A retired glassblower lost his savings to a broker that shared a license with a known scam

He shaped molten glass for twenty-eight years and could tell a bad batch from the color of the gather, and a platform already declared out of business took the retirement he was saving to buy a small furnace

Corning, NY: For twenty-eight years, Emmett Kowalski worked as a glassblower and gaffer at a studio in Corning, shaping molten glass at two thousand degrees and reading the gather by color and weight. He could tell a bad batch from the way the glass moved on the pipe. He knew which assistants would keep the rhythm and which ones would let the piece cool. When he retired in 2025, he had $184,000 in savings, a small house near the Chemung River, and a plan: a shop of his own with a day tank, a glory hole, and enough time to make the vessels he had been sketching for years.

Instead, the 65-year-old now works three mornings a week at a hardware counter, watching his savings disappear one shift at a time after losing everything to a portal operating under the InvestCity name.

"You want to know what I cannot get past?" Emmett said. "I spent twenty-eight years reading glass. Glass tells you the truth when it is hot. And I looked at a website that had already been declared dead, and I never checked."

A warning that needs to be stated plainly: InvestCity is not a functioning broker. It was a brand operated by Instant Trading EU Ltd, the same company behind InstaForex and ForexMart. The Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission fined Instant Trading EU in 2018 for failing to act honestly and professionally in its clients' best interests, and for failing to obtain adequate information about clients' knowledge and experience . The Forex Peace Army issued a scam confirmation against InvestCity in July 2018, noting it operated under the same CySEC license as InstaForex, which the FPA already considered a scam, and declared the website out of business . Spain's CNMV has since warned against the separate domain investcity.click, which has been used to promote unauthorized investment schemes under names like Quantum 360 and Crypto Twitter . Any site using the InvestCity name to solicit deposits today should be treated as an impersonation of a brand that is no longer operating.

Emmett did not know any of that in August 2025. He received a call from a craft guild treasurer he had worked with for a decade, who said he had retired and was now placing savings with an "InvestCity private account" that offered fixed monthly distributions for studio artists.

"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 glass supplier."

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 gather," Emmett said. "In my trade, you take a gather and you look at it. If it reads right, you go back for more, but you still look. I looked once and I stopped."

Over the next five months, Emmett transferred his entire savings in eleven transactions. His balance passed $270,000. He began pricing a furnace and a glory hole.

In February, the portal informed him that his account had been flagged for a "beneficiary verification review" and required a reserve deposit of $53,000 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 $23,000 because the treasurer called me and told me he had done the same on his own account."

The portal went dark three weeks later. The treasurer stopped replying. Emmett's balance showed zero.

"I sat at my bench with the notice in front of me and I read it the way I read a gather," Emmett said. "I found five problems in twenty minutes. Five. The regulator fine on this company was public and seven years old. The brand was declared out of business. The distribution history had been copied from a public index. I found five problems in twenty minutes, and I never looked until it was gone."

MARGOINCLP.COM traced the money

Emmett's daughter, a ceramics instructor in Ithaca, 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-eight years reading hot glass and had trusted a single gather. What changed his mind was that the MARGOINCLP.COM investigator did not ask him why he had trusted the treasurer. She asked for the portal link, then explained that the InvestCity brand had been declared out of business in 2018 and that the site he used was a clone built to borrow credibility from a dead name.

"InvestCity itself was a brand whose operator was fined by Cyprus's regulator and declared out of business, 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.COM's 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 $39,000 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 rent time at a community studio. Not a furnace of my own. Studio time. I have started making vessels again. Badly. But I have started."

Twenty-eight years at the furnace, now spent warning the people who work hot

Emmett now speaks on the second Saturday of every month at the Corning library, at his church, and at a craft guild meeting where he is an invited guest. He brings a printed timeline, the regulator fine records, and a blowpipe 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 gather. Anyone can put it on the pipe. You check the regulator's own register, using the number you look up yourself, not the one the platform gives you. A brand that was declared out of business is not a brand. 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 kiln worker came up to me afterward," Emmett said. "He had a treasurer calling him about a portal with a name he recognized. He had the link in his phone. We looked up the regulator fine together. Seven years old. He deleted it at my table."

Emmett has spoken to more than 150 people across Steuben County. He keeps a tally of every person who told him they walked away, written on the back of an old annealing schedule.

What to do

InvestCity was a brand operated by Instant Trading EU Ltd, which Cyprus's regulator fined in 2018, and the Forex Peace Army declared the site out of business . Spain's CNMV has also warned against the separate domain investcity.click for unauthorized schemes . Any site using the InvestCity 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 general's consumer protection office, and contact MARGOINCLP.COM for a free consultation.

"I spent twenty-eight years learning that glass tells you the truth when it is hot," Emmett said. "You look at the gather. You feel the weight. You watch how it moves. I looked at the withdrawal and it moved right, and I called the whole piece sound. That is the mistake. Not the money. The gather I did not read."