Lee Elbaz, a central figure in a large-scale binary options scam, continues to challenge the heavy prison sentence and the fine issued to her by the Maryland District Court.

Elbaz, who is the former CEO of Israeli-based Yukom Communications, a company linked to brands such as BinaryBook and Big Option, today filed a brief with the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. In the document, seen by FX News Group, Elbaz fights back opposes the arguments by the Department of Justice (DOJ) which stands behind the 264-month prison sentence and the $28 million restitution order as to Lee Elbaz.

Lee Elbaz and her confederates orchestrated a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme that targeted financially unsophisticated victims. The victims lost all or nearly all of their investments. At the center of this case were purported investments in “binary options.”

Elbaz and her co-conspirators facilitated this scheme through several companies that purportedly offered opportunities to invest in binary options. One such company was Yukom, based in Caesarea, Israel, and where Elbaz began working in May 2014. Over time, Elbaz ascended to become the CEO at Yukom.

She also had close ties to a company called Numaris, based in Tel Aviv, that similarly solicited clients to invest in binary options. Yukom and Numaris employees held themselves out to clients and potential clients as “brand managers” on behalf of two binary-option brands: Big Option and Binary Book. Finally, Elbaz communicated regularly with, and occasionally sent employees to, another company, Linkopia, based in Mauritius.

Victims who sent money to Yukom included victims from the United States.

According to Elbaz, the district court erred in determining the base offense level by including foreign losses caused by foreign conduct outside the United States.

She argues that the district court erred by holding her responsible for foreign losses that did not implicate the interests of the United States and which were lawful in Israel, her home country.

Thus, to include foreign losses to foreign customers, the court was required to determine whether Elbaz’s foreign business activities were unlawful where they occurred, she says. But the court performed no such comparative analysis, despite acknowledging that Elbaz’s business activities appeared to be “legal under Israeli law at least at one point in time.”

Elbaz says that the foreign conduct does not shed light on the gravity of the domestic offense because there is nothing to show that the foreign conduct constitutes an offense at all, except in the United States. Elbaz insists that her legal foreign conduct does not implicate United States’ interests and is “too attenuated”.

Elbaz insists that the court calculated her guideline range based on legal foreign conduct that should have been excluded from the estimate.

According to her, this has implications on the correct amount of the fine too. Elbaz argues that the correct loss amount, excluding foreign loss, “was $5,050,093, for an eighteen level enhancement.” The district court, however, included foreign loss and determined that the estimated loss was “$28,072,000, for a twenty-two level enhancement.”

The lawsuit continues at the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.