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
As of March 23, 2023, the European Court of Justice published its judgment in the case GAL BARAK against the Bamberg public prosecutor´s office (Case C-365/2). The court ruled in favor of the German authority. In addition, the European court provided the German court with elements of interpretation of EU
In addition to the acquiring bank, issuing bank, and card association, the merchant frequently employs the services of a payment processor to facilitate this process and act as the technical interface between the merchant and the payment system. Here you will find a list of the payment processors working with
Over the last decades, the world has witnessed increasingly massive cybercrime attacks across borders. These crimes are very often facilitated by supervised financial entities, crypto exchanges. With the European financial supervisory authorities being very reluctant to take decisive action against payment companies involved in fraud scams, the harm done continues
Crypto scams are a plague Although we are in a crypto winter with the crash on the markets also driving down the crypto valuations, we still receive emails from victims telling us about the scammers trying to convince them to invest in promising crypto ventures. So Crypto scams are still
Our research shows that Postbank Germany (a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank) was definitely “the bank to go” for scammers in 2016 – 2020 to open bank accounts for shell companies. We collected the data of more than 90 shell companies with bank accounts with different Postbank branches all over Germany.
As we have seen so often in the past years, the European authorities have been mainly concerned with protecting the interests of the business users in drafting the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and have forgotten about the so much-needed consumer protection. It is about time to enhance consumer protection in
The 1st Criminal Division in Bamberg, Germany, has submitted a request for a ruling to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) for the next steps in the Gal BARAK case on June 4, 2021. The pending ruling of the ECJ will not only be important in the criminal case of
In preparing the civil legal claims against PAYVISION B.V., we dig deeply into the criminal files for Option888 and the Wolf of Sofia. We learn a lot about how these fraudulent schemes work. In addition, we also know a lot about the enablers of these enormous fraudulent activities. Unscrupulous regulated
For Part, I of the interview with the EFRI founder Elfriede Sixt go here. Q 6. How did BitRush develop into the Lenhoff cybercrime case? Although knowing about the money laundering claims, Joachim Kalcher, the then technical chief operator of Bitrush Corp, teamed up with Uwe Lenhoff. He continued to pursue his
EFRI is the abbreviation for European Funds Recovery Initiative. The legal entity behind this Initiative is a not-for-profit organisation (EFRI-Association) registered in Vienna, Austria. Here you can read the statutes of the not-for-profit organization. Read More
