Unfolding the mystery behind Instaforex real owners and activities

We have accessed evidence that these documents have been provided by Ekaterina Pobedinskaya herself, long after the end of the official clash between Sergey Mayzus and Instaforex, and it sounds like this is corroborated by evidence available in a court case involving INSTATRADE CORPORATION (but more on that later).

So, wow, looks like Mr and Ms Mayzus were still very much involved into INSTATRADE CORPORATION in spite of the official position of Sergey Mayzus.
In fact, should the mysterious FLYSUN HOLDINGS company be held by Mr or Mrs Mayzus or both, Sergey Mayzus would have actually majority control over INSTATRADE CORPORATION....

Now, isn't it something that Sergey Mayzus himself states in his claim of 2013 on the KROUFR site, that FLYSUN HOLDINGS is his company ? (https://www.forexpeacearmy.com/community/threads/instaforex-scandalized-rumors-or-truth.25566/page-2)

Sound like Sergey Mayzus was not so distanced from Instaforex after all...
 
Now, of course, some could say that INSTATRADE CORPORATION and Instaforex had no more relationship (hmmm.....), but that would be without this contract for provision of payment services by INSTATRADE CORPORATION to INSTA HOLDING :

IT IH Contract page1.jpg

IT IH Contract page2.jpg

IT IH Contract page 3.jpg

IT IH Contract page 4.jpg
IT IH Contract page5.jpg
 
According to our information, over half a million dollars (and probably much more) have been paid unto the bank accounts of INSTA HOLDING (IBAN CY18003001780000017832223195) and INSTATRADE CORPORATION (IBAN CY66005002400002400739239202) pursuant this agreement.
 
So, what was the reason which lead Sergey Mayzus, still beneficiary owner of INSTATRADE CORPORATION, still connected to INSTA HOLDING and therefore to instaforex.com, to start a public war with Instaforex in the Summer of 2013 ?

After all, Sergey Mayzus is far from being an idiot, or to lack experience. He has been a politician, is the official owner and manager of several perfectly licensed businesses, which, contrary to Instaforex, are not blacklisted worldwide, and had everything to lose from this story.

Well, we think we have the answer, and it perfectly makes sense considering the game of smoke and mirrors which surrounds Instaforex.

But first, we need to turn our attention to another key player : Ildar Sharipov.
 
So, Ildar Sharipov, who had been the "face" of Instaforex, suddenly disappears.
Gone from the Instaforex website.

We initially supposed that he had been distancing himself from Instaforex so he could launch quietly forexmart.com, which was a complete replica of Instaforex : same methods (sponsoring of a football club, best broker here and there), extended leverage (1:5000 for the ones who really like to play....) and same payment processors (and we'll come back to this later on).

Forexmart was the project of the Cyprus company Trademart, which afterwards became INSTANT TRADING EU LTD.
First, Ildar Sharipov, free of any apparent tie to Instaforex, could request a license from CySec for forexmart.eu. Then he did step off the company to be replaced by Alexei Skachilov (more on this person later), which could extend the license for instaforex.eu and voila...."Instaforex" is licensed in Europe....
 
So, yes, we initially supposed that Ildar Sharipov had left the "Instaforex Group of Companies" to act like a submarine through forexmart, so that Instaforex can acquire a CySEC license.

But then we came across a very detailed inquiry from an Australian journalist, in the very reputable bankinfosecurity.com website : https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/how-63k-was-lost-in-week-on-online-trading-website-a-10697

In this sad story, the author, Jeremy Kirk, exposes how an Australian citizen was ripped off by a Forex company, Millenium-FX, from 63 000 dollars, which were sent to Online Currency Corp Ltd, a company owned and operated by Ildar Sharipov, and providing an electronic transfer of funds solution under the name "Megatransfer".

Megatransfer was very familiar to us, as being a payment system used by instaforex.com, instaforex.eu, forexmart.com and forexmart.eu, so we decided to take a deeper look into that too.

And this is when we went through the mirror.
 
First, we went to check ONLINE CURRENCY CORP FCA license, but it was kind of too late. Apparently, the complaints had been too many, and, out of the two authorisations (EMI and EMD) it held under its license, the EMD authorisation had already been revoked, while the second one suffered very harsh limitations, as ONLINE CURRENCY CORP was ordered (and still is) to refrain, for an unlimited period of time, to provide AIS and PIS services.

For those who do not know what this means, it basically means that ONLINE CURRENCY CORP might issue electronic money against the receipt of fiat money, but is otherwise prohibited to collect or execute payments, so goodbye payment processing (see the attached file "Financial Conduct Authority).

We could notice two companies from the FCA information : another UK company, Grizzio Ltd, and a Bulgarian company, Currentec EOOD.

So we went first for Currentec, and we found the website currentec.com

Of course, it is anonymously registered, but a reverseIP shows that it shares the same host than megatransfer related websites.

144.76.198.207 - Reverse IP Lookup - DomainTools.jpg

Of course, in a typical Instaforex style, the legal documentation of the website (name of the company, address, etc.) is completely missing.

You can only know that you are able to join 50,000 or so lucky (?) clients to perform spot exchanges of currencies.

Currentec | Signup.jpg


You still have to wonder how they managed to attract 50,000 customers. Definitely not with their company profile and services description

Currentec | About Us.jpg
 

Attachments

  • Financial Conduct Authority.pdf
    102.1 KB · Views: 21
The funny thing with Currentec is that Currentec EOOD, the Bulgarian company which is an agent of Online Currency Corp / Megatransfer has lost its EMD licensed agent status in Bulgaria in 2018 when the Online Currency Corp EMD license was revoked, but still look pretty active locally (more on that later).

What is even more funny is according to the information that is available in Bulgaria regarding this company (source here) it has a capital of 2 leva (local currency, BGN which is about 1 dollar). Alright, this company is just an agent of a company, not a fully licensed one, but 1 dollar capital, really ?

We also looked at the registered address (boulevard Tsarigradsko shose 135, 1784 Sofia) and what we found is much more interesting (source here) as this address is also home of Sofia Proconsult OOD, company registered under the number 201552174 whose former name is "Insta Sofia", under which name it had been blacklisted by the Bulgarian authorities.

We'll revert back to these companies and their management later on, but we could find out that both Currentec EOOD and Online Currency Corp seem to have members of their board of directors who are Cypriots : Georgios Spanos and Savvakis Patsalidis.

Savvakis Patsalidis. is also a statutory director of Instant Trading EU Ltd, the CySec regulated company.
Georgios Spanos is also a director of Online Currency Corp, Grizzio and Currentec Ltd, a dormant UK company.

Now, it seemed that we were able to lift a question : were the Cypriot members of the board of directors of Instant Trading EU simply local secretaries, accountants or lawyers which Instaforex had put there in order to play nice with CySec, or were they full-fledged members of the scam ?

The answer seems a big yes, especially that Savvakis Patsalidis was also a director in the now defunct UK company KnightsFX Trading Corp (https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/NI630297), but, again, more on that later.
 
We also investigated who was using MegaTransfer, and here came a surprise : beyond instaforex, forexmart and other connected websites (brokers of these two), we found a host of seemingly independent forex sites using this payment system :

SimpleFX
SpartanForex
Safe Gold FX (https://www.sg-fx.com)
Forex Grand
Gem Forex (https://gforex.asia)
EzyFX (https://ezyfx.la)
Gainsy Forex
TradesFX
Xtrade
VFX Capital

and so on, and so on....

We kept on wondering why would Instaforex provide payment facilities via MegaTransfer to its competitors....

Then it hit us : EzyFX "Best Broker in Asia" has the same address in the UK than Grizzio Ltd, company of Ildar Sharipov, agent of MegaTransfer and related companies of Instaforex, the other "Best Broker in Asia"
EZYFX - Best Forex Broker In Asia4.jpg

We took a look at SimpleFX : registration address according to their websiteSuite 305, Griffith Corporate Centre Beachmont, Kingstown VC0100, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which is also the exact same address than Insta Service, the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines company which, according to Instaforex, delivers services to instaforex.com clients....

So we started digging again, this time taking the addresses of the known related companies of Instaforex. And what we found out really baffled us....
 
So, here is, a nutshell, what we found :

We knew from the article https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/how-63k-was-lost-in-week-on-online-trading-website-a-10697 that the two incriminated brokers, Trade12 and Millenium-FX were headquartered in the Marshall Islands, with the following address :
Trust Company Complex, Ajeltake Road, Ajeltake Island, Majuro, Marshall Islands MH96960

We have been able to identify that several other MegaTransfer users, World FXM, VFX Capital and MarketOnUs (fxonus) were also operating from this address, according to their website information, example, for VFX Capital :
Contact Us | VFXCapital.jpg



This is far from being the sole companies users of MegaTransfer at this address, but we'll come back to this later on.
VFX Capital is quite "fresh" on the market, so it is only at the "reported scam" level, but the others have either gone down already, or are blacklisted by regulators, and even criminally investigated, such as MarketOnUs :

MarketOnUsBlacklist.jpg
 
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