Crypto service Trustee: legal chaos, customer complaints and lifting of asset freeze

Crypto service Trustee: legal chaos, customer complaints and lifting of asset freeze
Crypto service Trustee: legal chaos, customer complaints and lifting of asset freeze

Legal vacuum: who holds the funds?

We investigated three key aspects: the legal owner of customer funds, the volume of complaints, and the existence of criminal cases against the founders.

According to the current version of the Trustee Plus Terms of Use on the trusteeglobal.eu website (last updated on 10 November 2024), the custodian functions, namely the storage, exchange, and transfer of cryptocurrencies, were assigned to the company MikePay LTD from the Seychelles.

However, this entity has been included in the list of companies removed from the register due to dissolution, effective from 17 March 2025. Thus, the structure that, by contract, holds user assets does not legally exist, despite the website continuing to reference it.

Meanwhile, in app stores, another structure with a similar name acts as the developer. In the App Store and Google Play, Trustee Plus is attributed to Mikepay Inc. with an address in Panama (50th Street) and a contact phone number with the Canadian code +1 825.

Chain of jurisdictions and loss of licences

The card partner specified in the same terms is the Polish company Quicko, whose licence was revoked by the regulator KNF in January 2026. The Lithuanian UAB Trustee Global, which operated without a MiCA licence, was required to cease serving customers from 1 January 2026.

The customer base was transferred to the Polish IROC PRO, whose share capital is only 5,000 zlotys. The structure's geography covers the Seychelles, Panama, Lithuania, Poland, Delaware, and Vinnytsia. For a person with blocked funds, this creates a situation where it is unclear against whom exactly a lawsuit should be filed.

Complaints and user ratings

As of September 2026, the Trustee Plus profile on the Trustpilot platform contains 233 reviews with an average rating of 2.3. 55% of the authors (approximately 128 people) gave one star. In the last 12 months, 105 new reviews have appeared.

A typical complaint scheme: an incoming transfer is subjected to an AML check, the support service demands additional documents for weeks, and the money is neither credited nor returned to the sender. The amounts mentioned in complaints range from a few hundred dollars to 16,000 euros. The complainants are residents of Latvia, Poland, France, Portugal, Moldova, and the US.

On 5 September, a user from Cyprus reported that after topping up their account, they were informed about the loss of the licence and promised a refund within 7 business days. The company responds to most negative reviews with standardised templates regarding fund security, often asking to increase the rating.

The platform Sikayetvar has recorded 25 individual complaints. On reviewabout.me, the service is recommended by only 17% of 86 reviews. In Google Play, the app has a rating of 3.6 based on 2,600 reviews.

Criminal proceedings and court ruling

In October 2025, the VAKS considered the issue of freezing 1.44 million USDT held in a wallet created through Trustee, within the framework of a criminal case by the NABU. Detectives claimed that the actual owner of the funds was another person: during a search, they found a phone with the wallet's seed phrase, to which funds were received from an anonymous source, and her subordinates also received money.

The court lifted the freeze because, after nearly two years of investigation, no one had been formally charged.

Questions to management

We posed a series of questions to Vadym Hrusha:

  • Which legal entity actually holds customer cryptocurrencies today, given that the Seychelles-based MikePay LTD has been dissolved?
  • Who is the owner of the Panamanian Mikepay Inc.?
  • Why does the contract on the official website reference a company that does not legally exist?

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