Key Data

• Trading Name: Moorwand
• Legal Entity: UPayCard Ltd (Moorwand Ltd), UK
  UPC Consulting Ltd, UK
  PAP Onpoint Services Ltd, Cyprus
• Activities: high-risk payment processor
• Location: United Kingdom, Cyprus 
• Regulations: e-Money Institution (until 2019)
• Key People: Andrei Grati, Moldavia
  Alain Bazille, French
  Dana Sliman Yacin, French

Moorwand Ltd, registered with the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) as an Authorised Electronic Money Institution, was either knowingly and willfully or negligently involved in numerous illegal broker schemes as fraud-facilitating PSP. Until April 2019, Moorwand has done business as UPayCard (Source: FCA record for Moorwand).

In or around April 2019, Moorwand Ltd sold its UPayCard brand and transferred it to the Cypriot PAP Onpoint Services Ltd. On the FCA profile page of Moorwand Ltd, one can learn that this domain and brand transfer became effective on 16 April 2019. During the binary options fraud era Moorwand and their UPayCard facilitated to following scam brokers with their payment services:

• BeAlgo.com and Algotechs.com (see EFRI BeAlgo-Algotechs Campaign)
• KayaFX.com (see EFRI KayaFX Campaign)
• Bluetrading.com (see EFRI Bluetrading Campaign)
• Prestige.fm
• Capital Markets Banc

Moorwand has been founded by Alain Pierre Bazille, a notorious payment veteran who specialized in high-risk to illegal businesses such as gambling, adult sites, or broker schemes. Moorwand Ltd has been doing business as UPayCard and Paxept in the past. After FinTelegram exposed UPayCard‘s many scam involvements publicly, the payment platform was quickly transferred to the Cyprus-registered PAP Onpoint Services Ltd, and Moorwand officially ceased to do business under this brand.

People

In April 2018, the UK lawyer Robert Courtneidge was appointed as director of Moorwand Ltd and resigned in March 2020. In May 2019, Alain Bazille resigned as director. The UK citizen Wael Sulaiman Almaree was registered as a person with significant control in May 2019 (Source: UK Companies House).

Industries

High Risk

The Short UPayCard Narrative

At some point in 2021, the scam facilitating and money laundering scheme UPayCard disappeared. There has been an UpayCard in Israel since the disappearance that also operates as a payment processor and offers a debit card. The Israeli UpayCard is operated by ICP Finance Ltd in collaboration with Max It Finance Ltd. To our knowledge, however, the Israeli UpayCard has no connection to Alain Bazille‘s scheme.

Since 2020, Alain Bazille and his team have been operating the high-risk payment processor KoalaPays through Safe Payments Solutions s.r.o., which is regulated as an e-money institution in the Czech Republic. As reported by FinTelegram back in 2022, KoalaPays has been experiencing massive problems with its customers because they have allegedly not received their money. Whistleblowers alleged that the new high-risk payment scheme had massive problems with merchants, payouts in the amount of €40 million are disputed, or possibly the money has disappeared.

In addition, KoalaPays is reportedly being sued in the UK in connection with a fraud scheme. More on this shortly.

Until the end of 2020, Safe Payments Solutions was also an agent of the FCA–regulated EMI CFS-ZIPP Limited. According to some information from various forums, KoalaPays is likely to be a successor or offshoot of UPayCard.

Conclusion

Due to their involvement in scams as the processing payment provider, we rate the company RED.