It is no secret that we consider scam-facilitating payment processors to be much more dangerous than the scams themselves. These payment processors make the scammer scene possible; they are the facilitators of the fraud attacks on consumers and retail investors. In recent years, many crypto payment processors have been established, giving the high-risk and scam-facilitating scene another boost. In many cases, crypto payment processors hold bank accounts with regulated institutions to facilitate scams like Coinicash, AdvCash, and SysPay in the Cento GX scam.
Coinicash
We have recently discovered the crypto payment processor and exchange operator Coinicash (www.coinicash.com) as a facilitator in the QuantumMarket (report here) and Cento GX (report here) scams. Coinicash is the trade name and brand of Nigina Trading Ltd In the United Arab Emirates (UAB). The registered office of Coinicash is hosted with the Local Consultancy DMCC.
Coinicash is registered as a merchant with SysPay and works with AdvCash. Officially, the deposits of the victims of scams like Cento GX or QuantumMarket are masked as purchases of cryptocurrencies of clients of Coinicash. At first glance, the transactions look as if Coinicash clients bought cryptocurrencies and paid AdvCash for them. All clean or what? Of course not.
In fact, victims deposited these funds with the scams with the intention of trading. They don’t want to buy cryptocurrencies as a means to an end. The victims’ payments are processed via AdvCash (www.advcash.com). The cryptocurrencies acquired by the victims are then transferred from Coinicash to the scammers’ wallets. Thus, they are gone for good.
Offshore processor AdvCash
AdvCash is a high-risk payment processor specializing in credit and debit card processing. In recent years, the payment processor has also specialized in crypto payments, enabling its merchants to process cryptocurrencies. AdvCash is the trade name of Advanced Cash Limited, which has an offshore license in Belize from the local regulator International Financial Services Commission (IFSC) with the numbers 000107/97 and 000107/98. AdvCash is currently increasingly used as a payment processor in scams.
MFSC-regulated SysPay
SysPay is the trading name and brand of Maltese-registered Syspay Limited (www.syspay.info), an MFSA-regulated payment processor. In 2018, EMP Corp SA acquired the payment processor.
EMP CORP SA is the operator of the payment platform www.empcorp.com and has been registered in Luxembourg since November 2013 with the number B181670 with the business purpose of e-money processing. The company’s shares are held by G&F SA (B181619) and CRANBERRY SA (B185110), which are also registered in Luxembourg. Please find a comprehensive report on EMP Corp here on PayCom42.
