The EFRI PSP Class Action Campaign seems to have an impact already. EFRI and FinTelegram teams are talking to some of these PSPs to acquire data on beneficial owners and recover money for the cheated retail investors. EFRI does this in close coordination with the authorities in Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic.
- more bank accounts of involved PSPs have been frozen by the responsible authorities and the responsible people have been arrested;
- recently, the bank accounts of the unauthorized German PSP DigiWeb were frozen by the authorities and the managing director was apparently arrested;
- the Czech PSP DreamsPay Technologies s.r.o. has apparently been closed recently. At least the website is no longer accessible;
- Financial market regulator BaFin issued orders to these illegal PSPs to pay back the money to investors of illegal broker schemes.
Vladislav “Vlad” Smirnov And The Russian-Ukrainian Connection
Dreams Pay is a PSP associated with the UK-registered Binex Group LP, a company beneficially owned and controlled by the Russian Vladislav “Vlad” Smirnov. The PSP operates with companies in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria and used to work closely with the Ukrainian-Austrian Fondy. The managing director of the Czech DreamsPay Technologies s.r.o. is the Ukrainian Leonid Olshevsky, who is also a frontman in the Binex Group itself and as such registered director in the Binex DOO Podgorica which is subject of official investigations of Montenegrin authorities.
Leonid Olshevsky is also the official sole owner of the Bulgarian Binex EOOD which is the owner of the domain www.binex.ru used to run an illegal broker scheme in Russia and Ukraine. The Ukraine cybercrime police cracked this scheme down last year (read the FinTelegram report).
Through the UK-registered Binex Group LP and its network of companies, fraud via illegal broker schemes has been facilitated and billions of stolen dollars were laundered to the beneficial owners of those schemes. E&G Bulgaria, an illegal broker scheme owned and controlled by Gal Barak and his fiancee Marina Andreeva, for example, received millions of payments from Binex Group in their offshore companies Dynamic Solutions Ltd (Marshall Islands) and Rockarage Ltd (Marshall Islands). The payments have been funneled via the UK-registered PSP and FCA-regulated Connectum.
In September 2018, for example, these two offshore companies alone received payments of more than EUR 800,000 from the Binex Group. Below are a few of these bank transactions from the bank statements available to us:
Binex Group is only one of the PSPs facilitating the fraud schemes. Others are Payvision (Netherlands) or NetPay International (Israel and UK).
The Russian Laundroma
Registered partners of Binex Group LP are Hokkaido Invest S.A. and Okinawa Holdings S.A. Both companies are also involved the Russian money laundering machine, to so-called Russian Laundromat. Here is an interesting article by financial crime expert Graham Barrow summarizing the various studies.
The shutdown of DreamsPay there will probably be no really big issue for the Binex Group. They change their brands, companies,
Report Payment Services Providers
If you have perceptions of illegal payment service providers (PSP) and/or illegal broker schemes, please report them to our research team via our EFRI PSP Class Action Campaign. Together we can make an impact!
