Around 300 victims from all over Europe, coordinated and supported by EFRI, have been requesting restitution payments for their losses since they learned about the reckless and willful involvement of Payvision in Barak and Lenhoff´s online scams.
Legal claims in Austria and Germany are already pending. Additionally, a larger group of victims decided to try Payvision on its home turf, Amsterdam. The Amsterdam-based law firm Hupkes c.s. advocaten has been retained by the victims. This law company is well experienced in fighting online scams and in supporting victims in their fight for refunds.
The scammers!
Between 2014 and January 2019, the Israeli Gal Barak, the so-called Wolf of Sofia, and his cybercrime organization operated online trading scams, including OptionStars.com, optionStarsglobal.com, xtraderfx.com, and safemarkets.com, www.goldenmarket.com and cryptopoint.com.
Gal Barak was found guilty of severe fraud and money laundering in Vienna on 1 September 2020.
His partner in crime, Uwe Lenhoff, was the beneficial owner of option888, Tradovest.com, Tradeinvest.com, and xmarkets.com. zoomtrader.com, zoomtraderglobal.com. He was arrested on 24 January 2019 in Austria and was found dead in his cell in Saarbrücken beginning of July 2020.
Gal BARAK and his wife Marina BARAK will be indicted soon in Germany again. Criminal cases against co-conspirators of LENHOFF and BARAK are still pending in Austria and in Germany.
Payvision, the scammers’ card payment processor!
The criminal investigations in both cases showed that Payvision B.V., a 100% subsidiary of one of the biggest and allegedly most reputable European banks, ING Group NV, was processing more than 75% of the card payments for these scams. BOOKER and LENHOFF had a close personal and business relationship.
An audit report submitted by the Dutch Supervisory Authority (DNB) in October 2020 to the management of Payvision B.V. exposed that the company has been in serious breach of the Sanctions Act, the Financial Supervision Act, and the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Act (Wwft) since at least 2015,
- that fraud signals were deliberately ignored, and some of its customers were deliberately not screened (willful blindness).
- Furthermore, customer checks and compliance with anti-money laundering regulations were systematically neglected.
One year later on 28 October 2021, ING announced the phasing out of Payvision B.V. By now, the website and the employees are gone. Evidently, ING wants to bury Payvision as smoothly as possible to avoid any liability.
Dutch legal actions started!
Around 300 victims from all over Europe, coordinated and supported by EFRI, have been requesting restitution payments for their losses since they learned about the reckless and willful involvement of Payvision in BARAK and LENHOFF´s online scams.
Legal claims in Austria and Germany are already pending. Additionally, a larger group of victims decided to try Payvision on its home turf, Amsterdam. The Amsterdam-based law firm Hupkes c.s. advocaten has been retained by the victims. This law company is well experienced in fighting online scams and in supporting victims in their fight for refunds.
Victims have to be aware of the statute of limitations.
By now, it is evident that the retained lawyers of Payvision and ING are prepared to resort to any means to fight the liability claims of the victims.
As time passes, the risk of victims´ liability claims becoming time-barred increases. Meaning there is a risk that a filed claim may be subject to dismissal as having been filed after the statutory limitation period.
The length of time the statute allows a victim to bring legal action against the suspected wrong-doer is five years in the Netherlands. So counting from 2020/2021 (the written verdict for Gal BARAK was issued as of 7 January 2021), there is still some time to file claims. Still, nevertheless, the victims have to undertake some action soon.
Get in Contact!
So in case you are a victim of the online scams optionstarsglobal/ optionstars, safemarkets, goldenmarkets, cryptopoint, xtraferfx, option888, Tradovest, Tradeinvest90, zoomtrader/zoomtraderGlobal and are still looking for some justice, please refer to [email protected] to be advised how to act or contact EFRI [email protected].
