Blake Finance Ltd

A summary of what happened?

Blake Finance Ltd is a financial services company that has been the subject of significant controversy due to allegations of fraudulent activities and attempts to suppress negative information about its operations.

Major Concerns, Complaints, and Accusations Against Blake Finance Ltd:

1. Fraudulent Financial Practices: Numerous clients have reported that after investing funds with Blake Finance Ltd, they faced substantial difficulties in withdrawing their money. Some investors were asked to pay additional fees, purportedly for compliance or processing, yet still did not receive their funds. These practices have led to accusations of the company operating as a scam, deceiving investors and misappropriating their assets.
2. Lack of Regulatory Authorization: Investigations have revealed that Blake Finance Ltd operates without the necessary regulatory licenses required to provide financial services in certain jurisdictions. This lack of authorization raises concerns about the company’s legitimacy and the safety of client investments.
3. Attempts to Censor Negative Information: Reports indicate that Blake Finance Ltd has engaged in efforts to remove critical content from the internet. The company allegedly submitted fraudulent Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices to suppress negative reviews and articles that expose its questionable activities. Such actions suggest an attempt to manipulate public perception and prevent potential investors from accessing truthful information about the company’s operations.
4. Negative Customer Reviews: Various online platforms are replete with negative reviews from individuals who have interacted with Blake Finance Ltd. Common complaints include unresponsive customer service, unexplained account freezes, and an inability to retrieve invested funds. These consistent grievances further tarnish the company’s reputation and credibility.

Given these serious allegations and documented complaints, potential investors are strongly advised to exercise extreme caution when considering any engagement with Blake Finance Ltd. Conducting thorough due diligence and consulting with financial professionals is essential to safeguard against potential fraud and financial loss.

Analyzing the Fake Copyright Notice(s)

Our team collects and analyses fraudulent copyright takedown requests, legal complaints, and other efforts to remove critical information from the internet. Through our investigative reporting, we examine the prevalence and operation of an organized censorship industry, predominantly funded by criminal entities, oligarchs, and disreputable businesses or individuals. Our findings allow internet users to gain insight into these censorship schemes’ sources, methods, and underlying objectives.

What was Blake Finance Ltd trying to hide?

Blake Finance Ltd‘s attempts to hide unfavourable content through the misuse of copyright notices while allegedly engaging in perjury present serious legal concerns. These actions suggest a calculated attempt to manipulate legal systems to suppress free speech, a fundamental violation of copyright law principles and an abuse of legal processes. The use of such tactics not only undermines the integrity of copyright protection but also potentially constitutes perjury, further entangling Blake Finance Ltd in legal accountability. Let’s examine the information Blake Finance Ltd may be trying to remove from the internet –

Investigative Report: Unveiling the Controversies Surrounding Blake Finance Ltd

Introduction

Blake Finance Ltd, a brokerage firm claiming to offer financial services, has been the subject of numerous complaints, allegations, and regulatory warnings. This report delves into the adverse news, allegations, lawsuits, sanctions, complaints, and negative reviews associated with Blake Finance Ltd, providing a comprehensive overview of the controversies surrounding the company.

Regulatory Warnings and Alerts

1. Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) Warning

   On July 27, 2022, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) issued a warning stating that Blake Finance Limited (operating through blk-fin.com and blake-fin.com) is not registered with the AMF and is not authorized to solicit investors in Québec. The warning also noted that the company uses another business name, Blake Invest Ltd.

2. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) Warning List

   The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) maintains a warning list of unauthorized firms. While specific details about Blake Finance Ltd are not provided in the available search results, the FCA’s warning list serves as a resource for consumers to identify firms that are not authorized to operate in the UK.

Customer Complaints and Negative Reviews

1. Elite Trader Forum Complaint

   In April 2022, a user named Julia3 posted on the Elite Trader forum, alleging that Blake Finance Limited is a scam. The complaint stated that the company claims to be registered in England, promises yields of 20-30% per month, encourages deposits, displays fake profitable trades on their platform, and fails to process withdrawals. When customers complain, they are reportedly blocked on communication platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp.

2. BabyPips.com Forum Complaint

   A similar complaint was posted on the BabyPips.com forum in April 2022 by the same user, Julia3, reiterating the allegations made on the Elite Trader forum.

3. Trade2Win Forum Discussion

   In April 2022, a discussion on the Trade2Win forum highlighted concerns about Blake Finance Limited. Users pointed out that the company’s website was only a few weeks old at the time, lacked UK regulation, and had discrepancies in its registered address. The discussion also noted that the company had previously operated under a different domain, which became defunct after a few months, suggesting a pattern of short-lived operations.

Allegations of Fraudulent Activities

1. Fake DMCA Takedown Notices

   In September 2023, it was reported that Blake Finance Ltd attempted to remove critical information from the internet by submitting fake DMCA takedown notices. The report criticized the company for committing perjury, impersonation, and fraud in an effort to manage its reputation.

2. Unregistered Soliciting Entities

   The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) maintains a list of unregistered soliciting entities. While Blake Finance Ltd is not specifically mentioned in the available search results, the presence of similar entities on the list raises concerns about the company’s legitimacy.

Conclusion

The accumulation of regulatory warnings, customer complaints, and allegations of fraudulent activities paints a concerning picture of Blake Finance Ltd. Potential investors and clients are advised to exercise extreme caution and conduct thorough due diligence before engaging with the company. The patterns of unregistered operations, unfulfilled promises, and attempts to suppress negative information suggest that Blake Finance Ltd may not be a trustworthy financial service provider.

How do we counteract this malpractice?

Once we ascertain the involvement of Blake Finance Ltd (or actors working on behalf of Blake Finance Ltd), we will inform Blake Finance Ltd of our findings via Electronic Mail.

Our preliminary assessment suggests that Blake Finance Ltd may have engaged a third-party reputation management agency or expert, which, either independently or under direct authorization from Blake Finance Ltd, initiated efforts to remove adverse online content, including potentially fraudulent DMCA takedown requests. We will extend an opportunity to Blake Finance Ltd to provide details regarding their communications with the agency or expert, as well as the identification of the individual(s) responsible for executing these false DMCA notices.

Failure to respond in a timely manner will necessitate a reassessment of our initial assumptions. In such an event, we will be compelled to take appropriate legal action to rectify the unlawful conduct and take the following steps –

Since Blake Finance Ltd made such efforts to hide something online, it seems fit to ensure that this article and sensitive information targeted online by these events get a lot more exposure and traffic than what it would have received originally

We hope this becomes an excellent case study for the Streisand effect…The key idea behind the Streisand effect is that efforts to restrict information can backfire, often causing the information to gain more attention than it would have otherwise. This effect is widespread in the digital age, where users quickly notice and spread censorship efforts on social media and other platforms. Trying to suppress something can unintentionally lead to it becoming more visible, which Blake Finance Ltd is finding out the hard way.

Potential Consequences for Blake Finance Ltd

Under Florida Statute 831.01, the crime of Forgery is committed when a person falsifies, alters, counterfeits, or forges a document that carries “legal efficacy” with the intent to injure or defraud another person or entity.

Forging a document is considered a white-collar crime. It involves altering, changing, or modifying a document to deceive another person. It can also include passing along copies of documents that are known to be false. In many states in the US, falsifying a document is a crime punishable as a felony.

Additionally, under most laws, “fraud on the court” is where “a party has sentiently set in motion some unconscionable scheme calculated to interfere with the judicial system’s ability impartially to adjudicate a matter by improperly influencing the trier of fact or unfairly hampering the presentation of the opposing party’s claim or defense.”  Cox v. Burke, 706 So. 2d 43, 46 (Fla. 5th DCA 1998) (quoting Aoude v. Mobil Oil Corp., 892 F.2d 1115, 1118 (1st Cir. 1989)).

Is Blake Finance Ltd Committing a Cyber Crime?

Yes, it seems so. Blake Finance Ltd used multiple approaches to remove unwanted material from review sites and Google’s search results. Thanks to protections allowing freedom of speech in the United States, there are very few legal ways to do this. Blake Finance Ltd could not eliminate negative reviews or search results that linked to them without a valid claim of defamation, copyright infringement, or some other clear breach of the law.

Faced with these limitations, some companies like Blake Finance Ltd have gone to extreme lengths to fraudulently claim copyright ownership over a negative review in the hopes of taking it down.

Fake DMCA notices have targeted articles highlighting the criminal activity of prominent people to hide their illegal behavior. These people, which include US, Russian, and Khazakstani politicians as well as members from elite circles including the mafia and those with massive financial power, are all connected – and alleged corruption ranging from child abuse to sexual harassment is exposed when exploring evidence found at these URLs. It appears there’s a disturbing level of influence being exerted here that needs further investigation before justice can be served. Blake Finance Ltd is certainly keeping interesting company here….

The DMCA takedown process requires that copyright owners submit a takedown notice to an ISP identifying the allegedly infringing content and declaring, under penalty of perjury, that they have a good faith belief that the content is infringing. The ISP must then promptly remove or disable access to the content. The alleged infringer can then submit a counter-notice, and if the copyright owner does not take legal action within 10 to 14 days, the ISP can restore the content.

Since these platforms are predominantly based in the U.S., the complaints are typically made under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which requires online service providers and platforms to react immediately to reports or violations. Big Tech companies rarely have systems in place to assess the merit of each report. Instead, all bad actors need to do is clone a story, backdate it, and then demand the real thing be taken down.

Reputation Agency's Modus Operandi

The fake DMCA notices we found always use the “back-dated article” technique. With this technique, the wrongful notice sender (or copier) creates a copy of a “true original” article and back-dates it, creating a “fake original” article (a copy of the true original) that, at first glance, appears to have been published before the true original.

Then, based on the claim that this backdated article is the “original,” the scammers send a DMCA to the relevant online service providers (e.g. Google), alleging that the ‘true’ original is the copied or “infringing” article and that the copied article is the “original,” requesting the takedown of the ‘true’ original article. After sending the DMCA request, the person who sent the wrong notice takes down the fake original URL, likely to make sure that the article doesn’t stay online in any way. If the takedown notice is successful, the disappearance from the internet of information is most likely to be legitimate speech.

As an integral part of this scheme, the ‘reputation management’ company hired by Blake Finance Ltd creates a website that purports to be a ‘news’ site. This site is designed to look legitimate at a glance, but any degree of scrutiny reveals it as the charade it is.

The company copies the ‘negative’ content and posts it “on the fake ‘news’ site, attributing it to a separate author,” then gives it “a false publication date on the ‘news’ website that predated the original publication.

The reputation company then sent Google a Digital Millennium Copyright Act notice claiming the original website infringed copyright. After a cursory examination of the fake news site, Google frequently accepts the notice and delists the content.

In committing numerous offences, Blake Finance Ltd either premeditated actions or were unaware of the consequences. Despite hiring an agency to make Google disregard any negative information about Blake Finance Ltd, ignorance does not excuse this wrongdoing.

Fake DMCA notices have targeted articles highlighting the criminal activity of prominent people to hide their illegal behavior. These people, which include US, Russian, and Khazakstani politicians as well as members from elite circles including the mafia and those with massive financial power, are all connected – and alleged corruption ranging from child abuse to sexual harassment is exposed when exploring evidence found at these URLs. It appears there’s a disturbing level of influence being exerted here that needs further investigation before justice can be served. FSMSmart is certainly keeping interesting company here.

The Reputation Laundering

Rogue Reputation agencies use spurious copyright claims and fake legal notices to remove and obscure articles linking clients to allegations of tax avoidance, corruption, and drug trafficking. Most of these reputation agencies are based offshore, mainly in Russia, India, and Eastern Europe, and they do not worry about complying with US-based laws.

The content in all of the articles for which the fraudulent DMCA notices have been sent relates to allegations of criminal allegations, including corruption, child abuse, sexual harassment, human trafficking and financial fraud against businesses and individuals with ultra-high net worth.

In addition to the misuse of the DMCA takedown process, there is a notable absence of enforcement concerning perjury violations. The statutory requirement related to perjury is designed to deter copyright holders from submitting fraudulent or knowingly false takedown requests, as they may face legal consequences for making false declarations under penalty of perjury. However, to date, there have been no known instances of any individual being prosecuted for perjury in connection with the submission of false DMCA takedown notices.

This lack of enforcement has emboldened copyright holders to exploit the DMCA takedown process to suppress dissent, criticism, or other unfavorable content, without fear of legal repercussions.

Some of the people and businesses who have employed this tactic to remove legitimate content from Google illegally include a Spanish businessman-turned-cocaine-trafficker, Organised crime, an Israeli-Argentine banker accused of laundering money for Hugo Chávez’s regime, a French “responsible” mining company accused of tax evasion, child molesters and sexual predators. Blake Finance Ltd is in great company ….

What else is Blake Finance Ltd hiding?

We encourage you to ‘Dork‘ Google by searching for keyword combinations such as [Blake Finance Ltd] + {Negative Keyword, such as Scam, Fraud, Complaints, Lawsuit, Sanction, etc} on Google. It’s likely if you scroll down to the bottom of this Google search results, you’ll stumble upon this Legal Takedown notice (pictured below)

To make such an investigation possible, we encourage more online service providers to come forward and share copies of content removal requests with industry experts and researchers. If you have any information on Blake Finance Ltd that you want to share with experts and journalists, kindly email the author directly at [email protected].

All communications are strictly confidential and safeguarded under a comprehensive Whistleblower Policy, ensuring full protection and anonymity for individuals who provide information.