Fazzaco Exclusive: Whistleblower Reveals Yelopay's Ties to the BoomBill Scam

​The online payment industry has been plagued by fraud in recent years, causing losses to many merchants and consumers, including forex brokers. Recently, Fazzaco obtained a list of suspicious payment service providers (PSPs) that requires extra caution to deal with from an anonymous source, and the name of Yelopay caught our attention. After looking into it a bit further, we found out that the person behind Yelopay is the same person behind the BoomBill fraud case that was exposed last year for stealing millions of dollars, according to another source.

Source R: Her Experience with Yelopay & Carlo Sebastian Ball (Jasper) the Person Behind Yelopay

Source R works as an intermediary who provides payment solutions for high-risk merchants. They initially chose to work with Yelopay after being introduced by someone. Afterwards, R asked her clients to settle the first $5,000 at Yelopay, but they are not paid out even after several weeks. In response, the Yelopay team said that the settlement amount was too low, which caused delays from the acquirer, and even blamed the settlement being crypto. As of October 10, 2023, R's clients had a total of $50,000 locked in Yelopay for a month without being paid out.

Dissatisfied, R contacted Yelopay several times to ask for a solution, but they did not get a satisfactory answer. When R had a dispute with Yelopay, Jasper, as shown in the screenshot below, appears to be an important person in this matter.

R received information and found out that there was a very suspicious person behind Yelopay, namely Carlo Sebastian Ball. He has been using Jasper as a pseudonym, but he is actually a British citizen and the person behind the BoomBill fraud case that embezzled up to $4 million in customer funds last year. Now he is running Yelopay and also a company based in Dubai called DB7.

A Review of the BoomBill Fraud in 2022

Last year, there was a shocking fraud case in the online payment industry, involving BoomBill, Xcepts, Paypound and other PSPs. At that time, BoomBill used providing payment solutions for high-risk merchants as a cover and collected millions of dollars and USDT from other payment processors such as Xcepts and promised to pay the merchants on time. But in fact BoomBill did not fulfill its promise and transferred the funds to other accounts and disappeared.

Xcepts allegedly paid more than $3 million and USDT to BoomBill, while BoomBill only paid €700,000 to one entity. Therefore, BoomBill not only scammed millions of dollars from their merchants placed at Xcepts, but also scammed millions from many other payment processors around the world.

And Paypound was also one of BoomBill's customers, but according to a source, Xcepts never directly processed payments for Paypound and did not sign any agreement with them either. That is to say Paypound used some other companies (such as BoomBill and Xcepts) to process funds and profited from it. When things were exposed, Paypound disappeared and left other companies and merchants to bear the losses. Fazzaco published an article earlier this year titled "Payoneer First, and Now Paypound - What Has Gone Wrong with the Payment Industry?​" in which Paypound's issues were explored.

Problems with the Payment Industry - Intermediaries and Transparency

According to R, that there are usually two forms of fund loss in the payment industry. The first is that merchants inadvertently conduct fraudulent transactions, causing payment networks such as Visa to shut down their merchant IDs (MIDs), resulting in penalties and fines. But this is usually understandable.

The second is that intermediaries or brokers act as middlemen and fail to transfer funds to merchants after receiving them from acquirers. This leads to a chain reaction, as in merchants do not receive funds and blame the secondary brokers or intermediaries who connect them with these scrupulous brokers.

The solution lies in one point: better transparency. Secondary intermediaries should fully disclose the real brokers and acquiring bank information in the transaction chain to merchants. If MIDs are shut down, merchants should at least know where to get their money back. So the real problem is that merchants always don't know where their money is.

Therefore, as an intermediary who stays in contact with merchants, they should assist them in obtaining MIDs and increase transparency. Let merchants know where their MIDs come from, so that they can really find out who is behind the scenes and hold them accountable. Transparency is the key to achieving a fair and reliable payment ecosystem.

Final Thoughts

R told us that she will continue to track Yelopay and other bad PSPs (including Centspay) to prevent more people from becoming victims. At the same time, she also said that when working with others, trust and transparency should be both-way - as in identity verification should be mutual. "If you expect me to provide my KYC and KYB, I, in turn, expect you to reciprocate with your KYC and KYB".

Meanwhile, another source provided the latest update on his previously scheduled meeting with Yelopay's "Jasper" today (Oct 18), and he said the meeting has been canceled for the fifth time.

Fazzaco, as a professional pan-financial information hub, is committed to helping the FX community find the most suitable partners and avoid unnecessary risks and losses. If you have any latest revelations about the payment industry, please feel free to contact us: service@fazzaco.com.