Ido Samuel, who was freed from prison six years ago, has quietly returned to managing money for private investors, according to testimony obtained by Calcalist. The reports say he handled investments for a double-digit number of clients in recent years, with each client putting in anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of shekels, for a total of millions of shekels transferred into Samuel’s personal bank account. The activity focused mainly on stocks and options, along with regular and leveraged funds tied to cryptocurrencies.
Clients signed agreements acknowledging that Samuel had no license to manage portfolios or give investment advice. Under those terms, he would receive 20% of monthly or quarterly profits, but he did not commit to compensate clients for losses. Samuel, convicted in 2013 of fraud offenses and released after about five years in prison, has since presented himself as an educator and lecturer on capital-market trading, while not publicly disclosing that he was again managing client money. In messages seen by Calcalist, he told one client in August 2024 that publicity about him had helped him recruit 16 new clients.
One of Samuel’s larger clients, Roy Kanaf, is now publicly demanding repayment after losing his money. Kanaf says he transferred about $129,000 in several installments, beginning with $15,000 in August 2024, then $73,000 in November and another $41,000 later that month. He says the money was wiped out in crypto-related trading amid sharp drops in Bitcoin and Ethereum prices. In one message, Samuel complained about the difficulty of raising capital and compared himself to Messi being confined to a lower league. In another, after Kanaf said he was cashing out an investment managed through BlackRock, Samuel wrote that his own potential was far greater than that of a firm like BlackRock.
Trying to recover some of the losses, Kanaf opened a separate trading account and Samuel transferred 50,000 shekels into it, but that account also suffered heavy losses and shrank to about 11,000 shekels, a drop of nearly 80%. Samuel told Calcalist that he turned to client money management after leaving prison because he could not get work or a bank loan, and that the first clients did well. He said three clients who entered at the end of 2024 lost money because of the crypto selloff, and insisted that clients knew he was working in a risky field. He added that he had managed money for 25 clients over the years, that 15 were active from 2021 through 2026, and that three of them lost money. He now says he has stopped managing money for others entirely and will trade only for himself, while continuing to teach trading, especially options.
