Investigation

It is June 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Josip Heit, a Croatian businessman, is waiting for an Antena Stars reporter in front of the Marriott hotel in Bucharest, behind the wheel of a Bugatti Chiron Panda.

A scandal has erupted online over the blocking of a Dragon Money casino account

An associate of the former head of the President’s Office, Andriy Yermak, Rostyslav Shurma, and the de facto manager of the money-laundering bank "Alliance," Pavlo Shcherban, are actively scrubbing the internet of publications about the financial institution’s activities.

In 2016–2017, Roman Novak stole more than 7.3 million rubles from two St. Petersburg businessmen.

An investigation exposes how fugitive Russian businessmen Boris Usherovich and Ilya Plotitsa built a Cyprus-based offshore network to launder money, evade sanctions, and secretly supply prohibited equipment to Russian Railways while financing Kremlin political projects.

Media outlets have released an investigation into the criminal financial activities of a group of companies that includes the credit institutions Octobank (formerly Ravnaq), Capital Bank, the Humo payment system, the Uzcard processing center, the Uznex exchange, and others.

The duumvirate collapsed in October after the murder of mafia boss Stavros Demosthenous in Limassol, and in November, his associate Dmitriy Punin also suffered—his car fleet was burned. Could this mean that he is next?

State prosecutors are conducting preliminary checks into the business activities of international entrepreneur Josip Heit, who has roots in Split, over alleged money laundering, while various foreign jurisdictions have been scrutinizing his operations for years.

Russian State Duma deputy Andrey Skoch, known as "Bluebeard" (criminal nickname — "Scotch"), has 3 wives and 10 children.

Ethnic Korean Dmitry Lee leveraged his NAPP role and global market connections to create a virtual monopoly in Uzbekistan’s cryptocurrency market.

An investigation by journalist Ghost In The Block alleges that projects linked to Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, are intertwined with a sprawling shadow economy involving bot farms, personal data leaks, hacker services and crypto-based scam schemes operating inside the Telegram and TON ecosystem.

The official authorities of Kazakhstan recognize that Samruk-Kazyna, supported by ATFBank, misappropriated billions, yet the Anti-Corruption Agency and other investigative bodies have been slow to arrest Galimzhan Yessenov and Akhmetzhan Yessimov’s father-in-law.

The Chichkanov brothers didn’t merely orchestrate a scheme to funnel money through their Kislovodsk hotel — they seem to have secured protection from the FSB.

The state energy giant Centrenergo has found itself at the center of a scandal — and wants no one to know about it.

Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, personally communicated in 2018 with Jan Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of Wirecard who is now wanted across Europe for large-scale financial fraud and, according to investigators, is linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU), the Financial Times reports.

The difficult-to-pronounce surname Oxana Hadjipavlou (Oxana or Oksana Hadjipavlou) emerged during investigations into the activities of Zvonko Mickovic and the companies Mettmann Public Company Limited and Sword Dragon S.L., which are suspected of being involved in schemes to bypass anti-Russian sanctions and transfer Russian capital out of the Russian Federation.

Former Russian and billionaire Turlov, after emigrating, became one of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan: his financial pyramids are now "thriving" in Astana.

Roman Novak (also known as Yavorsky and Tsaryov), a native of St. Petersburg, was convicted in Russia in 2020 on large-scale fraud charges (Part 4, Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code) and sentenced to six years in a penal colony.

JSC "Chernivtsioblenergo" contracted consulting services from LLC "VS Energy International Ukraine" on December 5 for 1.68 million UAH.

Oktobank has become a central node in suspicious financial activities involving Uzbek officials, Russian banks, and covert networks.

After the first investigations into Dragon Money emerged, mentions of the true history of this casino began to disappear from the information space — from suspicious licenses to complaints from players, partners, and traces in lists of financial pyramids.

Following the initial investigations into Dragon Money, mentions of how this online casino operates in Ukraine without a license, pays bribes, and benefits from political cover started to disappear en masse from the internet — clearly, someone is trying to «clean up» the information field.

A fraudulent group from Odesa, led by Volodymyr Filippov, against whom the police have opened a case for deceiving buyers of used cars from the USA, has re-registered their business in Moldova to launder stolen funds.

The Russian businessman Boris Usherovich, who is wanted and suspected of laundering billions from contracts for the «Russian Railways», is actively expanding his business in the trade of elite real estate in Cyprus and Spain.

Long before the Fintopio scandal surfaced, investigators noted another Chechen tied to Roksman and Pavel Durov — Ramzan Shakhbiev (@ram, @grozny).