Black Banx
Key Data
- Trading Name: Black Banx (previously WB21)
- Legal Entity: Black Banx Holdings Ltd
Black Banx Inc. - Activities: globally-acting high-risk payment processor
- Location: Canada, Germany, United Kingdom
- Regulations: unregulated
- Key People: Michael Gastauer and Philip Gastauer
Black Banx (previously WB21) is a globally-acting high-risk payment processor. The German Michael Gastauer and his son Philip Gastauer are the owners. The company promises to get bank accounts for individuals and merchants in over 180 countries in just minutes.
Black Banx claims to have 8 million (now 20 million) customers and $10 billion in monthly transaction volume on LinkedIn and its website. We doubt the figures of this high-risk and dark side payment processor. The UK FCA has issued a warning against Black Banx.
The truth, however, is that Black Banx and Michael Gastauer have been involved in huge scams such as OneCoin or QuadrigaCX.
Compliance Problems
In June 2022 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) obtained a final judgment against Michael Gastauer, the German founder of the high-risk payment processor Black Banxscheme, for his role in an international scheme that generated more than $165 million of illegal sales of stock on the U.S. markets in at least 50 microcap companies. He is ordered to pay over $17 million. In 2018, the SEC charged Gastauer and six of his US-based entities with aiding and abetting a vast securities fraud scheme orchestrated by UK citizen Roger Knox.
News
On December 19, 2022, the Black Banx of Gasterauer sent out a fantastic press release. They now had 20 million customers, and one million accounts were being opened per month.
The latest Similarweb statistics (Dec 2022) say that between September to November 2022, only around 100,000 customers visited the website.
Assuming that not every visitor to the Black Banxwebsite immediately opens an account, we expect several million website visitors per month, resulting in one million opened accounts. In addition, there should be website visits of the already existing customers. So Black Banx would expect at least between 5 – 10 million website visitors per month. In fact, however, there were just over 100,000 (read correctly).
With 20 million accounts, Black Banx would be just behind Revolut, one of the world’s leading FinTechs, with around 25 million customers as of November 2022. However, Revolut had around 27 million visitors to its website between September and November 2022.
Black Banx would have more than twice as many customers as BaFin-regulated N26, which reported around 8 million customers. Similarweb says there were around 10 million people on the site between September and November 2022. That fits too!
We include Black Banx in our “Black Compliance” list.
