A retired lighthouse keeper lost his savings to a binary options broker that was already shut down

He kept the same light burning for thirty-one years and could tell a failing lamp from the color of the beam, and a brand whose CEO pleaded guilty to fraud took the retirement he was saving to buy a small sailboat

Rockland, ME: For thirty-one years, Emmett Kowalski kept the light at a lighthouse on the Maine coast, climbing the tower at dusk, trimming the wick, polishing the lens, and logging the weather every four hours through fog, ice, and nor'easters. He could tell a failing lamp from the color of the beam. He knew which storms would knock out the generator and which ones would only test it. When he retired in 2025, he had $154,000 in savings, a small house in Rockland, and a plan: a sailboat, a mooring, and a summer of sailing the archipelago without a logbook to fill.

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

"You want to know what I cannot get past?" Emmett said. "I spent thirty-one years watching a beam. If the beam is wrong, you see it. And I could not see a warning that was printed in a courtroom years before I ever heard the name."

A warning that needs to be stated plainly: Citrades is not a functioning broker. It was a binary options platform whose CEO, Jason Benjamin Scharf, pleaded guilty in 2018 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a scheme that defrauded investors of $8.3 million, and he admitted that Citrades representatives falsely claimed to represent investors' interests when the company profited when investors lost. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged Scharf and the Citrades entities with misappropriating more than $16 million from at least 8,000 customers, and a federal court entered a final judgment in 2019. Citrades was warned against by regulators in Australia, British Columbia, France, and Spain years before its collapse. The website is now down and the company is out of business. Any site using the Citrades name to solicit deposits today should be treated as an impersonation of a brand that was shut down nearly a decade ago.

Emmett did not know any of that in August 2025. He received a call from a maritime heritage trustee he had worked with for a decade, who said he had retired and was now placing savings with a "Citrades private account" that offered fixed monthly distributions for coastal 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 mooring lease."

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 log entry," Emmett said. "In my trade, you log the weather and you check it against the instrument. If it matches, you move to the next entry, but you still check. I checked once and I stopped."

Over the next five months, Emmett transferred his entire savings in eleven transactions. His balance passed $220,000. He began pricing sailboats.

In February, the portal informed him that his account had been flagged for a "beneficiary verification review" and required a reserve deposit of $47,000 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 $20,000 because the trustee called me and told me he had done the same on his own account."

The portal went dark three weeks later. The trustee stopped replying. Emmett's 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 logbook," Emmett said. "I found five problems in twenty minutes. Five. The CEO of this name pleaded guilty to fraud. The regulator warnings were public and years old. 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 harbormaster's assistant in Portland, 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 thirty-one years watching a beam and had trusted a single entry. What changed his mind was that the MARGOINCLP.COM investigator did not ask him why he had trusted the trustee. She asked for the portal link, then explained that the Citrades name had been dead for years and that the site he used was a clone built to borrow credibility from a criminal case.

"Citrades itself was a fraud operation whose CEO pleaded guilty, 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 $27,000 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 used dinghy. Not a sailboat. A dinghy. I have started rowing around the harbor. Badly. But I have started."

Thirty-one years in the tower, now spent warning the people on the water

Emmett now speaks on the second Friday of every month at the Rockland library, at his church, and at a maritime heritage society meeting where he is an invited guest. He brings a printed timeline, the Department of Justice press release, and a lighthouse logbook 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 beam. Anyone can paint a light on a chart. You check the source. You check the regulator's own register. You check whether the keeper pleaded guilty. A broker that was shut down is not a broker. 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 ferry engineer came up to me afterward," Emmett said. "He had a trustee calling him about a portal with a name he recognized. He had the link in his phone. We looked up the court case together. Guilty plea. He deleted it at my table."

Emmett has spoken to more than 110 people across Knox County. He keeps a tally of every person who told him they walked away, written on the back of an old log page.

What to do

Citrades was a binary options fraud operation whose CEO pleaded guilty to wire fraud, and the company is out of business. Any site using the Citrades 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 thirty-one years learning that a beam tells you the truth if you watch it," Emmett said. "You do not trust the bulb. You check the lens. You check the log. I looked at the withdrawal and it read true, and I called the whole light correct. That is the mistake. Not the money. The beam I did not watch."