FTC: Nuvei kept processing payments for scam merchants it should have flagged

According to the Federal Trade Commission, payment processor Nuvei will pay $4.85 million to settle charges that it opened and maintained accounts for merchants it knew or should have known were running deceptive schemes, including tech support scams that took millions of dollars from consumers.

The FTC's complaint names Nuvei Corporation and its subsidiaries, Nuvei International Group Limited, Nuvei Limited, SafeCharge Digital Limited and Nuvei Technologies Inc. It alleges Nuvei processed more than $30 million in consumer payments for Reimage, an offshore tech support scam, between 2017 and 2023.

A processor kept a scam's payments moving for six years

Reimage was not a scam that hid well. The FTC took its own action against Reimage's operators in 2024. Before that action, the scheme ran for six years, and the complaint says Nuvei's Cyprus-registered merchant acquiring bank kept furnishing it with the payment processing accounts that let it take credit card payments from cardholders in the United States and elsewhere. A scam of that size and duration depends on someone willing to keep its money moving. This case names the processor that did.

Reimage is not the only merchant the complaint describes. It alleges Nuvei's U.S.-based subsidiary, Nuvei Technologies Inc., also opened and maintained accounts for merchants selling business opportunities on false or baseless earnings claims, such as DK Automation, and for merchants impersonating government tax authorities, such as American Tax Service. The FTC brought its own enforcement actions against DK Automation and its founder in November 2022 and against American Tax Service and its owners in October 2025. The complaint also says Nuvei took on merchants that other payment processors or acquiring banks had already terminated for excessive chargebacks or fraud.

That last detail matters. It means the industry already had a signal that these merchants were a problem, and Nuvei's screening let them back in anyway. A merchant screening system that does not check why a merchant lost its last processing account is not really screening.

The FTC also sued a separate payment processor, Paddle, last year, alleging its "merchant of record" platform helped facilitate Reimage's scheme. That means at least two processors sat between Reimage and the cardholders it took money from.

Nuvei is charged with unfair practices in payment processing under the FTC Act and with assisting and facilitating deceptive telemarketers under the Telemarketing Sales Rule. The $4.85 million will go toward consumer redress. The proposed order also bars Nuvei from the unfair or deceptive payment processing practices described in the complaint.

Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the action reinforces "the transparency and trust in the payments system that consumers and businesses depend on."

The settlement puts a dollar figure and a name on a part of the fraud chain that consumers never see. The scammer takes the money, but a processor decides whether that scammer keeps a working account. This case says Nuvei made that decision wrong, more than once, for years.