About the European Funds Recovery Initiative (EFRI)

The European Funds Recovery Initiative (EFRI) fights cybercrime and identifies financial crime enablers by publicly reporting about them. The Europen Funds Recovery Initiative ask for refunds for the victims from the scammers and their enablers.

The story around EFRI started in 2017 when we filed a money laundering complaint against Uwe Lenhoff. Uwe Lenhoff, a German scammer who operated a vast criminal organization in cooperation with other big guys of the binary options industry (Gal BARAK, the by now infamous Wolf of Sofia, Ilan Troya (he acted as a whistleblower), Gary Shalon, and Vlad Smirnov). The criminal organization was busted in January 2019. The Austrian and German courts are filing charges against all of the UBOs of this criminal organization. We represent quite a several people on a European level in these trials.   But this criminal organization is not the only one we are addressing. We have realized that the scale of scams is increasing at an unbelievable pace, and everyone can be the target of these scrupulous organizations. We also learned that law enforcement in Europe currently lacks the corresponding means to address this threat to European civil society.     

 The legal entity behind this European Funds Recovery Initiative is a not-for-profit organization registered in Vienna, Austria, since May 2020. 

We strongly believe that a large group of victims fighting scammers, identifying financial crime enablers and asking the authorities for help in a structured way can make a difference and can help to stop this kind of fraud in Europe.

If you want to know more about our history and our fight, please read this interview (Part I) and (Part II). 

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