Vienna Cybercrime Trials – Defendant Barak confirms involvement of his wife and Payvision role

Today, the second day of the Vienna Cybercrime Trials against Gal Barak, the alleged Israeli principal of the international cybercrime organization E&G Bulgaria and operator of numerous broker scams, brought remarkable findings. The well-prepared public prosecutors confronted Barak with a number of payment transactions of the various companies of Barak’s cybercrime organization. At the center of these transactions was the notorious GPay Ltd, which actually laundered and distributed tens of millions of stolen client funds. And, oh yes! Barak was not the boss, he said. He just liked the offices in Sofia

The real bosses

Gal Barak has claimed that he was by no means the boss of E&G Bulgaria and the cybercrime organization in Sofia, Bulgaria. He would only have had an office there because he would have felt comfortable there. The bosses of the organization would have been his two Israeli partners Kfir Levy and Amit Hulin. The public prosecutor wanted to know why then there was a sign outside his office that said “CEO”. This, according to Barak, would have been because the employees wanted to please him.

The fact is that according to documents available to FinTelegram, Kfir Levy and Amit Hulin were Barak’s deputies. The latter was the managing director of the Global Payment Solutions Podgorica DOO in Belgrade, Serbia, and also looked after the illegal boiler rooms in Belgrade.

That was not the only contempt of court that day. Barak constantly got entangled in contradictions which, however, were not too obvious, partly because of the really miserable translation from English into German. But the court will have to appreciate this.

The GPay Laundromat

The indictment charges Barak of laundering and stealing millions of client funds via his various binary options and broker scams such as XTraderFX, SafeMarkets, Golden Markets, CryptoPoint, or OptionStars via the UK registered GPay Ltd (see UK Companies House here). At first, Barak said that he did not even know GPay‘s CEO, Bulgarian Georgi Komisarov. But then the prosecutor presented him with documents where Barak signed contracts on behalf of GPay. The prosecutor was also able to show that Barak’s wife Marina Barak (formerly Marina Andreeva) had disposed of the GPay funds.

Marina Barak’s Power of Attorney

Barak further explains that his wife would have been the person of trust for Global Media Partners Inc (“GMP“) registered in the British Virgin Islands. As such she would have had access to the bank accounts of GPay, which was apparently controlled by GMP. Specifically, GMP in the BVI still had a 100% subsidiary in Bulgaria – Global Media Partners EOOD (download Company Register Record here).

With his statements, Gal Barak not only admitted that he controlled the GPay via his offshore GMP construction, but also that his wife used Power of Attorney to carry out the bank movements and thus the money laundering.

The Payvision Collusion

Barak then provided a further bang-bang when the prosecutor asked about the business relationship between GPay and Dutch Payvision, a subsidiary of ING Bank. The documents available to FinTelegram News show that Payvision, under the then CEO Rudolf Booker, was still conducting multi-million dollar transactions with GPay and other Barak companies until shortly before Barak’s arrest. This despite the fact that there had already been numerous warnings by financial market regulators against Barak-Scams and GPay.

A new agreement between GPay and Payvision in 2018 – after the EU ban on binary options – was signed by Gal Barak on behalf of GPay. Interesting, because he said he didn’t even know GPay’s director. In this new agreement with Payvision, GPay was presented as a crypto company. Thus, Rudolf Booker and his Payvision acted against their better knowledge. This in turn makes Payvision liable to the victims of Barak’s scams as a co-conspirator and Facilitator.

So much for the remarkable findings of the second day of the Cybercrime Vienna Trials. Stay tuned. More days are scheduled to find the truth.