What an elaborate scam!
I am a mathematican and financial programmer working in the Financial Services Industry.
I entered the world of Astro Holdings on the back of a seemingly credible Readers Digest article, which has since been taken down. At the time of writing there are still a few articles from reasonably mainstream publications that link to Astro Holdings.
Having never dabbled in crypto before I invested £500 using a credit card. Almost immediately the account started making money. Seven gain trades on average for every loss trade. I was making about 1% per day. The thing is, my dear readers, if that return continued and assuming 250 trading days per year, I would be the richest man on earth within 8 years! (£500 multiplied by 1.01 to the 250 * 8th power).
So big red flags went up. Of course I received many calls from our friends Andrew Mason, Nate Lawrence, and currently David Bloomberg. Nice name - rather suspect - another red flag going up. I have thus been spared the amusement of talking with Felipe Perez (the first and last names of two Formula 1 drivers). The first three have continually pressed me for further investment. Fortunately for me I fobbed them off with delays. Due diligence and all that. Old habits die hard. As we speak I'm still in that phase. Although the returns have gone up astronomically. We are truly in the land of the fairies now. Account up ten-fold in three months! Richest man in the world in under 3 years!
Yes the website itself looks pretty convincing. I imagine there are at least 10,000 lines of code on the back end for that level of functionality. Digging deeper it looks like a fork from a set of similar sites doing the rounds on the internet right now. In other words, all the fraudsters are using some template. I haven't examined the tick data particularly carefully but my best guess is that they correspond to tick data in lag. That's how they make "algorithmic gains" before your very eyes - a sort of insider trading scam in reverse time. There are a couple of other issues - the major one is that the password is sent in plain text to the server - another red flag there and make sure you don't use one of your normal passwords as they will be able to read it as fluently as they can read Romanian.
Quite recently there has been a domain name change to astro-holdings.co.uk. My guess is that is to fob off some folk and to rig the stats on sites such as this one.
Of course I am chasing my credit card company for the return of funds (legally my contract is with them).
Two big rules of thumb ladies and gentlemen. (i) never invest in an unregulated entity unless you are prepared to lose your entire investment, (ii) nobody in the world can reliably make more than 10% returns in a year. Sure the second point happens sometimes, early bitcoin long positions and returns on lottery tickets. That could happen to you, but it won't.
I am one of the lucky ones. Apart from the disgrace the perpetrators should feel in setting up such a scam, what also bothers me is that some of the folk behind this are smart enough to have had quite a distinguished career.