The Powercash21 scheme is already over 20 years old and was created parallel to the collapsed Wirecard. At that time, the buzzword fintech was not even known. The domain www.powercash21.com was registered in 2000 by Ruediger Trautmann even before he became COO of Wirecard in 2005. From 2001, the website was operated by the German Inatec Group. Among others, the former Wirecard manager Dietmar Kuhl acted as managing director at Inatec. In or around 2011, the Cyprus-registered Powercash21 Limited then took over the website’s operation.
The Masterminds
Since the beginning, the Powercash21 scheme has been run by Dietmar Knoechelmann and Ruediger Trautmann. Both were top executives at Wirecard. Knoechelmann was sort of co-founder of Wirecard UK and the CEO of Wirecard Payments Solutions Holdings between 2006 and 2009. Trautmann was the Wirecard COO between 2005 and 2010. They sold their companies to Wirecard for very good money!
Knoechelmann’s wife, Ayelet Fruchtlander-Knoechelmann, also plays an important role. In 2009, she founded Inatec Payment AG in Switzerland, which has since been liquidated again. The Inatec Group was a licensed partner with Visa and Mastercard.
Powercash21 Limited, registered in Cyprus in 2011, was founded by Dietmar Knöchelmann and Rüdiger Trautmann. The Zatarra Report by short-seller Fraser Perring suggests that Knoechelmann and Trautmann also operated the Powercash21 scheme through Inatec Group during their time as top executives at Wirecard.
The Survivors
In 2022, Inatec Group and Powercash21 were merged and formed into the new high-risk payment processor Payabl, a payment processor regulated by the Bank of Cyprus.
Ruediger Trautmann, Dietmar Knoechelmann, his wife Ayelet Fruchtlander-Knoechelmann, and their friends are still the owners and masterminds of the Payabl Group. During the twenty-year journey of this high-risk payment processor, companies have been established and closed, and company names and managers have changed, but the masterminds have always remained the same. That is continuity. They have seen and experienced a lot. And for now, survived Wirecard.
One can justifiably argue that Payabl is one of the oldest German high-risk processors, if not the oldest.
