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Daily Affiliate Alert – Fraudulent Bitcoin Worldwide campaign promotes broker scams
Today we receive an email in which we are informed that there would still be a credit balance of more than €1,800 on our account. They had already tried to contact us several times to let us have our money! Within 48 hours, they would delete the account if we did not contact them. OK, let’s have a look. The link in the email takes us to the BITCOIN WORLDWIDE campaign, where we are promised a bitcoin bonus. Then we are redirected to the YuanPay Group (www.yuanpay-system.com) site, which finally redirects us to payment pages of various scam brokers.
Latest Updates
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Italian Consob has ordered the black-out of five more scam websites
Sure, scammers launch most likely a few dozen new websites every single day. Thus, closing down five per week doesn't sound too impressive, but it's a start. Like every week, the Italian regulator Consob announced the blackout of five new websites of illegally operating financial services providers. Consob is the only EU regulator to take this effective measure. It would be desirable if more member states would create a legal basis for blocking illegal or fraudulent websites. Forza Italia!
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Tradixa broker scam facilitated by Jubiter, Paysend, and PandaTS
A few weeks ago, we warned against the broker scam Tradixa, operating with different domains. Currently, www.tradixa.net is the active domain of the scam allegedly operated by Tradixa Ltd, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, and All Media EOOD, Bulgaria. The facilitating payment processors back then have been Praxis Cashier and ePay. While Praxis Cashier evidently terminated Tradixa, we have been able to establish that Estonian-Slovakian Jubiter and Spanish Paysend also facilitated the broker scam.
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GlobalNetInt CEO launched new financial services venture Findiban
Liudvikas Kulikauskas, founder, CEO, and shareholder of GlobalNetInt UAB (GNI), an e-Money Institution (EMI) regulated by the Bank of Lithuania with authorization code LB000434, has founded a payment processor Ifind MB d/b/a Findiban (www.findiban.com), together with his wife, Egle Kulikauskiene. The company is apparently positioned as a high-risk payment processor, offering businesses a range of financial services, including SEPA IBAN account, white-label FinTech services, or credit card processing.
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Whistleblower proves! StoxMarket boiler room scam is active again!
FinTelegram News was founded in early 2018 with the mission of investor protection. Since then, we have faced numerous threats, DDoS attacks, and also lawsuits. We have survived everything so far and defeated some of the bad players. Some companies have lost their licenses, and some scammers have been sentenced to prison and fined millions for investment fraud. All this would not have been possible without whistleblowers. They are the heart of our project. Now a whistleblower has proven that the StoxMarket scam is indeed alive.
Payment Processors
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Investor Alert – Investors Center and Trading Academy 360 facilitate broker scams big style
Scams are facilitated by fraudulent marketing campaigns and malicious payment processors. Take the Triton Capital Markets broker, for example. The scam, allegedly operated by Karello D Buro LLC, registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, has been warned against by the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA) on February 18, 2021 (report here). However, it has been facilitated by Investors Center, Trading Academy 360, and Praxis Cashier. Here are a few more details.
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Investor Warning – Celox is another broker scam in the Plutus Racket
We have reported about Plutus Racket scams several times in the last few weeks. So far, thanks to our whistleblowers and with the information provided by victims, we have found the scam brands Plutus, Lucrum, and Galore. Apparently, the Celox (www.celox.live) scam also belongs to Plutus Racket. Furthermore, we have discovered Praxis Cashier, BitTheBank, XChangePro, and Polish Sales Master Z.O.O. as facilitating payment processors. Behind all these scam brands are the same boiler rooms in Bulgaria and the Balkans working with Anydesk.
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Polish-Lithuanian Epayblock again exposed as a scam-facilitating payment processor
Time and again! Recently, brought a Request 4 Information (R4I) regarding the regulated Lithuanian e-Money Institution Epayblock. This payment processor has been exposed as a partner of illegal payment processors such as Skylas, Merelita, Ristema, or BDIKA, which are involved in broker scams. These companies launder money through their bank accounts at Epayblock. Today, we discovered the Hungarian Dot Systems KFT, another illegal payment processor being a client of Epayblock.
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Update – RocketChart broker scam facilitated by PayTechno and iPayTotal
Fighting scammers and their facilitators is tought. The RocketChart scammers filed a copyright infringement report with Google and want the URL removed from Google Search results. The article would have previously appeared on the site www.write.as. For sure, FinTelegram wrote the warning. Our legal representatives have already taken the appropriate action. To us, it shows that the reports hit the scammers.
Cybercrime Court Cases
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Breaking News – Criminal complaints against Payvision and its founders
Payvision and its founder and former CEO Rudolf Booker are already subjects of the criminal proceedings in Germany and Austria. Uwe Lenhoff, the alleged mastermind of a cybercrime organization, was arrested in January 2019. He was a personal friend of Booker and used Payvision for his dirty business. Rudolf Booker was introduced to Lenhoff by Amsterdam real estate investor Dirk-Jan Bakker, a partner of Lenhoff, who was found dead in his prison cell in July 2020. Criminal charges have now been filed against Payvision and its founders for money laundering and investment fraud.
Regulatory Updates
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GlobalNetInt, Converta, and the StoxMarket connection
The Romanian CONVERTA DIGITAL MARKET S.R.L. (CONVERTA) is an authorized agent working for the Lithuanian EMI GlobalNetInt UAB (GNI), which the Bank of Lithuania regulates with the authorization code LB000434. CONVERTA has its registered office in Bucharest. There is nothing special about the Romanian payment processor except one former beneficial owner: at the time of the conclusion of the agent agreement with GNI, the Israeli Mordechay Litke was (or maybe still is) one of them. And he was one of the scammers behind StoxMarket et al.
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Investor Attention – Binary options scam StoxMarket is back online
We have already warned several times against the StoxMarket scam operated by the Israelis Mordechay Litke and Chaim Bornstein via their offshore entities Marketier Holdings Ltd, Yukon Global Ltd, and Technofin Ltd, using boiler rooms in Serbia and Albania. PandaTS-powered StoxMarkets has been one of the largest binary options scams between 2015 and 2019 until it suddenly vanished into thin air, leaving thousands of victims behind. It seems as if www.stoxmarket.com is back online, though.
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R4I – Secretive scam-facilitating payment processor Paystruct
In recent weeks, Paystruct (www.paystruct.com) has appeared more and more frequently as a payment processor in our analysis of scam brokers. Like many of the high-risk payment processors, Paystruct discloses very little information on its website. There is no indication of the legal entity and individuals behind it. Contact can be made by email or phone with a number in London. Also, there is no additional information on the merchant dashboard except that Paystruct is supposed to be the world's best closed-loop token payment system with payouts under 24 hours.
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