Nuvei to pay $4.85 million and screen its merchants under FTC settlement

Nuvei, a global payment processor, will pay $4.85 million and take on a client-screening regime to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it opened and kept payment processing accounts running for merchants it knew or should have known were deceiving consumers, among them tech support scams. The complaint and the final order were filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. The Commission vote authorizing staff to file them was 2-0.

For anyone who has clicked a pop-up warning about a virus, this is the part of the plumbing that is rarely visible. Such a scam takes the card number; a processor moves the money. The FTC's complaint says Nuvei processed more than $30 million in consumer payments for Reimage, which the agency describes as an offshore tech support scam, across a 2017-to-2023 span.

The matter is civil. The two documents listed on the FTC's case page are a complaint for permanent injunction, monetary judgment and other relief, and a stipulated order of the same description. No criminal charge appears anywhere in the record reviewed for this piece, and nothing in the captured release states that Nuvei admitted wrongdoing. The release closes with the agency's standard note: a complaint issues on a reason-to-believe standard, and the court decides the case. Five defendants are named on the case page - Nuvei Corporation, Nuvei International Group Limited (formerly SafeCharge International Group Limited), Nuvei Limited (formerly SafeCharge Limited), SafeCharge Digital Limited and Nuvei Technologies Inc.

The claim half arrives in the announcement itself. "Today's action underscores the Commission's commitment to ensuring that our payments system operates free of fraud," said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, in the release announcing the settlement. The same release carries a further passage in the same register - "…and we will take action anytime those standards are threatened" - the close of a longer sentence, with no speaker attached to it anywhere in the captured page. This piece attributes it to the document, because the document names nobody.

Now set that against the money. The order recovers $4.85 million. The complaint's own figure for what moved through those accounts for a single merchant is more than $30 million. By this desk's arithmetic that is at most about 16 cents recovered per dollar processed for Reimage - a ceiling, since the processed figure is itself a floor, before any question of what the rest of the book held. The release states neither the ratio nor the comparison; the two numbers sit in different paragraphs of it.

What the order requires reads like a product spec. It directs the company to screen and monitor clients it already has and clients it might take on, names outbound telemarketing among the merchant categories that get that treatment, and requires deeper investigation of any existing client whose chargeback rate runs past limits the order sets.

Nuvei's own fraud and risk management page sells that work to merchants. The page markets advanced fraud detection, industrial grade tokenization and KYC, more than 200 configurable rules for a merchant's industry and market, and pre-chargeback mitigation with alerts, under a promise to "Prevent the majority of would-be chargebacks before they materialize." Offered as analysis rather than as a finding: the duties the order imposes are close to the product the defendant already advertises, and no FTC document reviewed here makes that observation.

The agency's public record on the scam it describes is thinner than it first looks. The FTC's Restoro-Reimage refunds page - so named in its address, though the captured sentence itself names no company - describes the companies as having "used misleading online ads and fake Microsoft Windows pop-up screens to scare people into paying for computer repair services." That page carries no payment count, no dollar total and no date. Separately, a March release announces that "The FTC will send 736,375 PayPal payments starting March 13 to consumers tricked into paying for unnecessary computer repair services." Note the tense: an announced distribution, not a delivered one. The captured body of that release names no company at all - not Restoro, not Reimage, not Nuvei - and its headline figure of more than $25.5 million appears in the release title rather than in the text captured for this piece. So the two records sit side by side here and are not merged. This piece does not assert that those payments were redress for the merchant named in the Nuvei complaint, because no document reviewed here says so.

For a reader the practical residue is small and specific. If a refund check arrives from an FTC matter, the refunds page instructs: "If you get a check, please cash it within 90 days." And the chargeback rate - the share of card transactions that customers dispute - is the tell the government has now written into one processor's obligations. Under this order an elevated rate is not merely a cost of doing business; it is the condition that triggers a required look at the merchant behind it.

Scale, taken from secondary and company sources and offered only as magnitude: Wikipedia records that on April 1, 2024 it was announced that Advent International had agreed to buy Nuvei for $6.3 billion in an all-cash deal, taking it private. Nuvei's own newsroom lists "Nuvei to Acquire Payoneer for $2.75 Billion, Creating a Leading Global Platform for Local and Cross-Border Commerce" among its headlines, undated in the capture. Against the $2.75 billion Payoneer figure, $4.85 million is about 0.18 percent.

No comment from Nuvei appears in any document reviewed here. The company newsroom, captured September 5, 2026, listed the Payoneer acquisition, a partnership with BlackLine on invoice-to-cash processing, and a first-party in-agent payment completed with Visa. It carried no statement on the settlement. Nuvei is listed as a right-of-reply subject on this piece, and nothing from the company had arrived when it was filed.

What resolves next sits on a docket rather than in a press release. The agency's note says the court decides the case, and the FTC's Nuvei case page is where an entered order would show up next to the complaint and the stipulated order already posted there. This desk's checkable prediction: as of March 5, 2027, that case page will list no document from a criminal proceeding against any of the five named defendants. If it does, the civil framing above was wrong, and the page itself will say so.