The Italian regulator Consob ordered the black-out of five illegal financial websites increasing the total number of black-out orders to 708. Against two of the scams, the Consob ordered to be blacked out FinTelegram has already issued warnings – Tetris Group and FinoMarkets. Both of them have been around for years already and received warnings from different financial markets regulators! It would be desirable if other regulators were also empowered by their parliament to block access to illegal websites.
Like clockwork, the Italian regulator Consob has again brought the news about websites closed for access by Italian consumers every Monday because of illegal financial offers. Today, six new sites have received black-out orders. Since July 2019, the Italian watchdog has blocked 522 websites for the Italian market. Consob is currently, unfortunately, the only European regulator that has this power in regulatory enforcement. It would be desirable if other jurisdictions also provide their regulators such authorization.
We have already warned against the Finomarkets (www.finomarkets.com) scam several times. A few weeks ago, the Spanish regulator CNMV warned, and now the UK FCA issued an investor warning. The Finomarkets website does not specify an operator or a competent jurisdiction. Coinicash is the facilitating payment processor for credit and debit card payments with Texcent and AdvCash, who process the payments. Victims’ deposits are represented and miscoded as purchases of cryptocurrencies on the Coinicash exchange.
It is indeed a huge scam network. Scams will typically either take offshore companies or simply invent fake companies. Only rarely, they are operated by companies in Europe as is the case with the Capital Letter scam network. Capital Letter GmbH, registered in Munich, Germany was the operator of several large scams until the end of 2020. In addition, two other companies also registered in Germany, Brunnlitz GmbH and Tokkata Software GmbH, participated in the scams. All three companies are operated by Ukrainian individuals; all received warnings from regulators.
The Swiss regulator FINMA has recently issued an investor warning against the Wellington Holdings scam (www.wellingtonholdings.com). The scam operators do not disclose any information about the legal entity or persons but give Bleicherweg 10 in 8002 Zurich, Switzerland, as the address. This is bullshit, says FINMA. As a payment processor, we once again found SysPay, regulated by the Maltese regulator MFSA, in criminal collusion with Coinicash and AdvCash. We also noticed this combination most recently in the Cento GX scam.
Spanish financial markets authority CNMV issued a warning against FinoMarkets on September 13, 2021. The scam's website does not specify an operator or a competent jurisdiction. However, we have again Coinicash acting as a payment processor for credit and debit card payments. Coinicash is again facilitating in its capacity as a registered merchant with Texcent and AdvCash, who actually process the payments. Victims' deposits are apparently represented and miscoded as purchases of cryptocurrencies on the Coinicash exchange.