Russian connections of Ukrainian venture investors

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IT entrepreneurs Ruslan Drozdov and Ruslan Tymofeyev of Adventures Lab may still be involved in a global fraud scheme.

Ukrainian companies involved in organizing gambling paid UAH 851 million in taxes in May. “This is four times more than for the entire 2021, and the highest figure in almost 2.5 years,” Deputy Head of the Verkhovna Rada Finance Committee Yaroslav Zheleznyak recently said .

“UAH 851 million in May alone. Per month! – the people’s deputy was delighted. – The income tax has arrived here + many more gates have been closed, but it’s already good. This is 4 times more than in the whole of 2021.”

This good salary was preceded by draconian measures against the gambling business, which does not shine with law-abidingness, writes Andriy Karpinskyi in his review for the CRiME and [high-profile cases] projects. In February 2023, the new Igorka law is on a simplified taxation system with a rate of 2%.

As we wrote earlier , already in March the President of Ukraine introduced sanctions from the National Security and Defense Council aimed at a whole group of individuals and legal entities closely tied to the shadow gambling business. But, first of all, casinos and bookmakers associated with the aggressor country were sanctioned (read about the “showdowns” between influential participants in the gambling business here and here ). From now on, their assets and activities on the territory of Ukraine are blocked, and at least take a bite out of the huge pie (about 180 billion UAH per year) .

Sanctions cleared space for both seasoned bigwigs who avoided repression and newcomers. Among the latter is ChampionCasino , which received a license to conduct online gambling on September 27, 2021, and is now actively offering its services to gamblers.

The ChampionCasino brand and license belong to Limon LLC, founded in 2020 by a group of Volyn businessmen, including Lutsk City Council deputy from Servant of the People Oksana Rudnyk.

But, according to the Opendatabot service, in August 2021, shortly before receiving the license, a certain Ruslan Drozdov became the sole beneficiary of Lemon.

Ruslan Drozdov

A man named Ruslan Drozdov has already come to our attention. His name appears in our investigation "IT Fraud Cartel: Anatomy of a Global Scam" .

Let us recall that Ruslan Drozdov and his partner Ruslan Tymofeyev were (and, perhaps, still stand) behind the Everad company - a key link in a huge network of virtual traders selling in dozens of countries under the guise of bullshit . effective medicines.

Ruslan Tymofeyev

Ruslan Tymofeyev is “credited” as the founding fathers of the Everad Group - one of the world’s largest CPA networks (services in which the advertiser pays for the targeted actions of users.).

Tymofeyev’s biography promoted on the Internet claims that in 2019 he sold his fortune at Everad and focused on investing. It is noteworthy that the author of these lines did not find any mention of his partner Ruslan Drozdov leaving Everad in open sources.

Also in the same year, when Tymofeyev cut himself out of Everad, this company became the “anchor investor” of his venture fund Adventures Lab.

According to the official website of the fund , at the moment this organization is managed by three partners: the already mentioned Ruslan Tymofeyev and Ruslan Drozdov, as well as a certain Oleh Lukanov .

Oleh Lukanov is credited on the investment fund’s website as “an expert in networking and business development with more than 20 years of experience,” but an entity with the same name and surname does not appear in the register of legal entities as a beneficiary or director.

Oleh Lukanov on the Adventures Lab website

But Oleh Lukanov is mentioned quite often in the Russian sector of the Internet. But not as a businessman, manager or venture investor, but as a metropolitan “pickup” instructor.

Resume of Oleh Lukanov on the website info-produkt.ru

For example, the resume of this person on the website info-produkt.ru states:

“Oleh Lukanov is a consultant in the field of seduction, relationship building, personal growth, and lifestyle. He is one of the leading and well-known trainers in Europe and the CIS countries on seduction, communication, relationship building, and personal growth.

[…]

Oleh set himself the goal of making a man an object of seduction by a girl. And so that at any moment he is confident in himself and knows how to achieve what he wants.”

Perhaps Lukanov’s only startup is the Ortega project , the essence of which is selling advice to dissatisfied men on how to seduce ladies.

As for the Adventures Lab venture fund, nothing similar to its founders – Tymofeyev and/or Drozdov – exists in Ukrainian registers.

The “anchor investor” of the Adventures Lab venture fund – Everad LLC, according to current registration information , has been owned since August 2019 by a resident of sultry Ashgabat (Turkmenistan) Ruslan Kerimov. According to the Opendatabot service, as of March of this year, the payer certificate of Everad LLC was canceled, which indicates a long absence of legal business activity of this legal entity.

In the context of the global bullshit scam, Vitaliy Stavnitskyi, a Ukrainian living in Moscow, appeared. Here, in his name, according to the registers of the aggressor country, Everad LLC is registered .

We would like to remind you that Moscow-based Everad also has 15 “bullshit” trademarks registered in Russia. For example, such as Nutribion and Hypertolife. The latter, which is not only a medicine - it is not even a dietary supplement (however, like everything that these “combinators” sell), scammers position it as a miracle cure for hypertension and high blood pressure. A couple of years ago he was “coupled”, including in Ukraine. Here, for a package (20 tablets), the scammers charged around 400 UAH, that is, 1200 UAH for a full course of treatment. For this money, the naive client received no real treatment for hypertension, and as a result, an increased risk of stroke or cerebral atherosclerosis. Well, the grave is very close.

Moscow’s Everad is just one of the octopus’ tentacles. Its key Internet platform is everad.com . It is difficult to say who exactly controls it.

As stated above, the Ukrainian legal entity Everada was rewritten as the Turkmen Ruslan Kerimov. Obviously he is a “pound”. Since the change of ownership, a certain Oleksandr Yasyukovych has been acting as CEO (chief executive officer) of Everad.

However, in state registers there are no suitable legal entities that would have this name and surname. However, we discovered the sole proprietorship “Yasyukovych Oleksandr” , whose main activities are advertising agencies and computer programming.

CEO of Everad Oleksandr Yasyukovych

On the everad.com platform, through which Everad carries out its suspicious activities, the owner is listed as Cariovision Trade Ltd. It is located offshore - on the island of Tortola (British Virgin Islands), where information about the ultimate beneficiaries of the companies is not disclosed.

This “offshore company” is listed as the owner by another site – atlas-atlas-atlas.com . Like Everad, this is a CPA network. According to the who.is service, this Internet resource was created last year in the aggressor country, hosted on the servers of the Russian provider Timeweb .

That is, the global Everad, founded by Ukrainians, in the second year of the bloody large-scale invasion, maintains contact with the aggressor country. As are the venture investors behind it, Ruslan Drozdov and Ruslan Tymofeyev.

/to be continued/

Andriy Karpinskyi, especially for the CRiME and [high-profile cases] projects