Interesting! Nasdaq-listed GreenBox POS acquires notorious Bulgarian Transact Europe

GreenBox POS is a California-based FinTech company specializing in payment solutions on the blockchain. The company has been listed on Nasdaq with the symbol GBOX since February 2021 and currently has a market capitalization of around $450M. Transact Europe is a Bulgarian financial institution with an intense past in the largely fraudulent binary options industry. Transact Europe was one of the facilitating payment processors of Gal Barak and his Bulgarian E&G Bulgaria. Major shareholder Falk Preussner is also linked to the late alleged cybercrime mastermind Uwe Lenhoff. GreenBox POS is to acquire Transact Europe for $30M in cash.

A major transaction

On 19 July 2021, GreenBox POS announced that it has entered into a binding MOU to purchase Transact Europe Holdings OOD. As recently as February 2021, GreenBox POS raised approximately $43M via its IPO in conjunction with its NASDAQ listing (press release). The company most recently announced a quarterly loss of more than $13M as of the end of March 2021 and had some $35.6M in total cash available. In that respect, the $30M acquisition of Transact Europe is noteworthy, to say the least. Read more on GreenBox and the Transact Europe transaction here on this blog post of @borrowed_shorts.

The cybercrime legacy

Gal Barak was sentenced in Vienna in September 2020 to several years in prison for investment fraud and money laundering. The court found that his brands, such as XtraderFX, SafeMarkets, OptionStars, or OptionStarsGlobal, were a fraud. Transact Europe has processed payments from victims to the operators of these scams. Currently, more charges against partners of Gal Barak are in preparation. The cybercrime case around E&G Bulgaria is far from over.

One of the suspects in the E&G Bulgaria criminal case is Gery Shalon, who is charged in the U.S. with one of the largest cybercrime cases surrounding the hack of JP Morgan and organizing a pump and dump scheme with penny stocks. Shalon was the actual boss of the E&G Bulgaria cybercrime organization, as shown in the criminal files.

Interesting shareholders

Transact Europe EAD is a subsidiary of Transact Europe Holding OOD, also registered in Bulgaria. The shareholders of Transact Europe Holding include the German citizen Falk-Uwe Preussner, who was (or is) also a big shareholder in the public Bet90 Holdings PLC (previously Veltyco Group PLC), a company that has been deeply involved in scams, cybercrime, and money-laundering.

Preussner holds almost 30% of the shares in Transact Europe Holding. His partners, the two Israeli-born US citizens Yehuda Avganim and Avi Chesed, also hold almost 30%. The latter two also operate Bulgarian CardConcept Europe Limited, connected with the payment processor platform www.processing.com that has also been notorious for facilitating binary options scams.