Crypto Payments | FinTelegram News

April 13, 2021

Licensed Estonian scam-facilitator Woodstock and its payments network

We have recently discovered the licensed Estonian crypto payment processor Woodstock OÜ as a payment processor in the Trade Com scams network with GlobalSpotFX, Spotfinex, FXonspot, or TopEuroFX. These scams' victims deposited money through Woodstock's bank accounts with Lithuanian financial institutions Finolita Unio UAB, GlobalNetInt UAB, the Maltese Secure Trading Financial Services Limited, and crypto exchanges. Woodstock is controlled by Marianna Charalampous and does not even have a functioning website.

April 7, 2021

Estonian Compliance Issue – The Estonian lawyer Igor Torsin and Eesti Firma

We asked a few days ago, who is this Igor Torsin would be. A busy man for sure. We identified him as a director of nine FIU-licensed crypto payment processors in Estonia. Among these are also some that operate as scam facilitators - PayTechno or Steveyx d/b/a Venus Exchange. Evidently, he is the frontman for getting and maintaining the FIU license. We learned that Torsin is a lawyer working in Tallinn, Estonia, at Eesti Firma OÜ, a company builder specialized in crypto licenses, among other things.

March 10, 2021

Estonian scam facilitator Payeer and its Russian owner

Fincana OÜ, a crypto payment processor, licensed in Estonia by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) as the competent regulator, operates the payment processor Payeer (www.payeer.com) together with Paycorp Limited, which is registered in Vanuatu and licensed by the VFSC. This payment processor has increasingly appeared as a scam facilitator over the last couple of months. For example, in the scams of the Capital Letter group against which regulators issued numerous warnings. The beneficial owner of Payeer is the Russian Liubov Svezhentseva.

Crypto Payments

February 10, 2021

CryptoPayIn – Another scam-facilitating Estonian crypto payment processor

Estonian crypto payment processors are a problem for retail investors and consumers in the EU. Especially those who have received a license to operate crypto payment services from the relevant Estonian regulator FIU. Thus, they call themselves EU-regulated payment processors on the website pretending to be a serious business. Unfortunately, many of these licensed crypto payment providers are scam hard-core facilitators and/or are related to scam operators. Most recently, we identified CryptoPayIn at the Financial Resident broker scam as a payment provider.

January 10, 2021

Scam-facilitating Crypto Payment Processor Zichain and its network

Zichain OÜ is a crypto payment processor and exchange licensed by the Estonian FIU. Besides, the company is also licensed as a general financial services provider and is doing business as Zichain, Cryptoeye, and Rashbe. Currently, one can only conduct crypto transactions through Zachain. Rashbe is associated with scams like Swiss500 or ApcoFX. In turn, Swiss500 is associated with Michael Zetser, who, together with Ilan Frankos, is behind the scam-facilitating high-risk payment processor GumBallPay.

January 7, 2021

R4I – Estonian Crypto Payment Processor Bitxtech

BitxTech is a crypto payment processor and exchange operated by CryptoFactury OÜ, registered and licensed in Estonia. Israeli Or Bar, born in September 1987, is registered as the director. BitxTech has increasingly come to the attention of broker scams in recent months as a supporting payment processor. It is also interesting to note that BitxTech and XchangePro use the same application and identical onboarding processes. They appear to be clones or white label solutions.