A payment processor that helped move more than $30 million out of American bank accounts for a tech-support scam has agreed to pay nearly $5 million to settle federal fraud charges — but that money is not on its way to victims yet. The Federal Trade Commission says Nuvei, a Canada-based company that processes credit card payments for online merchants, kept opening and running payment accounts for scam operations long after warning signs should have shut the door. For households, the case is a reminder that scams do not run on cash alone — they need a bank and a payment processor willing to keep the transactions flowing, and regulators are increasingly going after that plumbing, not just the con artists at the front end.
How Nuvei’s Payment Pipes Carried $30 Million to a Tech-Support Scam
According to the Federal Trade Commission’s September 4 announcement, Nuvei Corporation and four of its subsidiaries — Nuvei International Group Limited, Nuvei Limited, SafeCharge Digital Limited and Nuvei Technologies Inc. — opened and maintained payment accounts for merchants the company knew or should have known were engaged in deception. The largest piece of that business, the FTC says, was Reimage, an offshore tech-support operation that took in more than $30 million in consumer payments between 2017 and 2023 by routing the money through a Nuvei-affiliated merchant acquiring bank registered in Cyprus.
Reimage’s playbook, laid out in a separate FTC case that settled for $26 million in March 2024, relied on fake Microsoft-style pop-up warnings telling consumers their computers were infected with viruses. Consumers who paid $27 to $58 for repair software were then contacted by telemarketers who claimed the software alone could not fix the problem and pushed hundreds of dollars more in technician fees. Nuvei is accused of processing those payments even though it knew, or should have known, what Reimage was doing. The FTC’s complaint charges Nuvei with unfair practices under the FTC Act and with assisting and facilitating deceptive telemarketers in violation of the Telemarketing Sales Rule — the same law regulators used against Reimage’s operators in 2024 and against another payment processor, Paddle, in 2025.
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DK Automation and American Tax Service Rode the Same Merchant Accounts
Reimage was not the only account the FTC flagged. The complaint says Nuvei Technologies Inc., the company’s U.S. subsidiary, also opened or kept merchant accounts open for DK Automation, which the FTC previously accused of selling bogus Amazon done-for-you businesses and a crypto trading bot built on fabricated earnings claims, and for American Tax Service, which federal and Nevada regulators sued in October 2025 for impersonating the IRS and other tax authorities in mailed collection letters.
The FTC also alleges Nuvei accepted merchants that other payment processors or banks had already cut off for excessive chargebacks or fraud, effectively giving a second life to businesses the rest of the payment industry had already flagged as risky. That pattern sits at the center of the FTC’s legal theory: processing payments is not illegal, but doing so for merchants carrying obvious warning signs can itself become an unfair practice under the FTC Act. Tech-support scams and tax debt relief schemes are among the fraud patterns the FTC has pursued most aggressively against payment companies over the past two years, and the Nuvei case marks at least the second time a processor tied to Reimage specifically has faced its own settlement, following Paddle’s case in 2025.
What Nuvei Must Change Under the Proposed Order
Under the proposed order, Nuvei is banned from providing payment services to any business selling tech-support products through telemarketing calls or computer pop-ups about security or performance problems. It is also barred from making false statements to obtain merchant accounts and from using tactics — including a practice called load balancing, which spreads a merchant’s transactions across multiple accounts — to dodge the fraud-monitoring systems banks and card networks already run.
The order also requires Nuvei to screen and monitor its clients on an ongoing basis, with extra scrutiny for higher-risk categories such as outbound telemarketing, and to investigate any existing client whose chargeback rate — how often customers dispute a charge — crosses a threshold set in the order. The Commission voted 2-0 to authorize the case, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. Because it is a stipulated order rather than a final judgment, a judge still has to approve it before any of these requirements take effect. Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador, the two commissioners who voted to bring the case, also issued a joint statement about the settlement.
Why the $4.85 Million Isn’t a Refund Check Yet
The FTC says the $4.85 million Nuvei must pay will be used to provide redress to consumers harmed by the scams it financed. That is a real dollar figure, but it describes a fund, not a distribution. No claims process, payment schedule or eligibility list has been announced, and the underlying order is still proposed rather than finalized.
This is not the first time the FTC has gone after a payment processor connected to Reimage. In June 2025, U.K.-based Paddle agreed to pay $5 million and accept a permanent ban from processing tech-support telemarketing payments for similar conduct, with that money used to supplement redress already sent to Reimage’s victims. Anyone who paid for tech-support repairs tied to Reimage, DK Automation or American Tax Service should watch for official refund notices rather than unsolicited calls or emails claiming to speed up a payout — the FTC is direct about this on its own site: the agency will never demand money, make threats, or promise a prize in exchange for releasing a refund.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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