While the Veltyo Cybercrime Scheme is currently taking place in Saarbruecken, Germany, the E&G Bulgaria Cybercrime Scheme is dealt with by German prosecutor Nino Goldbeck in Bamberg. The German prosecutor informed that the boiler room agent Sasa Siler has also been charged for allegedly defrauding German-speaking victims with OptionStarsGlobal, XTraderFX, or Trade Capital. The mastermind behind E&G Bulgaria was the Israeli Gal Barak with his wife Marina Barak and their partners Gery Shalon and Vladislav Smirnov.
The Case
The Israeli Gal Barak and his wife Marina Barak (prev. Marina Andreeva) have been the principals of the E&G Bulgaria scheme. In Sept 2020, Barak was sentenced to a four-year prison term and a restitution payment of around €4 million. The mastermind of the Veltyco Cybercrime Scheme and one of the partners of Gal Barak, Uwe Lenhoff, died in prison in July 2020. Cause of death unknown.
While Lenhoff and Barak ran their schemes independently, they cooperated closely and jointly operated the payment processor Global Payment Solutions Podgorica and boiler rooms in Serbia. Defendant Sasa Siler worked in one of these shared boiler rooms.
The Charges
Sasa Siler (pictured left), born in Feb 1971, is accused in the indictment that he was part of the E&G Bulgaria cybercrime organization and, in cooperation with various accomplices as a boiler room agent, is alleged to have harmed numerous investors in the German-speaking region.
Specifically, Siler is alleged to have worked in a Serbian boiler room of the Veltyco Cybercrime Scheme and defrauded victims as a boiler room agent between Feb 2018 and April 2019 with the stage names Filip Schultz and Filip Kemp for the trading platforms OptionStarsGlobal, XtraderFX, and Trade Capital.
The Payvision connection
The criminal files show that a significant part of the money of the victims of the binary options scams of E&G Bulgaria was laundered through the Dutch Payvision. Rudolf Booker, the founder and then CEO of Payvision, was a close business partner of Uwe Lenhoff and had also hired him as a distributor. In this capacity, Lenhoff acquired other scam operators as merchants for Payvision.
Based on these fraud merchants and their illicit transaction volumes, Booker and his co-founders sold Payvision to ING at a valuation of €360 million. It remains to be seen if and how Payvision and Rudolf Booker will be incriminated by the prosecution, suspects, and witnesses in the upcoming trials.
Stay tuned; we will continue the reports on the trial and its background.
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If you have any information about the Veltyco Cybercrime Scheme or other cybercrime activities, please let us know via our whistleblower system, Whistle42.
