This is the second article in a week I've seen on binary options. The earlier one I read called it a scam, but never described the scammy part. I mean, seems fair enough to me: financial instrument either hits the mark or it doesn't, if I think AAPL's going to hit $120 and my stock platform of choice says it did, pretty straight forward, right?

This articles takes pages to get to the point: the scammy part. But it gets there, and I'll save you the scrolling. That part above where I just look up AAPL on Yahoo! Finance? Yeah, that doesn't work because the "brokerage" has it's own algorithm, and (big surprise here) turns out NASDAQ might say AAPL hit $120, but the "brokerage"'s platform says, aw shucks, it only hit $119.84 that day. Tooooo bad.

That and, much like trying to unsubscribe from AOL, they'll block you on getting your money out of the account, complete with retention agents.

I used to have a company like this as my clients. They got pretty irritated when I kept calling them a gambling app (they were not entirely above board. to say the least).

A call: "Wait, so no securities actually change hands? Or derivatives? What is the user buying exactly?"