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.
The Company
P2P GmbH was registered in 2012 as SR Prozesstechnik GmbH in Cologne and dissolved in April 2020. The purpose of the company was the import and export and trade of various physical goods, in particular stainless steel and rubber products or various pumps.
Since its establishment in 2012, various foreign directors have served as directors. Among them were Russians Maksim Privalov and Elena Privalova, who were replaced in 2017 by Vladyslav Shania from Ukraine. In December 2017, Igor Chernych, a resident of Germany, was appointed as a director, and the company was renamed P2P GmbH.
Facilitating scams
Through P2P, Gal Barak and Marina Barak‘s E&G Bulgaria processed bank payments from customers. Law enforcement authorities followed the money trail and discovered, for example, that nearly one million euros had been paid to GPay Ltd – one of Gal Barak‘s many companies – alone. Payments were also made directly from the P2P to Gal Barak‘s private accounts.
P2P GmbH was also one of the Germany-based facilitating payment processors in the vast binary options scam Blue Trading besides StronIT GmbH and others! Moreover, it provided its illegal payment and money-laundering services to the binary options scam ZoomTrader, which is investigated by the prosecutors in Saarbruecken, Germany.
P2P processed deposits of scam victims through a portfolio of bank accounts such as one with Dutch BUNQ (with an address in Amsterdam) or with Sparkasse Aachen in Germany. The law enforcement investigators found a lot of other bank accounts across multiple jurisdictions.
The EFRI Complaint
In March 2021, the European Fund Recovery Initiative (EFRI) filed a complaint with the Cologne public prosecutor for money laundering. EFRI represents victims who made deposits to various scams via P2P GmbH and thus lost more than €360,000. The prosecutors in Cologne launched investigations, which resulted now in the charge. We will report on the details of the indictment and the progress of the proceedings over the next few weeks.
If you have any information about P2P or are a scam victim who has made deposits through P2P, please let us know. We will forward the information to EFRI and the prosecutor’s office.
