Friday, November 22, 2024

The Latvian Racket – The e-book scams and undercover payment services

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We have recently published an #R4I regarding the so-called Latvian Racket to learn more information about a group of Latvian citizens involved in operating broker scams and payment processors. One of its members is Pavels Krasovskis, the beneficial owner of the licensed Estonian crypto payment processor Isunext. Until December 2020, he was also a director and beneficial owner of the UK-registered e-commerce merchant K.L.A. Enterprises Ltd, which operates a portfolio of identical websites selling e-book subscriptions and the scam site www.greatoffers.email. Our educated guess is that this company is also an illegal “undercover” payment processor.

We currently know too little about the Latvian Racket and have only recently begun our research. Currently, we have identified some companies and people associated with the Racket. These are the Latvian individuals Sergejs Iljins, Pavels Krasovskis, Nikita Krasovskis, Arnolds Kalnins, Aleksejs Kohanovs, and Joanna Elaine Hill.

Furthermore, we have discovered some companies in the United Kingdom and Estonia. These include ZH Companies Bnk Ltd, Finex Group Ltd, K.L.A. Enterprises Ltd, and Xfinances OÜ. There are also companies in Poland and certainly some offshore entities.

With its portfolio of companies, Latvian Racket apparently operates several illegal businesses up to and including illegal and fraudulent brokers such as Zurich Invests or XFinances and money laundering. We have just opened the Latvian Racket Case and will report on the progress of our research.

The German e-book scam

We are convinced that at the moment, we have found only a small part of brands and websites associated with the Latvian Racket. In total, we identified six brands with 12 websites engaged in selling e-books in the beauty, health, and spa sectors. The websites are available in German. Each brand has two websites with different domains. One domain is for the sale of e-book subscriptions, and one for the management of these subscriptions. We suspect that this separation was done for a reason, right?

Here are the sites:

BrandDomain 4 subscription salesDomain 4 subscription mgmt
Body Revivingwww.bodyreviving.comhttps://mybodfee.com/
Fashion is my Profwww.fashionismyprof.comhttps://fmyprof.com/
Spa Treat Beautywww.spatreatbeauty.comhttps://spatrebty.com/
Beauty with Spawww.beuatywithspa.comhttps://spabecost.com/
Proper Caringwww.propercaring.comhttps://caskinfe.com/
Care Skin Rightwww.careskinright.comhttps://caskinright.com/

E-learning and e-books are the “golden standard” as a cover for illegal “undercover” payment processors. This is well known in the scene. Given the already proven involvement of the identified Latvian nationals in broker scams, it is reasonable to assume that the brands and websites listed above are used for money laundering by the Latvian Racket.

Scam warnings

Anyone submitting a request via one of these websites will receive an automatic email from [email protected]. Various scam warnings have already been published against this email address.

The fact that the six currently identified K.L.A. Enterprises Ltd websites are only available in German leads to the conclusions that (a) German-speaking victims are being attacked and (b) bank accounts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland are being operated.

Share information

We would like to know more about this scam. If you have any information or experience regarding K.L.A. Enterprises and their related companies, people, and projects, we would be grateful if you could share it with us.