Nuvei to pay $4.85 million over merchant screening, and the FTC adds a knowledge test it must now plead

The Federal Trade Commission sued Nuvei Corporation and four affiliates on 3 September 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, alleging the payment processor opened and kept merchant accounts for sellers it knew, should have known, or consciously avoided knowing were deceiving consumers, and helped them evade the card networks' fraud-monitoring systems. The two sides filed a stipulated order the next day; Judge Krissa M. Lanham entered it on 9 September 2026 and closed the case.

Judgment of $4,850,000 is entered against the five defendants jointly and severally, as monetary relief. Their counsel already holds the sum in escrow, and payment was due within seven days of entry. It may go into a Commission redress fund, with anything unused going to the Treasury. The vote authorising the filing was 2-0.

The settlement is not an admission; the findings record that "Defendants neither admit nor deny any of the allegations in the Complaint, except as specifically stated in this Order. Only for purposes of this action, Defendants admit the facts necessary to establish jurisdiction."

What the Commission now says it must prove

The more consequential document is not the order but a seven-page joint statement by Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson and Commissioner Mark R. Meador, dated 2 September 2026, which changes the Commission's pleading position on unfair payment processing.

It says the Commission has never formally taken the position that such a claim requires the processor to have actual or constructive knowledge of the merchant's wrongdoing, and that in earlier cases it pleaded facts showing knowledge without pleading knowledge itself. "Today, however, we plead that Nuvei knew of the merchants' wrongdoing because we have concluded that Section 5 imposes a knowledge requirement in unfair-payment-processing claims," the two write. The statement says the Commission must now plead and prove that a processor knew, should have known, or consciously avoided knowing that a merchant's transactions involved unfair, deceptive or otherwise unlawful conduct.

They also reject strict liability: a processor applying every industry-standard measure will still let some through, and a strict rule would push processors to exclude legitimate businesses. Nor, they add, may a processor avoid learning what its merchants are doing; a low chargeback rate does not by itself show it did not know.

"Payment processors are crucial intermediaries between businesses and consumers that must take their role seriously and operate in good faith to screen out bad actors; they should be able to do so without fear that they will become responsible whenever an associated merchant behaves poorly. But if payment processors do not take their fraud-prevention role seriously, the Commission will move swiftly to compel them to do so."

The five merchants

The complaint names five schemes it says Nuvei processed for.

• Reimage, later trading as Restoro, an offshore tech-support seller offering software at $30 to $60 through pop-ups warning a computer was infected, then routing buyers to call centres selling plans costing up to $499.99. Between 2017 and 2023 the processing let it take over $30 million from consumers.
• PC Vark, an India-based tech-support seller also called Innovana Thinklabs. Nuvei Limited opened its accounts in late 2020, weeks after the Justice Department sued U.S. members of the same ring, and paused them in February 2021 at tens of thousands of transactions a month.
• DK Automation, a business-opportunity scheme selling coaching programmes and turn-key Amazon stores on earnings claims the FTC calls false and unfounded. Nuvei Technologies Inc. processed over 17,000 sales totalling over $10 million from April 2019 to November 2021.
• American Tax Service, which the FTC alleges was a tax consulting and government impersonation scheme. Nuvei's underwriters classed it high risk yet approved $300,000 in monthly volume, the complaint says, despite an owner who had pleaded guilty to bank fraud. It processed over $6.6 million in net sales from January 2020 to January 2021.
• Premier Health Solutions, a medical discount plan seller the complaint says was already on Mastercard's MATCH list and facing licence proceedings in three states. Nuvei Technologies onboarded it in late 2023 and processed over $90 million in the eighteen months to June 2025, until its sponsoring bank ordered it closed.

The screening the complaint says did not happen

Nuvei Limited's own onboarding policy, the complaint says, required know-your-customer checks, MATCH searches, a review of third-party forums for scam notifications and six months of processing history.

The FTC alleges the opposite happened. It says the defendants spread Reimage's transactions and chargebacks across several accounts to keep each below the networks' thresholds, and quotes a head of risk management writing in May 2017, "We will manage, will split their traffic with more banks…." Accounts were opened, it says, using nominee directors, fake European locations and misleading business descriptions, and an executive told staff to open Reimage's accounts before the know-your-customer checks were done.

Visa warned in early 2020 that Reimage was impersonating Microsoft with fake virus alerts and fined it 25,000 euros that May; processing continued and expanded, the complaint says. An adverse merchant alert quoted in it told Nuvei Limited, "We have discovered a tech scam laundering merchant that resides within your dataset". The then global head of risk and underwriting advised terminating Reimage, the complaint says, while a VP of risk management agreed the reports were "very bad" but pointed to the volume and suggested they try to push back to Visa. An internal report in September 2021 put the account's chargeback rate for the year above 8.5%. None of this has been admitted.

What the order requires

Sections I to VI are permanent. The defendants are banned from processing for anyone selling technical support by telemarketing or through pop-ups about a device's security or performance, and for anyone they know or have reason to know is on Mastercard's MATCH list. They may not make false statements to obtain processing, or use the evasion tactics the order names.

The order defines a "Covered Client": any client selling by outbound telemarketing, any client in the order's named high-risk categories, and any client named in a public enforcement matter in the past ten years. Within sixty days the defendants had to review every existing client against that test, and each Covered Client must be monitored at least monthly.

Any client that in two of the past six months exceeded a 1.0% monthly chargeback rate and more than 75 chargebacks in a month must be investigated, including by viewing its websites from an IP address not associated with the defendants. Processing may continue only if the defendants document, by clear and convincing evidence, that the client's practices are not deceptive or unfair.

Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said when the case was announced: "Consumers deserve a payment system that is competitive, transparent and fortified against fraud—and we will take action anytime those standards are threatened."

What is not known

Nuvei has published nothing about the case. It has not been a public company since November 2024: the Advent International take-private closed on 15 November and the shares came off the Toronto and Nasdaq listings later that month, so there are no current securities filings, and its newsroom carried no item as of 21 September 2026. The only company-attributable act in the record is the signature of Lindsay Matthews, general counsel and corporate secretary, on the stipulation.

Nothing in the file explains how $4,850,000 was arrived at, or ties it to the $30 million the FTC says Reimage took. No filing confirms the money has been transferred, and no refund programme or method of distribution has been announced. The complaint gives processed volume rather than what Nuvei earned from it, the internal messages are attributed only by role, and no individual is a defendant.