Many high-risk merchants will painfully remember the Indian-British iPayTotal and OctaPay. The two high-risk payment processors had the same beneficial owners and vanished a few months ago. FinTelegram reported! According to our information, they had brutally ripped off a lot of their merchants. Among these merchants were also many operators of scams and cybercrime ventures that had stolen the money anyway. Paypound, a successor to iPayTotal and OctaPay, a whistleblower claims, has emerged and offers payment services to the high-risk segment. Or so it says.
Operated by a dissolved entity?
We are still working out if and how Paypound is connected to iPayTotal and Octapay. We hypothesize that it’s the successor. Anyway, it is also an Indian-British payment processor with a similar approach. The iPayTotal people, like former president Sen Kugan or the Chief Experience Manager Davina Mungroo, have deleted their LinkedIn profiles and disappeared, as has the entire iPayTotal Group with OctaPay. The Indish guys like Madhumita Sing or Anuraq Pratap Singh have always been hiding behind fake names anyway.
Please read the full story about iPayTotal Group here on PayCom42.
Paypound (www.paypound.ltd) is allegedly operated by Paypound Ltd and its subsidiary Paypound LDA. At least, that’s what the Privacy Policy says (as of August 28, 2021). The problem with this is that Paypount Ltd, a UK-registered company controlled by the Indian citizen Amaranatha “Amar” Puttana, born Aug 1979, was already dissolved in 2019 via compulsory strike-off. The Indian IT entrepreneur Puttana used to be the director of Quidpay Limited, another company dissolved via compulsory strike-off in 2019. Quidpay (wwwquidpay.io) is now operated in Nigeria. However, its website is not working anyway. This is the Indian-British environment that established Paypound.
The other operator
On the Paypound website, another operator is listed as SELF PAY IO LTD, established on August 3, 2021, by Alizee Cannelle Ghislaine, a French woman born in Oct 1987 and living in the Netherlands. She is also registered as the company’s sole director and beneficial owner. We found one Alizee Ghislaine (LinkedIn) in Amsterdam. She co-founded the online CBD shops Let Magic Happen (www.let-magic-happen-cbd.com).
The company’s location on LinkedIn is listed as Povoa de Varzim in Portugal. However, you can contact the people of Paypound via a UK Relefonnummer. The registered office, too, is in London. The employees linked to Paypound on LinkedIn are also largely in the UK, like Abram Xavier (LinkedIn) in London, the onboarding manager.
As an acquirer, Paypound uses OPay Digital Services Limited d/b/a OPay, licensed by the Central Bank of Nigeria, according to the information we have.
Overall a fascinating constellation for a high-risk payment processor. We would probably only do business with Paypound as a high-risk merchant in great desperation even if we would run a scam or fraud scheme.
Share information
If you have any information about Paypound and the individuals and entities involved, we would be grateful if you could share it with our research team via our Whistle42 whistleblower system.
