Crypto businessman Mykola Udyanskyi and the ruins of financial pyramids
How Mykola Udyanskyi, Bohdan Prylepa and crypto scammer Mykhailo Romanenko are connected.
If some character starts investing thousands of dollars in promoting his persona in the information space as a successful crypto businessman, there is a high probability that we are dealing with a fraudster. Especially if we take a closer look at the tools used by the subject to create an aura of respectability for himself.
"Ukrainian businessman Mykola Udyanskyi named person of the year at Congress Awards 2023." Publications with such a headline, placed as advertisements, began circulating on the Internet about a month ago. Moreover, the "award" itself took place much earlier - on May 26. Your humble servant knows this for sure, since another laureate of this vanity fair was a subject of another of our journalistic investigations.
Mykola Udyanskyi
As stated in the aforementioned publications, "this year’s winner was Mykola Udyanskyi, a well-known Ukrainian IT entrepreneur, scientist and philanthropist. Mr. Udyanskyi was recognized for his contributions to blockchain and cryptography, as well as his charitable work."
If we go to the English-language source referred to by the publications that reprinted such a note, we will see that not only Mykola Udianskyi was awarded the Congress Awards, but also a number of other prominent swindlers.
In particular, one of the special guests who received the Executive Award of Honor was Mykhailo Romanenko . Allegedly for the best investment products.
Mykhailo Romanenko
"Mr. Mikhail Romanenko is the founder of Danvel Ltd and Eternity Business Limited," said the Congress Awards organizers. "He is also an investor and philanthropist who runs the Danvel Group, which is valued at $1.5 billion."
The International Investment Congress, which awarded Udyansky and Romanenko with certificates and trinkets, is as murky as its award winners. The office with addresses in Munich, Berlin and Monaco, judging by the "about us" section, was created and managed by people from the "scoop" with a peculiar idea of business and investment. The congress website, judging by the history of Google tags, was developed in Ukraine and is supported from its territory.
It seems that the International Investment Congress is a respectable “horns and hooves” selling titles, certificates and other show-offs to vain rogues.
Mykhailo Romanenko is well known to our regular readers. He is the nominal owner of Danvel Group , which includes Eternity Business and Danvel Ltd. However, in the information space, as a co-owner of this "empire", allegedly valued at one and a half billion "bucks", the former student of the Dnipropetrovsk University of Internal Affairs Nazar Babenko is promoting himself. As well as his companion, who is close to the organized criminal group of Koshlyak, Ihor Kotov .
Ihor Kotov and Nazar Babenko
It is worth recalling here that, as we wrote earlier, the companies Eternity Business and Danvel registered by Mykhailo Romanenko in the British jurisdiction are most likely dummies. And their web platforms are probably components of fraudulent schemes.
For example, Eternity.business, which Mykhailo Romanenko and Nazar Babenko position as a "neobank", has the characteristics of a Forex pyramid. (By the way, Mykola Udyanskyi, who appears in this article, has been repeatedly accused of involvement in the MMCIS pyramid scheme, but without evidence).
On the web platform of another Romanenko-Babenko-Kotov project, Danvel, the visitor is convinced in beautiful words that these bigwigs allegedly have a "formula for financial success" with the help of which anyone who invests in this "scheme" will get rich without wasting precious personal time. "We are the ones who are leading the revolution of tomorrow," the website states. "Join us!"
But Danvel also appears to be a financial pyramid built on the principles of network marketing. Its website may be one of the links in a larger scam using call centers . (Read more in our investigation “Mykhailo Romanenko and Nazar Babenko: “crypto pyramids” in the shadow of the President’s Office” ).
Against the backdrop of this gang of thugs, Mykola Udyanskyi and his partner Bohdan Prylepa look like decent young men.
Bohdan Prylepa
However, their projects often look like a scam and, in the end, turn out to be a scam. Take Bitcoin Ultimatum, launched with much publicity in 2020. Soon after its presentation, cryptocurrency experts began talking about how it was most likely a scam.
However, even the informational promotion of this product was a scam. The author of these lines restored it from the Wikipedia article dedicated to Udyansky. In it, Bitcoin Ultimatum is mentioned in only one line, in which there are as many as four links to sources.
The first two lead to notes on a very good English-language resource Investing.com, where, however, it is not so expensive to print a “custom-made” article (which, by the way, was repeatedly done by Nazar Babenko and Mykhailo Romanenko mentioned here). But the other two source resources (where about the presentation of Bitcoin Ultimatum at the International Family Investment Summit in Monaco) are indicative in their own way.
Both the openthenews.com blog and the website of the Monaco edition of Forbes (no longer working), judging by the history of tags (see here and here ), at the time of the publication of saccharine articles about Bitcoin Ultimatum, were managed by webmasters from Ukraine. By the way, among the authors of Forbes registered in Monaco, people with Slavic surnames predominated. In short, all this was a rather crudely worked out PR campaign.
The legal entity BTCU Organisation Ltd, registered by Udyanskyi in London specifically for this adventure, was forcibly liquidated by the British regulator by the summer of 2022.
That is, as of today, Bitcoin Ultimatum has finally “deflate”.
Its price is zero, no decent platform trades it, and short-sighted citizens who invested in it a couple of years ago, presumably, lost their money.
The WeWay crypto exchange, which Mykola Udyanskyi and Bohdan Prylepa cobbled together in 2021 together with Fuad Fatullaev, a nouveau riche from the aggressor country, is striving for the same result.
The press release for the startup stated:
“WeWay is a unique entertainment ecosystem that offers new mechanisms and completely new ways for creators and fans to interact, as well as innovative tools to increase audience reach and monetize content. It also gives fans the opportunity to interact with their favorite creators and allows creators to receive meaningful feedback from their followers.”
"The WeWay blockchain platform has every chance of becoming one of the most popular projects in the blockchain and NFT products market. There are all the prerequisites for this, in particular, the participation of two successful companies in the project," Mykola Udyanskyi stated from the pages of his pocket news portal Parliament.ua.
The crypto bubble, wrapped in a beautiful PR shell, burst as expected. After all, if you think about it a little, what is the point of some promoted celebrity, say Paris Hilton, registering in the Udyanskyi-Prylepa-Fatullaev "ecosystem"? To communicate with fans and accept "bucks" from advertisers? But she feels pretty good in "Insta". And it is hard to imagine that the FSB colonel would exchange occupation rubles for WeWay tokens in order to pay off blogger Anatoliy Shariy, who has gone into hiding in Spain.
Currently, the WeWay “coin” is worth less than one American cent - $0.0051.
Its peak value (1WWY/0.028 USD), according to Binance, came in the summer of 2022, when ordinary Russians, suspicious of something, among other things, rushed to buy up the "crypto". After that, interest in this asset tends to zero.
Now Mykola Udyanskyi prefers to bashfully remain silent about his connection with WeWay, or even stubbornly deny it. After all, after 02/24/2022, doing business with representatives of the aggressor country is not only shameful, but also fraught with sanctions and confiscation of all assets in favor of the state.
But the fact that Mykola Udyanskyi left his joint business with Russian Fatullaev is not entirely true. Firstly, as of July 25, 2022, Mykola Udyanskyi was listed as one of the shareholders in the financial statements of the British Weway Group Limited . Since then, as you can see for yourself, the company has not reported any changes to the register of its shareholders to the regulator.
Secondly, Udyanskyi’s partner, the Ukrainian Bohdan Prylepa, who lives in the UAE, is still listed as the director of WeWay Group together with the Russian Fuad Fatullaev.
Another crypto exchange of Prylepa-Udyanskyi, Qmall, registered in Lithuania, is doing much better, but not at all rosy.
The Qmall cryptocurrency, having reached its price peak ($0.9 per “coin”) in May 2022, is trading within $0.13-$0.12 as of 07/19/2023; the daily trading volume is somewhere around $5.5 thousand. That is, the fall is colossal.
It is safe to assume that this crypto exchange will do well next year, when the founding fathers of Qmall, as they promise on the project’s homepage , will complete the construction of a metaverse on its basis. But personally, I would not take their word for it. After all, Qmall was initially positioned as the first Ukrainian crypto exchange regulated by the Ministry of Digital Development and the National Bank. However, both regulators denied this.
Therefore, it is possible that other statements by Qmall beneficiaries are far from the truth. For example, Prylepa’s statement made at the beginning of July this year about the entry of this crypto exchange into the Polish market .
Nevertheless, Mykola Udyanskyi and Bohdan Prylepa, unlike Romanenko and Babenko, who throw around "show-offs", are still trying to create real projects and products, even if this process is accompanied by them deceiving investors and other idle people.
But this is only at first glance. Let’s dig a little deeper.
In August 2015, Electroclub Ukraine LLC was registered in Kiev. Its main activity is “provision of other information services.” The LLC has ten beneficiaries with equal shares in the authorized capital. Among them are a certain Vadym Anisimov from Slavuta in the Khmelnytskyi region and Bohdan Prylepa from Irpen, who, according to the biographical note , had been operating with Mykola Udyanskyi for two years (since 2013) at the time of the company’s foundation.
Little is known about what Electroclub Ukraine actually does. This shady company was mentioned in the press, perhaps, only once. In September 2015, the business publication Delo.ua wrote that Electroclub tried to “hype” the then emerging interest in electric cars and build something similar to a financial pyramid on this topic.
As the publication’s correspondent wrote, "Electroclub Ukraine" promised "investors" who would risk becoming members of the club of the same name, electric cars at bargain prices. But to become a member of the club, a potential electric car enthusiast had to pay $2.5 thousand ($2.4 as an initial payment for the car and $100 for operating services).
"And here’s where the fun begins," the publication said. "Theoretically, an electric car can cost the buyer exactly this ridiculously small amount. However, to become the owner of a fashionable "green" car for pennies, you’ll have to remember the basics of network marketing. For each new person brought to the club, 1,000 points are credited to the personal account, which is equivalent to a thousand dollars. The new club member pays $2,500 and, in turn, goes to recruit new "electric club members." And so on until enough points are collected to buy the chosen model. And various bonus and affiliate programs (they are also converted into points) only reinforce the analogy with the infamous companies that previously used this scheme."
And one of these companies, which caused a lot of noise in the aggressor country and a little less in the rest of the world, was directly involved with Udyanskyi’s partner Bohdan Prylepa.
On March 2, 2015, in the city of Sheffield, located in the English county of South Yorkshire, nine enterprising young people registered the company EVORSW LLP. Two of them were Poles, the rest were Ukrainians. In the context of this story, it is worth highlighting three "concessionaires": Bogdan Prilepa, registered in Irpen, his partner in "Electroclub" Mr. Anisimov from Slavuta and Kyiv resident Mher Akopyan.
It is reasonable to assume that the newly created company immediately began to work vigorously. So vigorously that a year later British regulators closed it down to be on the safe side.
What was EVORSW LLP doing? Judging by the slides on its long-unupdated Facebook page , the company promised naive Pinocchios potential investors super profits for “investing in ecology.”
There is a channel on YouTube called EVORSW, which has only one video from eight years ago. The video features two people talking – a somewhat dull-looking young man with a fiery gaze, Mher Akopyan, and a cunning old man, Anatoliy Yunitskyi. Both are talking high-flown nonsense (the author of these lines got the impression that the interlocutors do not understand the meaning of all the words spoken).
In short, the gist of the video is as follows. "Venture investor" Mher Akopyan announces that the company entrusted to him, EVORSW, is becoming a partner of Yunitskyi’s SkyWay project in order to attract investors who will invariably become fabulously rich. During the tense conversation, it is emphasized that this is not a financial pyramid.
Thousands of articles have been written about SkyWay, RSW Systems and other companies associated with this scam being financial pyramids. Mainly in the aggressor country, where, according to some estimates , a gang of crooks, hiding behind the crazy old man Yunitskiy, swindled gullible investors out of $200 million. The money was lured under a supposedly unique project, the essence of which is to create a certain transport system, the so-called string transport. It is a kind of rails, but without sleepers, located above ground level on concrete supports, along which capsules with cargo and people will rush at a speed of 500 km/h.
Judging by fragmentary information , in 2018 Sky Way was testing the possibility of "stirring up" in Kyiv, promising local authorities some kind of trackless metro to Troyeshchyna. Since last year, it has been pushing the topic of "rocket-free space exploration". It is worth assuming that it is collecting money for a "string elevator" to Mars or the Moon.
Now, if I am not mistaken, SkyWay and the riffraff associated with it mainly operate from the territory of Russia-occupied Belarus and the United Arab Emirates. In which, as is known, the heroes of this article are currently based - Bohdan Prylepa, Mykola Udyanskyi and, perhaps, the briefly mentioned here Nazar Babenko, partner of Mykhailo Romanenko.
20 July 2023 ã., 23:21
