Inside “Smart Elite Trade”: seven phone numbers, a shuttered twin site and the bank accounts taking the money

Key facts

1. How it reaches people

The file opens with the story of one victim, extreme ice swimmer Amber Fillery, who describes how she lost her savings. It follows the pattern the industry calls pig butchering: a long con in which criminals build trust first and take the money later.

Telegram first. A friendly, ordinary-seeming message. Weeks of conversation. Then the talk turns to investing, “like advice from someone who cared”.

Then WhatsApp. The pitch changes. There is, she was told, a way to recover money she had already lost, through a special website and a limited chance.

A convincing dashboard. Charts moving the right way and screenshots of growing balances. She paid in, then paid in more.

The pressure never stopped. When doubts surfaced, the scammers had answers ready. Her savings went. She says she crossed lines she never expected to, including taking money from her family, and ended up incarcerated.

They came back. After she blocked the numbers, new contact details and fresh scripts appeared, with the same demand for “one last deposit”.

She also says that reporting got her little help: the money had already moved through mule accounts into Bitcoin, and tracing it is hard. Hers is the story of what happens when this machinery works. Note: the investigator’s file lists her among the victims of this operation but does not record which platform she paid.

2. The platform and its domains

The site presents itself as a global, regulated forex and crypto broker. It advertises daily profits of 6% and 24%, and 451% a day on its “Standard Plan”. At 451% a day, $1,000 would become more than $5,500 in 24 hours. No legitimate investment does that; it is the pricing of a Ponzi-style “HYIP” scheme.

The investigator says the company has traded under many names in different countries and has changed its domain along the way. Here is the table of domains in the file:

Where the file’s dates disagree. The notes give 3 March 2026 for the main domain, but the WHOIS screenshot says 6 March; we use the screenshot. For smartelitetrade.com, the WHOIS here says 14 December 2025, while ScamMinder analysed a four-month-old domain of that name in September 2024. The name may have lapsed and been re-registered. This is unresolved.

3. What the site tells visitors

The site’s contact page lists a UK mobile number, +44 7950 969709, a Slough address and a support email. In the investigator’s screenshot the email domain is smartelitetrade.com: the same domain the site later tried to use as its mail server. Our own earlier capture recorded the “pro” spelling, so the site may have changed. Either way, the contact details point to the shuttered twin domain.

The domain and contact details don't match

The site is smartelitetradespro.com, but its own listed support email is support@smartelitetradepro.com a different domain, missing an "s." Real companies don't misspell their own domain in their contact email; this is typical of scam operators running multiple cloned sites off one template.

I found a WHOIS/scam-checker record for that email's domain (smartelitetradepro.com): registered 17 October 2024, ownership hidden behind a privacy proxy ("WhoisSecure," address "18 San Carlos Street, California" a known generic proxy address, not a real corporate HQ), phone number with an Ohio area code despite the California address. Independent scanners gave it a trust score of 24.1/100 ("Suspicious. Unsafe. Doubtful.") with a 97/100 phishing score and 98/100 malware score.

The listed physical address, "Canada Rd, Slough SL1 5AB, United Kingdom," is a generic serviced-office address a common choice for shell/scam operations wanting a UK-sounding presence.

That address matches this one for Smartlite

There are no offices here, just a bunch of houses.

Testimonial page stole people’s identity:One of the people who they stole his identity is Mat Cussack works as a freelancer copywriter for a number of startups and when we checked we found that a lot of companies are using his face to scam people.

Links: https://www.fearlessmotivation.com/author/matt-cusack/

4. Regulators and rating sites

The site claims to be regulated. The evidence does not back that up.

The claim that they hold a “Category 3 Investment service License no. IS/56519 issued by the Malta Financial Services Authority  and appears to make unauthorised use and reference to company details of an MFSA licensed investment firm.

License number IS/56519 and the "Category 3 investment services" terminology actually belong to the regulatory framework of the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA). Financial scammers frequently clone or copy legitimate regulatory text from one country, alter the country name poorly (e.g., swapping "Malta" for "US"), and use it to deceive investors into thinking they are legitimate.

They are operating with fake regulatory credentials

The investigator reports that the company is not registered with the FCA or the FSCA.

WikiFX lists “Smart Elite Trade” as Not Regulated with a score of 1.88/10, flags “No forex trading license found” and labels its regulatory licence “questionable” and its operating region “suspicious”. It gives the same smartelitetrade.com contact email.

Wikibit carries a matching high-risk listing: forex.wikibit.com and wikifx.com.

The FCA’s warning list carries a family of near-identically named unauthorised firms, including Perfect Elite Trade, Elite Trading Platform, Smart Trade Investment and Smart Trading Concept. “Smart Elite Trade” is not individually named there as of our check. The shared naming shows a template, not a single operator.

5. Hosting, and the error that gave the game away

The older domain, smartelitetrade.com, sits on a server at 84.247.166.188 in Germany. Its WHOIS status is now “client hold”, which fits the site being shut down.

On the live platform, the investigator registered an account and could log in. During sign-up the site threw an unhandled Laravel error with debugging on. It revealed:

A server path of the form /home/bestmark/smartelitetradespro.com/account/, so the hosting account is called “bestmark”.

The software: Laravel with Fortify sign-in and the SwiftMailer email library, consistent with a packaged broker-site kit.

The fault: the mail host mail.smartelitetrade.com “failed: Name or service not known”. The site was configured to send email through the dead twin domain.

6. The phone numbers

Victims are contacted on WhatsApp from numbers in different countries. The investigator logged six WhatsApp numbers and one more US number. Country and region come from free number-lookup sites; US numbers can be internet-based, so the area code is only a guide. The profile names are the aliases they use.

7. The money trail: mule accounts

Payments were directed to South African bank accounts. The investigator’s list works out to seven accounts held by five people at four banks. Their names and account numbers are withheld here, and the screenshots below are blurred. Mule accounts are often opened by, or in the names of, people who are paid or pressured to lend them, and some holders may not know what the account is used for. Being named on a payee screen is not evidence of guilt.

8. The “RETURNPROFITS 247” link

The platform’s website links to a YouTube channel called “RETURNPROFITS 247” and the investigator ties the operation to a business called Returnprofit247 (returnprofit247.org). The name matters: ProtectionWeb’s 31 May 2024 report on the FSCA’s list of illegal financial-services entities includes RETURNPROFITS 247 among 25 entries, and the FSCA said none of the listed persons or entities is licensed or authorised to provide financial services in South Africa. It added that it was issuing the list “without commenting on the business” of those named. The shared name is a strong lead; it does not by itself prove the two are the same operator.

ProtectionWeb: FSCA issues list of illegal financial services entities

9. What we could not confirm

Who runs the platform. Domain ownership is hidden behind privacy services, and the numbers are aliases.

Which other sites share the Contabo server (84.247.166.188), and whether the “bestmark” account name appears on other domains.

Whether smartelitetraders.com and the smartelitetradepro.com spelling belong to the same operator.

Whether the account holders know what their accounts were used for.

Whether the victim profiled in section 1 paid this specific platform.

Trust scores from automated checkers are indicators, not verdicts. The conclusions here rest on the investigator’s screenshots and public records, and should be checked before republication or legal action.

10. If you’ve been approached

Don’t send money. Treat any balance on a dashboard as fictional.

Keep evidence: screenshots, payment references, chat logs, numbers and bank details you were given.

Call your bank now if you paid, so it can try to recall the payment and flag the receiving account.

Report it: the FSCA (0800 110 443), SAPS and your bank’s fraud line in South Africa, the FCA and Action Fraud in the UK.

Beware “recovery” offers. Contacts who offer to win back lost money are a second scam, and the file’s victim says she was targeted that way.

Sources

Investigator’s file “Smartlite trading”: WHOIS captures, number lookups, WhatsApp contact screenshots, payee screens and error-page capture

WikiFX: Smart Elite Trade and Wikibit listing

ScamMinder: smartelitetrade.com · Scam Detector: smartelitetradepro.com

ProtectionWeb: FSCA illegal-entities list (31 May 2024)

FCA Warning List · FCA Financial Services Register