Fulham claims to have performed due diligence before entering a partnership with IUX. But missed that the company used fake profiles, fake employees, fake reviews – and three investor alerts against it from national financial regulators.
By Martin Calladine
In September 2024, Fulham announced it had signed a deal with a new official CFD partner named IUX. CFDs – contracts for difference – are a sophisticated form of gambling, allowing people to profit on price changes of various financial products using leverage. IUX offers up to 3,000x leverage, which means that you can win or lose three-thousand times your stake. In the UK, where IUX does not operate, CFD leverage is capped at 30x.
With Fulham’s last CFD partner Titan Capital Markets having been exposed as a fraud and dumped by the club in 2022, the deal with IUX brought inevitable attention. Journalists and fans immediately raised questions about the company. Questions like who owns it, where is it based and who works for it?
The first small clue that something might be amiss was that, when Fulham announced the partnership, in a now deleted news story on its website, no names of employees of IUX were quoted, just the “Board of Directors.” A subsequent search for senior IUX staff on LinkedIn showed that all its UK and US people – numbering more than ten – were fake profiles, using images from other websites or stock shots of models.
Take Bobby Thomas. His LinkedIn profile said he was an IUX “content creator” based in Croydon, south London. Bobby claimed to have worked at the company for over five years – his only job – and to have an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Linkedin profile of IUX employee “Bobby Thomas”
In fact, Bobby Thomas doesn’t exist. His profile picture is a model from a photo library, whose image has been used to promote, among other things, wedding gifts, clip-on microphones, hair stylists and sperm donation.
Stock shots of “Bobby Thomas”
Numerous other LinkedIn profiles of people purporting to be IUX employees were similarly bogus. There was a “Drif Reknell,” an imaginary “Graphic Web Designer” whose image was taken, perhaps appropriately, from an Adobe corporate film. Another fake employee, “Anthony Harrelson,” a fictional sales manager from Florida, had a profile using a photo of a Ukrainian personal trainer called Oleg Mikryukov.
When asked, in early September 2024, who had created these profiles, IUX initially denied any knowledge of them, saying, “unfortunately, we are unable to prevent individuals from falsely claiming affiliation with our company,” and “we will pursue appropriate action against any persons falsely claiming to be associated with our company as employees.”
IUX LinkedIn post on fake employees
“Establish credibility”
Some months later, in January 2025, the company changed its story, saying that it had created, “profiles using Western names and images as part of an early strategy to establish credibility in a competitive market.” It went on to say that, “while this approach was misguided, it was not malicious.”
At the launch of the deal with Fulham, some fans spotted that IUX’s TrustPilot rating was suspended for what the site said were “fake reviews.” When asked, IUX said that the suspension of its TrustPilot account had occurred because a marketing agency that it had hired to help promote the business had, without its knowledge, created the reviews. It said it no longer used the agency and had been working with TrustPilot for over a year to reestablish its rating – something that happened in early 2025.
IUX TrustPilot page, 2024
Investor alerts
With the focus among Fulham fans on fake employees and fake reviews, what got less attention was that, in February 2024, the Ukrainian National Securities and Stock Market Commission (NSSMC) – the country’s financial regulator, equivalent to the US SEC and the UK FCA – had added IUX to its list of “dubious investment projects.” According to the NSSMC, IUX “is likely to be offering financial services to Ukrainian consumers. It does not hold an [sic] Ukrainian financial services licence from the NSSMC, and is not authorised by a licensee.”
When asked about the NSSMC’s alert, IUX said it was the result of a mistake by the NSSMC, which it was attempting to correct via its lawyers. To date, the alert remains on the NSSMC website.
And then, in June 2024, another investor alert was issued. This time it was the Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission, the financial regulator of the country where IUX seems to do most of its business, which said that IUX was running an “unlicensed securities, derivatives and digital asset business.”
Before Fulham had even signed a deal with IUX, two financial regulators had raised the red flag about the company.
In February 2025, two red flags became three when the Securities Commission of Malaysia issued an alert saying that IUX was, “carrying on unlicensed capital market activities of dealing in securities.”
Investor alert from the Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission
Which means that one of Fulham’s newest commercial partners, a company which it assured fans it had done its due diligence on before recommending it to fans, stands accused by three national financial regulators of offering unlicenced financial services.
False claims
And even as IUX has appeared on Fulham’s website and on pitch-side displays on matchdays, further questions have emerged about some of the historical claims the business has made about itself.
Most troublingly of all, while IUX says it has no staff in the UK and has never targeted UK consumers, this is not what it has always claimed. Archived versions of the IUX website show that, between at least 25th June 2022 and 2nd April 2023 – a period of more than nine months – the company claimed it was “established in London in 2016” and was a “trusted and leading United Kingdom regulated broker.” Elsewhere on its site, IUX claimed, wrongly, that it was the “largest CFDs provider in the world.”
IUX website, April 2023
YouTube videos of traders opening accounts in 2022 show the UK as an option in the country dropdown and IUX did not add the UK to its list of countries which could not use its site until sometime in August 2024.
When IUX later provided a response to these findings, it strongly denied ever having targeted or serving UK customers and said that it had opened a UK company initially to protect its IP here and with a view to a potential FCA registration – something it eventually decided not to do.
On the question of why, if it does not and has never targeted UK consumers, its website had claimed that the company was founded in, based in, processed trades in and was regulated in the UK, IUX said that this was the result of poor language skills in its web design team and a failure to proofread its own website.
Beyond that, there have also been questions about other of the company’s registration claims. For a period, IUX’s website said that it was a member of the US National Futures Association – an industry body for companies selling derivatives – and displayed a certificate to demonstrate it. When contacted, the NFA said that IUX is not and has never been a member, saying: “A search of CFTC and NFA records reflects no record of a CFTC registration or NFA membership for IUX Markets (“IUX”). Because IUX is not a NFA member, NFA does not regulate or otherwise supervise IUX in any way. Any statements made to the contrary are inaccurate.”
In response, IUX says that it was registered with the NFA via a third-party and can prove it. It has, nonetheless, removed the NFA membership claim from its website.
Meanwhile, in 2020, marketing tweets from IUX targeted at the Thai market included some small print claiming that IUX was regulated by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission through a company called Charlgate.
Small print from IUX tweet, 2020
Charlgate is a real company – it operates a number of brands as part of a large trading company – and the registered number given is correct, but IUX does not seem to have been licenced through the company. When contacted to ask if IUX had licenced by Charlgate, the company’s response was unequivocal: “They definitely were NOT. It’s a false claim.”
Even if you accept IUX’s explanations for some of the above findings – that they are a series of innocent errors – the picture is still a troubling one. Here, then, is a financial services company being endorsed by a Premier League club with three investor warnings against it and a history of making materially misleading claims about fundamental facts of its business. There is a reason why financial services companies are generally subject to much closer oversight than other industries and why their marketing materials are expected to be clear and accurate: the impact of people being misled about money, even inadvertently, can be huge.
Ownership
Beyond the concerns about how IUX markets itself are some even more fundamental claims.
Over time, IUX has listed at least five different addresses in its footer, including places it is registered and “processes trades.” Most recently, it has published an address in Cyprus, which it calls “the physical address of the company.” However, a visit to the address by a broker review site in October 2024 showed this was just a brass plate address where the company’s law firm is based.
Who actually owns and operates IUX is no more certain. The only named individuals on any IUX corporate press releases have been a “Ryuuta Roma,” “Ryuuta Toma” and “Ryuuta Takayoshi.” None of these people appear to exist.
But by tracking shareholders through non-trading UK companies established by IUX and cross-referencing addresses against old versions of the IUX website, one name emerges: a Thai man in his late 30s called Takin Jitjanuruk.
Shareholder list for “Center Cluster Ltd”, formally “IUX Market Ltd”, UK company 12780035
Mr Takin has a very small digital footprint, but he is shown in a Dun & Bradstreet listing as CEO of a company called Woxa. And Woxa is… an online trading platform selling CFDs. And like IUX, Woxa has an investor alert against it from the Ukrainian financial regulator.
Woxa is registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where it shares an office address with IUX. And like IUX, until recently, Woxa’s TrustPilot rating was suspended for fake reviews.
There are other, more conclusive links. A great deal of IUX’s trading content that it published on LinkedIn and YouTube features individuals who list themselves on LinkedIn as working for Woxa or who have previously presented Woxa videos.
Woxa’s website, meanwhile, claims wrongly that it is regulated by the Mauritius Financial Services Commission.
And so, not only does IUX have a range of serious questions about its operations, it appears to be connected to a larger group of companies whose regulatory status and operations also raise concerns.
According to Fulham’s now deleted press release, IUX is “committed to transparency and ethical practices” and “aims to be the trusted partner for traders.” But despite repeated requests, IUX declined to identify who owns IUX or what Mr Takin’s connection might be to it. It likewise declined to provide evidence that the claimed identity of its spokesperson – which had an almost non-existent digital footprint – is linked to a real person.
Before publication, we submitted a list of questions to IUX and Fulham. Here’s the response we received from IUX:
We cannot comment without the whole article as context matters as well
We note however that after nearly a year of exhaustive scrutiny, your efforts have yielded no “smoking gun,” no credible evidence of misconduct, and no genuine client complaints.
You continue to grasp at minor details, misconstrue innocent actions like dropdown menus as sinister conspiracies, and publish incomplete or misleading statements.
Your repeated failures highlight not just your incompetence as an investigator but your wilful disregard for accuracy and integrity.
We urge you to abandon your unfounded allegations and biased narrative, as your current approach serves only to undermine your credibility further.
Legal Warning and Cease-and-Desist Notice :
You are hereby formally demanded to immediately cease and desist all defamatory and misleading publications concerning IUX.
Should you choose to persist with your baseless allegations, we will not hesitate to initiate comprehensive legal proceedings, seeking substantial damages, against any party involved in the dissemination of those dubious and unfounded and biased accusation and full compensation for reputational harm.
Be advised, our legal retaliation will be swift, decisive, and exhaustive leaving no measure unaddressed.
Govern yourself accordingly
Warmest regards,
Skyla