Scam Alert: OOOPay Claims to Support Bitcoin Payments in Russia

On 11 March, an unknown Russian online exchange service called OOOPay (OOOPay.org) announced that it started to accept Bitcoin payments. Bitcoin.com went deep into the Russian web to find out whether this service is legit. Here’s what we found.

Also read: Russian Firm Tries and Fails to Patent ‘Bitcoin’ Trademark

What’s OOOPay?

Many of Russian SEO experts and site creators use www.sbup.com for checking websites’ legitimacy and ratings. So we decided to use this tool too and here are the results:

As we see above, the TrustRank of this site is 2.05/10, PageRank 3.62/10, Google PageRank is 0 and Yandex Index of Citations is 30 (this number is reachable for almost any type of scam site if its owners put some efforts into SEO).

Now, lets look at the whois stats of this site. The domain was first registered in 2013-07-18, and updated on 2015-05-18. However, OOOPay’s website claims that they have been in business since 2001. Moreover, the registered organization is Domains By Proxy LLC, which indicates that the true owners of this site are willing to hide their faces from the public.

User Feedback

Perusing through various public reviews of the site, we have uncovered that the feedback doesn’t look good either.

According to the comments in the links above, most of the site’s users have confirmed that the site is indeed a scam. Mirpravda, for example, deems OOOPay.org as a fraud operation that puts users’ deposit under serious risk. It says:

Yet another scam site just like cash4wm.ru and free-kassa.ru. This sites have a standard fraud scheme, after receiving your money the service won’t allow user to send them further, or allow with some restrictions. After they got your money and you want to send them somewhere a constant verification starts, then — the technical problems, then they ask you to order their mythical debit card, and then the Support just stops to answer your questions.

Additionally, a user from the Sites.Reviews service under the screen name Samsonn left a couple of screenshots of his dialogue with customer service. Here’s a screen shot, where you can see the convo (in Russian) and that he exchanged 561 Payeer RUB for 511 WMR:

You can see that the payment is in process and will be completed ”after a few hours.” Real exchanges never do this — they usually exchange your e-cash in minutes (that’s the convenience of using electronic money isn’t it?). You can see all the screenshots (in Russian) here.

In the press, the only mention beside a published press release — which anyone can pay to publish online — is a small article on Banki.ru here. If you visit this page, you will see a short ”news story” about the service and three negative comments under the article stating that OOOPay is a scam.

Russia is considered to have a hostile climate regarding Bitcoin activity with looming penalties of up to 3 to 5 million rubles for companies dealing with the “money surrogate” digital currency. Thus, it is always questionable when a Russian business claims to accept Bitcoin.

OOOPay is a verified scam and Bitcoin.com advises all users to do their homework before depositing money with these unverified services.

Do you know of other similar scams trying to defraud Bitcoin users? Let us know in the comments section below!

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