Interesting! The Shabby Business Of Maltese High-Risk Payment Processor Maxpay and Max Polyakov!

According to extensive research by Alex Kasprak, senior reporter at Snopes, subscription trap scams account for 61.6% of referral traffic to Maxpay. Moreover, 21% of the referral traffic comes from fake merchants used for sweepstake schemes. Nearly 24% of Maxpay's traffic comes from online dating websites. One Night Friend, Flirt, Uniform Dating, Tender Meets, and BeNaughty are all associated with Maxpay founder and controlling shareholder Max Polyakov or his Together Networks.

According to extensive research by Alex Kasprak, senior reporter at Snopes, subscription trap scams account for 61.6% of referral traffic to Maxpay. Moreover, 21% of the referral traffic comes from fake merchants used for sweepstake schemes. Nearly 24% of Maxpay‘s traffic comes from online dating websites. One Night Friend, Flirt, Uniform Dating, Tender Meets, and BeNaughty are all associated with Maxpay founder and controlling shareholder Max Polyakov or his Together Networks.

Key Data

Trading name	Maxpay
Activity	Payment processor
Domain	https://maxpay.com
Legal entities	Maxpay Limited Maxpay Holding Limited
Jurisdictions	Malta
Authorization	No
Related individuals	Max Polyakov, UBO (LinkedIn) Artem Tymoshenko, CEO and shareholder (LinkedIn) Stephen Balzan, advisor (LinkedIn) Denitza Dimitrova (LinkedIn)
PayRate42 rating	Orange Compliance (profile)
Related schemes	Covery by Covery AI Limited (Cyprus) Genome by UAB ‘Maneuver LT‘ Together Networks

Short Narrative

For his report on Maxpay‘s clients and website visitors, Alex Kapsrak used various data sources such as Similarweb, Web Archive or Urlscan. He investigated the traffic of the Maxpay website over a period from December 2020 to November 2021 and came to an unpleasant conclusion for Maxpay. Apparently, most of the traffic comes from “fake merchants” scams or illicit websites that operate subscription scams, for example.

Maxpay is controlled by Ukrainian-born tech entrepreneur Max Polyakov through his Malta-registered companies Maxpay Limited and Maxpay Holding Limited. Maxpay CEO Artem Tymoshenko is a minority shareholder. Polyakov has his entrepreneurial roots in online porn, dating, and gambling.

Around 2010, he joined Cupid PLC, a company listed on the London Stock exchange, with his then-partner Bill Dobby to run several online dating sites. According to a report from Kyiv Time, the company’s revenue was $125.4 million, and its capitalization reached $204.9 million. Investigations by BBC and Kyivpost caused a sharp decline in share prices. In the Summer of 2013, Polyakov acquired Cupid’s “casual dating business” vis his Grendall Investment Limited.

Polyakov later formed Together Networks, which allegedly runs nine porn or dating websites: NaughtyDate, Loveaholics, UpForIt, Flirt, IWantU, QuickFlirt, BeNaughty, AffairDating, IAmNaughty.

Via his Tradax IP Licensing Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands, Polyakov allegedly established additional porn and dating sites: UnformDating, MatureDatingUk, LoveAgain, SpeedDaterEvents, LoveBeginSat, Serencomtrer, GirlsDateForFree.

The Snopes report also revealed that Genome, an e-money institution founded by Maxpay CEO Artem Tymoshenko in Lituania and regulated by the Bank of Lithuania, is directly linked to Maxpay and processes questionable transactions like it.

Within the period of time covered by our SimilarWeb data, BeNaughty and other related websites ran identical .js files including the phrase chunk.dating that made reference to both Maxpay and Genome, a company connected to Maxpay, in a section of code related to payments.
Alex Kasprak in Snopes

According to Snopes‘ investigation, Maxpay in Malta is used not least to process payments for these porn and dating sites of Polyakov. Maxpay is listed on the Orange Compliance list by the CyberFinance rating agency PayRat42, citing the Snopes reports.

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