Payza

Payza was an online payment processor that grew out of AlertPay and operated internationally, including in markets that larger providers avoided. It appeared in the cashiers of a number of brokers during the 2010s.

What happened

In March 2018 the United States Department of Justice charged the operators of Payza with running an unlicensed money transmitting business and with laundering proceeds of criminal activity, and the company's domains were seized. The service stopped. Customer balances were caught in the enforcement action, and recovering them was a legal process rather than a support ticket.

Payza is not a restricted, regional or slow method. It does not exist. Any broker page still listing it is displaying content that has been stale for years.

The point that generalises

Payment providers that serve merchant categories other processors decline are attractive for exactly that reason, and carry exactly that risk. The permissiveness that makes a wallet useful for funding an offshore broker is often the same permissiveness that attracts regulatory attention, and when the intervention comes it lands on customer balances without notice.

• Do not store trading capital in a payment wallet. Move it through, and keep it either in the market or in a bank.
• Verify a second withdrawal route in advance. Once a provider is seized or frozen, nothing can be verified and nothing can be moved.
• Read the cashier as a signal. A broker advertising a processor that shut down in 2018 is telling you how carefully it maintains everything else it publishes, including its regulatory claims.

What to use instead

For funding an account today, the durable options are a debit card, a bank transfer, and — where the broker supports them — an established regulated wallet. None of them is exciting, and all of them will still be there next year.