Tag: PowerCash21

It is no secret to our readers that we have and are following the activities of payment processors in the high-risk area on our radar screen. Payment processors are the backbone of the cyber economy and are even more critical in the high-risk area. We have recently discovered several new domains through which high-risk merchants handle payment processes. These are likely to be connected to Payabl. We would like to know more about it.

In Munich, Markus Braun, the former CEO of collapsed German fintech unicorn Wirecard, is fighting to prove his innocence to the court. Yesterday Thursday, he used a PowerPoint presentation to prove that the controversial third-party acquiring business in Asia existed. The prosecutors' crown witness Oliver Bellenhaus denied the existence of this business. The judge was skeptical; Braun could not answer important questions conclusively. Here is the FinTelegram update!

On Day 3 of the Wirecard Trial, the prosecution's key witness, Oliver Bellenhaus, is called to testify. The former director of the Wirecard business in Dubai speaks quietly and extremely quickly. He wants to get his testimony over with as quickly as possible and avoids any eye contact. In essence, he confirms what he has already said during the questioning at the public prosecutor's office. The TPA system was a big fraud, audit data was faked, and Wirecard was a cancer, Bellenhaus told the court.

The Wirecard trial begins on 8 Dec 2022. The main question will be: Who is responsible for the scandal? Markus Braun, the founder and former CEO, Oliver Bellenhaus, managing director of Wirecard Dubai, and the former head of accounting, Stephan von Erffa have to answer critical questions! Braun and his accomplices are alleged to have operated Wirecard as a criminal organization, the indictment says. The court has scheduled 100 days of hearings. In an underground courtroom.

YesOption was one of the infamous Israeli Binary Options scams operated through Diamond Global Ltd in the Marshall Islands. Payment services were processed through Global Online Solutions Ltd in the UK. One of the payment processors was Cyprus-regulated PowerCash21 (now Payabl). In 2015, the U.S. CFTC placed YesOption on its red list. Today YesOption.com is operated as a broker review platform and as an IB for other brokers like IQ Option or Olymp Trade.

Until 2021, the Bank of Cyprus-regulated payment institution Payabl did business as PowerCash21. The high-risk payment processor founded by former Wirecard top executives Dietmar Knoechelmann and Ruediger Trautmann specializes in porn, gambling, and online trading. Among its customers is apparently also the offshore broker VT Markets as a Similarweb analysis shows. A warning was issued against VT Markets by the Spanish regulator in August 2021.

Wirecard was an unremarkable and not particularly innovative German payment processor until 2007. The international take-off started with the acquisition of Trustpay International AG and the two payment veterans Ruediger Trautmann (2005) and Dietmar Knoechelmann (2006). Wirecard acquired companies from them in complicated and secretive transactions, creating a huge international high-risk payment volume. Here is the story of Wirecard's internationalization.

The Powercash21 scheme is already over 20 years old and was created parallel to the collapsed Wirecard. At that time, the buzzword fintech was not even known. The domain www.powercash21.com was registered in 2000 by Ruediger Trautmann even before he became COO of Wirecard in 2005. From 2001, the website was operated by the German Inatec Group. Among others, the former Wirecard manager Dietmar Kuhl acted as managing director at Inatec. In or around 2011, the Cyprus-registered Powercash21 Limited then took over the website's operation.

The Similarweb September statistics came out and show that the number of visitors to the website of Cypriot-German payment processor Payabl (formerly PowerCash21) increased tenfold in Q3 2022 - from just under 15,000 to almost 140,000. Similarweb says that more than 55% of website traffic has been sourced from porn sites and just under 35% from gambling, betting, and lottery sites. Payabl is thus likely to have replaced the collapsed Wirecard in Germany as the high-risk payment processor, Similarweb suggests!

Klarpay is a FINMA-regulated FinTech and received an investment from Payabl Group a few months ago. The latter was founded by former Wirecard executives Ruediger Trautmann, Dietmar Knoechelmann, and his wife Ayelet Fruchtlander-Knoechelmann. Klarpay announced that in Q3 it became a Principal Member of the VISA network and integrated Visa’s B2B Connect, which enables Klarpay’s business customers to perform cross-currency outbound payments. And it introduced Apple Pay.

The German Ruediger Trautmann was Wirecard’s COO between 2005 to 2010. According to the Zatarra Report, Trautmann incorporated numerous undisclosed companies in the Wirecard scheme during his tenure. One of these satellite companies was Wire Card UK Limited, where he served as a director from 2006 until its dissolution in 2010. This Wire Card UK did not belong to the German Wirecard Group but was part of the scheme. The similarity of the names was probably no coincidence.