Nuvei to Pay $4.85 Million to Settle FTC Payment Processing Case

Key Takeaways

• Nuvei Agrees to $4.85 Million Settlement: The payment processor will pay $4.85 million to settle FTC allegations that it opened and maintained accounts for merchants it knew or should have known were engaged in deceptive activity.
• More Than $30 Million Processed for Reimage: The FTC alleges Nuvei processed more than $30 million in consumer payments between 2017 and 2023 for Reimage, an offshore tech-support operation.
• Allegations Extend Beyond Tech Support: Nuvei’s U.S. subsidiary allegedly served merchants accused of deceptive business-opportunity claims, impersonating government tax authorities, and merchants previously terminated for excessive chargebacks or fraud.
• Merchant Screening Requirements Will Tighten: The proposed order requires Nuvei to screen and monitor existing and prospective clients, with enhanced scrutiny for certain merchant categories and clients exceeding specified chargeback thresholds.
• FTC Targets Payment Infrastructure Behind Fraud: The case underscores regulatory scrutiny of payment processors that provide access to the financial system when warning signs about merchant conduct are present.

Deep Dive

Global payment processor Nuvei has agreed to pay $4.85 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that it provided payment services to merchants it knew or should have known were engaged in deceptive activity, including tech-support scams targeting U.S. consumers.

The proposed settlement, announced Thursday, would also require the Canada-based company to strengthen how it screens and monitors merchants and would bar it from processing payments for certain tech-support businesses. The $4.85 million payment is to be used for consumer redress.

The FTC’s complaint focuses in part on Reimage, an offshore tech-support operation for which Nuvei allegedly processed more than $30 million in consumer payments between 2017 and 2023. The agency says Nuvei, through a merchant acquiring bank registered in Cyprus, provided Reimage and other overseas tech-support operations with accounts that allowed them to accept credit-card payments from consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Reimage was not the only problematic merchant identified by the agency. The FTC alleges that Nuvei’s U.S. subsidiary, Nuvei Technologies, also opened and maintained accounts for businesses accused of making false or baseless earnings claims, impersonating government tax authorities and engaging in other deceptive conduct. Some merchants, according to the complaint, had previously been terminated by other processors or acquiring banks because of excessive chargebacks or fraud.

Among those named in the complaint is DK Automation, which sold business opportunities and was accused by the FTC of making deceptive earnings claims involving Amazon and cryptocurrency ventures. The agency brought an enforcement action against DK Automation and its founder in November 2022.

Nuvei Technologies also allegedly provided merchant accounts to American Tax Service. The FTC and Nevada authorities sued the company and its owners in October 2025, accusing them of falsely impersonating government agencies while selling tax-debt-relief services.

The allegations place Nuvei further up the payment chain than the merchants the FTC has previously pursued. The agency took action against Reimage’s operators in 2024. A year later, it sued European payment processor Paddle, alleging that the company used its merchant-of-record platform to facilitate Reimage’s deceptive tech-support operation.

The case against Nuvei turns in significant part on what a processor does when warning signs begin to accumulate.

Payment processors routinely serve businesses that can generate complaints or chargebacks without necessarily engaging in fraud. The FTC’s allegation is that Nuvei opened or maintained accounts for merchants it knew or should have known were engaged in deception, including some that other financial institutions had already stopped serving.

The complaint charges Nuvei Corporation and four subsidiaries (Nuvei International Group Limited, Nuvei Limited, SafeCharge Digital Limited and Nuvei Technologies) with unfair practices in connection with payment processing in violation of the FTC Act and with assisting and facilitating deceptive telemarketers in violation of the Telemarketing Sales Rule.

“Today’s action underscores the Commission’s commitment to ensuring that our payments system operates free of fraud,” Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in announcing the case. “Our enforcement work reinforces the transparency and trust in the payments system that consumers and businesses depend on.”

The settlement does considerably more than impose a monetary payment. Under the proposed order, Nuvei would be banned from providing payment services to anyone selling tech-support products or services through telemarketing or through pop-up messages concerning security or performance problems on a computer or other device.

The company would also be prohibited from making false or misleading statements to obtain merchant accounts or other payment-processing services for itself or others. It could not employ tactics designed to evade fraud or risk-monitoring programs maintained by banks or credit-card networks, including load balancing.

The order would also impose new requirements on the machinery of merchant oversight itself. Nuvei would have to screen and monitor prospective and existing clients, including merchants in certain categories such as outbound telemarketing. When an existing client’s chargeback rate exceeds thresholds specified in the order, the company would be required to conduct enhanced screening and investigation.

That requirement gets closer to the substance of the FTC’s case than the $4.85 million figure does. The agency is not alleging merely that bad actors found their way onto a large payments platform. Its complaint concerns the controls that determine who gets access to that platform, what happens when evidence of trouble appears and how long a processor can continue doing business after those warnings become difficult to ignore.

Chargebacks are particularly important in that equation. A high chargeback rate does not by itself establish fraud, but it can give a processor an early indication that customers are disputing what a merchant has sold them or how they were charged. Under the proposed order, crossing the specified thresholds would require Nuvei to look more closely rather than allow the account to continue without enhanced review.

For compliance teams in the payments industry, that makes the case as much about merchant lifecycle management as fraud itself. Onboarding controls matter, but so does what happens six months or three years later, when the information available about a merchant no longer resembles the information on which the original approval was based.

The FTC’s allegations against Nuvei cover precisely that territory. Reimage allegedly remained on the company’s payment infrastructure from 2017 through 2023, processing more than $30 million along the way. Other merchants allegedly arrived with histories that included excessive chargebacks, fraud concerns or termination by other financial institutions.

The proposed order would make those signals harder to treat as background noise. It would require Nuvei to investigate specified warning signs and place responsibility for merchant risk where the FTC argues it belonged all along: with the processor deciding whether to keep processing.

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