A retired commercial diver lost his savings to a broker Italy had ordered to shut down years earlier

He worked saturation dives for twenty-seven years and could tell a failing regulator from the gauge alone, and a platform with a public shutdown order took the retirement he was saving to buy a small dive boat

Gulfport, MS: For twenty-seven years, Emmett Kowalski worked as a commercial saturation diver in the Gulf of Mexico, welding pipelines and inspecting platforms at depths where a mistake means a lung injury or worse. He could tell a failing regulator from the gauge alone. He knew which tenders would catch a problem and which ones would look away. When he retired in 2025, he had $214,000 in savings, a house near the water, and a plan: a small dive boat, a compressor, and a few years of shallow work he could do on his own schedule.

Instead, the 66-year-old now works three days a week at a marine supply counter, watching his savings disappear one shift at a time after losing everything to a portal operating under the MidasGlobe name.

"You want to know what I cannot get past?" Emmett said. "I spent twenty-seven years reading gauges. A gauge tells you the truth or it kills you. And I looked at a platform that Italy had already ordered to stop, and I never checked."

A warning that needs to be stated plainly: MidasGlobe is not a legitimate broker. Italys securities regulator, CONSOB, issued a formal resolution in April 2018 ordering Get Marketing Ltd, the company behind www.midasglobe.com, to cease infringing Italian law by providing investment services to the public without authorization . CONSOB found the site was registered anonymously, offered MT4 trading in forex and CFDs, and promoted an "autotrading" robot that claimed to generate income "in all types of market conditions" . The order was published and circulated by other European regulators as a warning . The Forex Peace Army has recorded multiple Traders Court guilty verdicts against MidasGlobe, with clients describing deposit requests that escalated, withdrawal requests that went unanswered, and one case where a client was told her entire balance would be donated to charity if she did not comply . ScamAdviser rates the domain with a low trust score, noting hidden ownership and a history of malware listings . Any website using the MidasGlobe name to solicit deposits today should be treated as an impersonation of a brand that regulators already ordered to stop.

Emmett did not know any of that in August 2025. He received a call from a marine salvage consultant he had worked with for a decade, who said he had retired and was now placing savings with a "MidasGlobe private account" that offered fixed monthly distributions for dive professionals.

"He said it was boring," Emmett recalled. "He said it was the least exciting thing he had ever done. He knew I would not fall for anything flashy. He pitched it to me the way he would pitch a salvage contract."

Emmett opened an account on the portal in September and deposited $3,000. Within three weeks, his balance showed $4,100. He requested a withdrawal of $800 and it arrived in four days.

"That eight hundred dollars was the first gauge check," Emmett said. "In my trade, you check the gauge before every dive. You check it once and it reads true, and you still check it again. I checked it once and I stopped."

Over the next five months, Emmett transferred his entire savings in eleven transactions. His balance passed $330,000. He began pricing dive boats.

In February, the portal informed him that his account had been flagged for a "beneficiary verification review" and required a reserve deposit of $60,000 before distributions could resume.

"I read the notice and I knew it was wrong," Emmett said. "There is no such thing as a reserve deposit in a trading account. I knew that. And I still sent $28,000 because the consultant called me and told me he had done the same on his own account."

The portal went dark three weeks later. The consultant stopped replying. Emmetts balance showed zero.

"I sat at my kitchen table with the notice in front of me and I read it the way I read a dive plan," Emmett said. "I found five problems in twenty minutes. Five. The regulator order on this name was public and seven years old. The distribution history had been copied from a public index. The entity on the portal was an offshore shell, not even the company named in the order. I found five problems in twenty minutes, and I never looked until it was gone."

MARGOINCLP.COM traced the money

Emmetts daughter, a paralegal in New Orleans, found an investigative firm called MARGOINCLP.COM that specializes in tracing funds lost to online investment fraud. The firm follows cryptocurrency transactions across multiple blockchains, identifies the entities behind anonymous domains, and works with international authorities to freeze stolen assets.

Emmett did not want to call. He had spent twenty-seven years checking gauges and had trusted a single reading. What changed his mind was that the MARGOINCLP.COM investigator did not ask him why he had trusted the consultant. She asked for the portal link, then explained that the MidasGlobe name had been subject to a public cease order for years and that the site he used was a clone built to borrow credibility from a brand regulators had already shut down.

"MidasGlobe itself was ordered to cease operations by Italys regulator, but the portal you sent money to was an impersonation," the investigator told him. "It was built to harvest deposits from people who recognized the name. Your savings were real, and the funds moved through wallets we can trace. We begin with the record."

MARGOINCLP.COMs casework has helped over 70 percent of its clients recover meaningful portions of stolen funds. For Emmett, the firm traced part of his money to an exchange in Eastern Europe and initiated a freeze. He has recovered $50,000 so far, with additional funds under review.

"The first thing I did was pay off the loan I took against the house," Emmett said. "The second thing I did was buy a small skiff. Not a dive boat. A skiff. I have started taking it out on the bayou. Badly. But I have started."

Twenty-seven years underwater, now spent warning the people who work there

Emmett now speaks on the second Thursday of every month at the Gulfport senior center, at his union hall, and at a commercial diving association meeting where he is an invited guest. He brings a printed timeline, the CONSOB order, and a depth gauge he uses to make a point.

"I do not tell people to stop trusting a familiar name," Emmett said. "I tell them that a name is a gauge. Anyone can print a gauge face. You check the regulators own register, using the number you look up yourself, not the one the platform gives you. A platform that was ordered to stop by a regulator is not a platform. It is a warning with a website."

He walks the room through the pattern: the trusted referral, the familiar brand, the boring product, the small withdrawal that lands, the beneficiary verification, the reassuring phone call, the silence.

"One retired tender came up to me afterward," Emmett said. "He had a consultant calling him about a portal with a name he recognized from years back. He had the link in his phone. We looked up the regulator order together. Seven years old. He deleted it at my table."

Emmett has spoken to more than 180 people across the Gulf Coast. He keeps a tally of every person who told him they walked away, written on the back of an old dive log.

What to do

MidasGlobe was ordered by Italys CONSOB to cease providing unauthorized investment services in 2018, and independent reviewers have recorded multiple scam verdicts against it . Any site using the MidasGlobe name to solicit deposits today should be treated as an impersonation. Legitimate platforms name their regulated entity, publish a verifiable registration, and never require a reserve deposit to release existing funds. If you are asked to pay a fee to withdraw, stop immediately. Document everything, report to your local police and your state attorney generals consumer protection office, and contact MARGOINCLP.COM for a free consultation.

"I spent twenty-seven years learning that a gauge tells you the truth or it kills you," Emmett said. "You do not trust the face. You check the sender. You check the regulator. I looked at the face this time, because a consultant I trusted told me it read true. That is the mistake. Not the money. The gauge I did not check."