tamir | FinTelegram News

Author: tamir

May 9, 2021

OctaPay – The exposed fraud, the vanished money, and many open questions!

According to his LinkedIn profile, Christian van Biezen lives and works in Limassol, Cyprus, one of the European powerhouses of Forex brokers, which are part of a high-risk industry, whether regulated or unregulated. Consequently, a highly active high-risk payment processor scene has developed around these Cypriot forex brokers. OctaPay was one of them, and Christian van Biezen was its director until he realized it was defrauding its merchants. So he left in December 2020, exposing the crime. As a result, OctaPay and its people vanished with most of its customer funds.

High-risk payment processors

May 8, 2021

Strange! iPayTotal’s Chief Experience Officer and her LinkedIn account vanished!

Does anybody know what a Chief Experience Officer (CEO?) is or does? If you don't, we happily welcome you to the club. We didn't know either. Then in December 2020, we were contacted by Davina Mungroo of iPayTotal about our reviews of the high-risk payment processor. Of course, they would be totally unjustly negative. We then learned on iPayTotal's website that Davina, as CEO, was responsible for how her company is perceived in reviews and reports. Until she vanished.

May 6, 2021

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.

May 3, 2021

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.

May 2, 2021

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.

April 30, 2021

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.

April 28, 2021

Unbelievable. The dirty wealth of the boiler room fraudster James Morra!

Israeli Gal Barak was sentenced to four years in prison for investment fraud and money laundering as one of the principals of the cybercrime organization E&G Bulgaria in the Vienna Cybercrime Trials in September 2020. His wife, Marina Barak, is also charged and is currently on trial. Gal Barak is currently being extradited to Germany, where he will also be charged. In Germany, a former Bulgarian co-conspirator responsible for dozens of victims as boiler room manager is already waiting in prison. This Bulgarian going by the stage name James Morra earned a small fortune by defrauding unsuspecting victims.

April 23, 2021

New – List of scam-facilitating Estonian crypto payment processors

Digital currencies are the future in one way or another. For a few months now, online payment pioneer PayPal has also been accepting bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. Estonia is currently the epicenter of European crypto payment processors. As of mid-2020, the Estonian FIU had issued more than 3,000 licenses (report here). Unfortunately, many of them are used to facilitate scams and illegal payment services. We have drafted a list of Estonian crypto payment companies that have come to our attention in scams.

April 23, 2021

Update PayTechno – Beneficial owner from Israel, another platform, and Bulgarian offices

We are really excited to be able to rely on our loyal whistleblowers. Therefore, we have received some important information in response to our Request 4 Information (R4I). Based on KYC data, we can establish that scam-facilitating PayTechno OÜ is controlled by Israeli Asaf Izhak Rubin as its beneficial owner. Besides, we have received information about the high-risk payment Gateway ironically branded as "The Best Gateway" offering payment gateway services for high-risk online merchants. The office of the group seems to be in Sofia, Bulgaria.

April 22, 2021

R4I – Scam-facilitating licensed Estonian crypto payment processor PayTechno

We already know Igor Torsin. Don't we? The 62-year old Estonian lawyer works for Estonian company builder Eesti Firma OÜ and is a director at nine FIU-licensed Estonian crypto companies (read this report). Among them is PayTechno OÜ, supervised by the FIU with license number FVT000151. The company was registered in May 2018 and operates two domains www.cryptopaytech.com and www.paytechno.com. The latter is one of the worst scam-facilitators as a crypto payment processor. We would like to know more.

April 22, 2021

Daily Affiliate Warning – RocketChart broker scam facilitated by PayTechno and iPayTotal

Today we get an email telling us the secret to making money. The link in the email takes us (again) to LPONLINE or TopOnTechBiz and the article about the next big startup after Google and Facebook. We already know the campaign. Still, we are promised that we will get rich with it in 7 days. To sign up, we are redirected (again) to the BitQT campaign on Amazing Offers (www.amazing-offers.online/bitqt), further to Bitcoin Revolution and then, finally, to the scam broker RocketChart.

April 22, 2021

Chasing Scam Facilitators – The Vienna Cybercrime Trials, SpotOption, and PandaTS

Israeli Gal Barak was sentenced in September 2020 to four years in prison and millions in restitution payments for investment fraud and money laundering in the Vienna Cybercrime Trials. Barak also faces charges in Germany. He was the head of the cybercrime organization E&G Bulgaria, which operated broker scams such as XtraderFX, SafeMarkets, Golden Markets, or OptionStarsGlobal. Payvision was its main payment facilitator, and PandaTS, the white label provider, which Barak charges with similar arguments as the U.S. SEC does in its SpotOption fraud complaint.