A $4.85 Million Fine Is a Rounding Error for Nuvei

The Federal Trade Commission announced on September 4 that Nuvei will pay $4.85 million to settle charges that it processed more than $30 million in consumer payments for a tech support scam it had been explicitly warned about. Nuvei is a payment processor that reported billions of dollars in annual volume before its 2024 take-private deal. A $4.85 million check is not a deterrent at that scale. It is a line item.

What the FTC Actually Found

According to the FTC’s complaint, Nuvei processed payments for Reimage, an offshore tech support scam that used fake virus alerts to impersonate Microsoft and lure consumers into paying for services they did not need, from 2017 to 2023. Visa itself flagged the merchant to Nuvei in 2020, warning that Reimage was running the impersonation scheme and had already drawn a card-network fine. Nuvei’s response, per the FTC, was to keep processing for Reimage and ramp up the volume it handled. The complaint also names other merchants Nuvei serviced despite red flags: a fake business-opportunity seller, an operation impersonating government tax authorities, and clients previously terminated by other processors for excessive chargebacks. “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 agency’s announcement.

The Counter-Argument, Stated Fairly

The strongest defense of this settlement is that the dollar figure was never supposed to be the punishment. The order also requires Nuvei to stop processing for tech-support sellers that use telemarketing or pop-up warnings, to stop making false statements to acquire merchant accounts, and to build out real screening and enhanced review when a client’s chargeback rate crosses a threshold. Regulators who focus purely on fine size, this argument goes, miss that behavioral remedies are the actual lever: they change what a processor is legally allowed to do going forward, in a way that outlasts any one-time payment. On this view, $4.85 million is simply the number needed to fund consumer redress and close the case, not a measure of how seriously the FTC takes the underlying conduct.

Why That Argument Does Not Hold Here

It would hold if payment processors were financially indifferent between screening merchants properly and processing whatever they can get. They are not. Screening costs money and slows onboarding; skipping it is faster and more profitable, especially for a processor charging a percentage of every dollar that flows through a fraudulent merchant’s account. Nuvei did not fail to notice the risk on Reimage. Visa told it directly, in 2020, that the merchant was running a scam, and the FTC’s own account is that Nuvei processed more for Reimage afterward rather than less. That is not a screening gap. That is a business choosing volume over the warning it was given, for three more years, because the warning carried no cost and the volume did.

A $4.85 million settlement, even paired with new behavioral rules, does not change that calculation for the next processor facing the same choice. The conduct rules bind Nuvei specifically and expire in scope the moment a different processor makes the same call on a different merchant. Behavioral orders only deter the industry broadly when the accompanying penalty is large enough that other processors update their own math, not just the defendant’s. A fine equal to roughly a rounding error on the volume a mid-sized processor moves in a single quarter does not clear that bar, and the FTC’s own complaint, which describes a processor that kept scaling up a scam merchant after a direct fraud warning, is a strange place to conclude that the financial penalty did not need to be larger.

What It Means for the Risk Leader

The behavioral terms in this order are a genuine floor and other processors should read them as the minimum screening standard regulators now expect: real monitoring of chargeback rates, real diligence before onboarding, no more looking past a network’s own fraud warning. But risk leaders should not read the size of the check as a signal that the FTC’s enforcement carries real financial teeth yet. It is the same pattern this publication has flagged in other regulators’ enforcement records: the FCA’s bans keep arriving only after the money is already gone, and the CFTC has its own history of tightening rules on new products while easing them on legacy ones. Until a processor pays a penalty that is a visible fraction of the fraudulent volume it enabled, rather than a fraction of a percent of it, the economics still favor looking the other way when a high-volume merchant is also a high-risk one.

Source: Federal Trade Commission