news, helped by an assistant, called “Shirley” who made new investors feel at ease.

“I was in the discovery phase, looking at the group, and everyone looked educated, people that would not fall for a scam,” she added. “There were really nice productive conversations in the group, which made me believe this was a legitimate group.”

She opened an account on the legitimate Trading 212 platform, and deposited £50 to test the water.

“At 2.30pm, when the US market opened, ‘Professor Robert’ used to suggest which stocks to invest in, so I invested £50 and earned profit £10 or £15, and that made it more believable that he knows what he’s talking about,” she said. “I started believing what they were saying.”

She was then persuaded to open an account on the DPEI Max platform, which the fraudsters told her would give her access to the ‘primary market’, where the bigger profits were to be made.

The assistant showed her how to open an account, and told her she had to first pay money into the legitimate crypto.com platform, before transferring to the DPEI Max app

“The app looked very similar to any other trading platform,” said Manilekha. “It had all the stocks listed, and showed live ups and downs, typical trading stuff. I was very excited to do my first trading.”

For just a £20 investment, she earned a profit of £30 by following a tip from ‘Professor Robert’, and was able to successfully withdraw it back to her bank account. This made the scam even more believable.

The scammers then started to increase the minimum amount in the DPEI Max account required to trade, encouraging Manilekha to deposit more and more money into her account.

By July 2, the scam trading account showed a balance worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, and she decided to withdraw enough to pay off her student loan.

But when she followed the same process as her previous, successful, withdrawal she found she could not take any money out.

“It kept saying ‘withdrawal cancelled’,” she explained, “so I dropped a message to the assistant and she said there was a regulation in the UK related to crypto where you needed to create a VIP account in DPEI Max to withdraw an unlimited amount. I said ‘OK, what are the requirements?’”

The scammers asked for £20,000 to create the VIP account, which had to be new money, and not taken from the balance in the DPEI Max account.

Other users in the Whatsapp group claimed the VIP account “worked like magic”, but Manilekha discussed the matter with her husband, who works in cyber security.

“He clicked on the DPEI link on his office laptop and it said ‘this is a scam website, do you want to continue?’,” she said. “Then he went into the Apple store and checked, and by that time there were two reviews naming Professor Robert and Shirley as scammers. The reviews narrated the entire story we were part of, and that was the time we thought ‘OK, they are scammers’.”

She realised that the other members of the Whatsapp group were in on the scam and, when she confronted ‘Professor Robert’ and ‘Shirley’ via message, they failed to respond.

“I was chatting with these people, but they were all scammers,” she said. “It would mean a lot to recover my money, because it was a lot of my savings.”

Lena Abuagla, a lawyer at National Fraud Helpline solicitors, said: “This was a very clever scam in which our client was given a lot of reassurance by people pretending to help her with her investments.

“We now know the DPEI Max trading platform was not to be trusted and that the Financial Conduct Authority has issued a warning that it is not regulated by them.

“It is a horrible feeling to get scammed and we will be doing everything we can to recover the lost money.”