In a world rife with audacious fraudsters — from an Australian bartender who took advantage of an ATM glitch to withdraw over $1.5 million AUD to a Nigerian who sold a fake airport to Japan — the high-octane world of racing has proven no exception, as exemplified by Joshua Cartu, the race car driver accused of orchestrating a multi-million dollar fraud scheme who was recently detained and swiftly released in Russia.

RELATED: Ferrari Cavalcade Review: The Grandest Tour On Earth

Who TF Is Josh Cartu?

Josh Cartu, a 45-year-old Canadian-Israeli “influencer” from St. Catharines, Ontario, has vaulted to the pinnacle of the high-stakes racing and luxury automobile world. As the son of a used-car dealer, his entry into life would take a rather unpredictable path when he entered the gambling software industry in Europe.

His flamboyant lifestyle, which included a fleet of Ferraris and a Rolls-Royce, caught the attention of hundreds of thousands of his followers on social media, further endearing him to the hearts of car enthusiasts and celebrity hobnobbers alike.

Everything seemed to be going well for Cartu in 2016 when Forbes Magazine featured him, his entrepreneurship, and his passion for race car driving. But behind the facade of high life, a storm was brewing.

Ferrari Fugitives

According to U.S. authorities, between 2013 and 2018, Cartu and his brothers, David and Jonathan—also known as the Ferrari Fugitives—were the ringleaders of a multi-million dollar fraud enterprise.

The operation was based on the trade in binary options: a high-stakes investment that offers an individual a potential profit—or loss—on betting that an asset’s value will increase or decrease over a short period of time. While there is nothing inherently illegal about the use of binary options, several investigations are pointing out that the operation by Cartu was anything but legitimate.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged Cartu with running a fraudulent binary options trading scheme that received over $165 million USD in connection with illegal, off-exchange binary options transactions. The brothers reportedly operated out of Israel, where binary trading options remained legal until 2017, using regulatory arbitrage to their advantage.

The scale of the alleged fraud is vast. Financial regulators are estimating the Cartu brothers’ efforts to have raked in as much as $233 million USD.

In 2021, the U.S. government filed a fraud lawsuit against Cartu, among others, citing that they conspired to commit wire fraud. More charges come overseas, where the Ontario Securities Commission also said that in 2020, Cartu and his co-conspirators illegally obtained $1.4 million USD from about 700 Ontario investors.

Due to outstanding warrants and charges, Cartu was detained on August 19 at St. Petersburg at Pulkovo International Airport by the Russian Interior Ministry’s Interpol bureau. However, a Russian court released him on August 24 because U.S. officials had not filed the official request for extradition with their Russian counterparts.

Russia and the U.S. do not have an extradition agreement, but the two countries carried out a high-profile prisoner swap at the beginning of the month. It remains to be seen if the U.S. will officially request the extradition of someone once seen as a glamorous person behind the wheel.