Tag: Zoomtrader

In April 2025, Mohamad Shaker — the head of the largest boiler room in German cybercriminal Uwe Lenhoff’s vast cybercrime empire — was sentenced to 8 years in prison by a German court. Shaker's conviction marks another milestone in dismantling one of Europe’s largest cybercrime organizations. Yet, while some lieutenants have faced justice, the key facilitators — including executives of Payvision and the Amsterdam-based money laundering network — remain untouched.

Here's an update on the E&G Bulgaria cybercrime case involving Israelis Gal Barak and Gery Shalon. FinTelegram has been instrumental in uncovering and providing crucial whistleblower information, which led to Barak's arrest in early 2019. While Barak and several of his associates have already been sentenced, further charges are anticipated, potentially implicating Gery Shalon as the true mastermind behind Barak's operations.

FinTelegram has reported a number of stories since 2018 about Dutch FinTech Payvision's involvement as a payment processor in broker scams. Payvision was acquired by major Dutch bank ING in 2018 and continued its illicit activities. The European Fund Recovery Initiative (EFRI) has coordinated victim lawsuits against supporting payment processors like Payvision for years. Business Insider has now also reported on these lawsuits.

Nino Goldbeck became known to FinTelegram readers as the chief prosecutor of Gal Barak, a/k/a, Wolf of Sofia, and his cybercrime organization in Germany. The Association of German Criminal Investigators recently awarded Goldbeck its highest honor, "Bul le mérite." However, the honor of crashing the Wolf of Sofia's cybercrime organization belongs not only to Goldbeck but also to an enabling whistleblower who exposed the fraud via FinTelegram. Here is the true story.

More trials against binary options scam operators or their facilitators coming up in the first half of 2023. The former beneficial owners of the (then) CySEC-regulated Novox Capital Ltd are also in the spotlight: the Israelis Shay Hillel, Yehoram Hillel, and their partner and frontman Israel Bash. They are currently not charged however the prosecution alleges that their Novox Capital had been massively involved in running and facilitating vast binary options scams. Gal Barak and his cybercrime organization E&G Bulgaria were a close partner and client of Novox Capital.

The CySEC board informed that it imposed an administrative fine of €100 on Novox Capital Ltd since it did not successfully submit the QST-CIF Form to CySEC for the first quarter of the year 2022 within the set deadline, as required by Circular C497 of CySEC. Effective October 1, 2022, former binary options broker Novox Capital has voluntarily suspended due to acquisition and restructuring. The website is offline.

ING's current subsidiary Payvision will close in 2023. The reason for this was the massive involvement of Payvision in cybercrime and money laundering activities under its founder and former CEO Rudolf Booker. Booker sold Payvision to ING for around €350 million in 2018. How unabashedly Booker did business with cybercrime organizations as CEO is shown files from the criminal proceedings against convicted fraudster Gal Barak. Here is a remarkable scene from the criminal file!

In September 2020, Israeli Gal Barak was sentenced to four years in prison for investment fraud and money laundering by a court in Vienna. He was released on parole in 2021 and has since founded the Vantage fund in Israel, which aims to finance convicted cybercriminals and their startups. However, German prosecutors also charged Barak as a principal of the cybercrime organization E&G Bulgaria. The case is currently before the European Court of Justice.

The first trial in the so-called Veltyo Cybercrime Scheme was held in Saarbruecken, Germany. The defendants were two Kosovans, Betim Tasholli, Azem Spahiu, and the Syrian Mohamad Shaker. Tasholli was the boiler room manager in Pristina, Shaker was responsible for the boiler room in Prague, and Spahiu was responsible for coordinating affiliate marketing around the scam brands Option888, ZoomTrader, TradoVest, or XMarkets. The Court sentenced Azem Spahiu to a 12-year prison term. Tasholli and Shaker are allegedly on the run.

A 33-year-old Kosovar was sentenced to an 18-month prison term in a trial in Austria after a seven-month pre-trial...

In Germany, the cybercrime trials against the so-called Veltyco Cybercrime Scheme started. The scheme's alleged mastermind, Uwe Lenhoff, died in prison in July 2020. Cause of death unknown. Some of his lieutenants and co-conspirators have to stand trial nevertheless. According to the prosecutors, they allegedly cheated more than 1,100 German investors out of almost €42 million. The trial started with the 29-year-old Kosovo guy Azem Spahiu. He and his friend Betim Tasholli have been operating boiler rooms for the cybercrime scheme in Kosovo.

The public prosecutor's office in Cologne has filed charges against the responsible operators of the illegal payment processor P2P GmbH ("P2P"), which acted as a scam-facilitating payment processor for numerous major binary options and broker scams. Gal Barak's E&G Bulgaria criminal files show that P2P processes millions of victims of their various scams. With the P2P indictment, the Cologne prosecutor's office has charged the second illegal payment processor following a criminal complaint of EFRI. We reported about the B2G indictment recently.