BridgerPay is the brand and platform of Bridger AI Limited, registered in Cyprus, and established by Israeli Forex veteran Ran Cohen (LinkedIn profile) in 2018. BridgerPay is registered in the Visa Service Directory as a Merchant Servicer.

Ran Cohen runs the company together with his partner Nati Harpaz, the former CEO of the Australian e-commerce group Catch.com. Ran Cohen‘s past lies in the Traders Group and partnership with some guys considered by the OCCRP the masterminds of the giant scam machine.

Sometime in 2017, Finance Magnates reported that a Cypriot investment firm bought a 50% stake in Ran Cohen‘s Traders Group, which was considered a training camp for aspiring scammers. Cohen allegedly received around €400,000 for 50% of the shares in Traders Group. The cooperation with the new guys went well for a few months, we heard. But then, in 2018, Cohen’s partners demanded the remaining 50% and got it.

Read more here on Cohen’s profile on PayRate42.

The payment processor reportedly works with artificial intelligence (AI) to minimize payment rejections by credit card companies and banks via its retry engine.

The Israeli South Israel Bridge Fund (SIBF), co-founded and presided by the former Mossad boss Tamir Pardo, is one of the investors of BridgerPay.

In September 2022, BridgerPay launched Bridger Connections, a free search engine for merchants to help them find the perfect payment processors for their businesses. 

BridgerPay is notorious for being a leading scam-facilitating PayTech.  Many industry experts insist that  PayTechs such as BridgerPay must be licensed by the relevant regulator. In any case, they must comply with the applicable KYC/AML regulations and are therefore not allowed to accept scam customers.

BridgerPay has been exposed as a facilitator in a variety of broker scams. Although Ran Cohen assured us that they would eliminate such customers immediately, we downgraded BridgerPay from Orange to Red in our compliance framework.