While the convicted Bayazitova and Arharova ask Putin for clemency after being sentenced to a penal colony for extortion, the main fraudsters - Arsen Akopyan (the biological brother of Arharova’s husband, Artem Akopyan), Alexey Korneev, and Ruslan Mannanov, who organized a criminal community servicing prohibited online casinos in Russia, where Bayazitova and Arharova actually worked, are gradually relocating abroad, specifically to Dubai with an eye on the USA. Thus, the fraudsters hope to evade imminent criminal prosecution for organizing P2P payments amounting to billions of rubles in favor of banned online casinos.
Let us recall that on August 28, 2024, despite the requests of deputies, the Moscow City Court upheld the sentence of journalist Bayazitova and media technologist Arharova, who were previously convicted in a high-profile extortion case and sentenced to 5 and 4.5 years in prison, respectively.
The court decided to send the Telegram extortionists Arharova and Bayazitova to a penal colony for 4.5 and 5 years, respectively
And today’s news is striking primarily for its audacity - pseudo-journalist Alexandra Bayazitova, serving a sentence in a general regime penal colony for extortion, who, along with Olga Arharova, served the interests of fraudsters providing online casinos with payments through various illegal schemes, including P2P transfers through “droppers” amounting to billions of rubles - Arsen Akopyan and Alexey Korneev, has appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin with a petition for clemency - Life.ru. And here is what Forbes.ru itself writes about this.
Arharova and Bayazitova, who were executing a “contract” for Akopyan and Korneev against Alexander Ushakov, Vice President of Promsvyazbank (as we discussed in our previous investigation), acted with a single goal - to park payment traffic for illegal casinos on the internet acquiring of PSB, seriously counting on the fact that the authorities of Russia will be favorable to them, Russia, from which, thanks to the criminal schemes they have established, hundreds of millions of rubles are withdrawn daily from the pockets of ordinary citizens of the Russian Federation, in favor of, among others, Ukrainian gambling companies and online casinos.
The most important thing is that all the criminal schemes for withdrawing money in favor of the online casinos, which fund the Ukrainian army, as they are owned by Ukrainian businessmen, for example, the online casino Pin-up has the online payment operator company Empayre.com owned by Alexey Korneev), the online casino Vulkan is also serviced by online payment and cryptocurrency provider Calypso Pay - Calipso.finance, also owned by Alexey Korneev and Ruslan Mannanov), in turn JoyCasino, Pokerdom, Azino777 of Ukrainian entrepreneurs Sergey Tokarev and Rustam Gilfanov is serviced by online payment providers Payment.Center and Payselection, as the Telegram channel Payment Shield mentioned). All these banned online casinos in the Russian Federation are Ukrainian and supply money to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (since 2022, all Ukrainian gambling businesses are obliged to do this) and have direct connections with the SBU of Ukraine, and this is only a small part of the clients for whom Alexey Korneev and Arsen Akopyan provide illegal payments.
All our investigations have revealed who exactly is servicing illegal casinos, namely the criminal structure of Alexey Korneev and a similar structure of Arsen Akopyan. Everyone has been de-anonymized, including all the main participants of the criminal community. Since the publication of our investigations, they have been read by more than 5 thousand people related to the financial sector of the Russian Federation.
Moreover, Telegram channels revealing criminal schemes, such as Badbank and others close to the power structures, Telegram channels promptly reacted:
For the main actors of our investigations - Alexey Korneev, Ruslan Mannanov, as well as Arsen Akopyan, Garik Kravtsov, and Vasily Melikhov, and the criminal structures functioning under their control, this had the effect of a bomb explosion, and the main characters seriously began to think about their criminal future and whether to continue their criminal path, but already abroad. Quite logical plans, considering that the first echelon of not the most important participants in the fraudulent schemes is already in penal colonies.
How did our main characters react to their de-anonymization?
Fraudster Arsen Akopyan quickly cleaned the pages of his employees, working simultaneously on Payment.Center and Defexa.io on LinkedIn, the profiles of the other participants of his criminal community have either disappeared from search or been deleted.
LinkedIn Profile of Diana Maniapova before the publication of our investigations:
Profile of Diana Maniapova after the publication of our investigations:
And what about the other participants in our investigations - Mannanov Ruslan and Korneev Alexey? Here, friends, everything is very interesting.
Let us remind you that Korneev Alexey and Mannanov Ruslan created a criminal structure processing online payments in favor of banned online casinos in Russia, this structure is still successfully operating.
Of course, after their exposure, our main characters ordered a massive DDoS attack on our main site paycrime.com, literally an hour after it was mentioned in the Telegram channel Badbank, more than 3 billion requests flooded our resources in an attempt to overload the server and ensure its inaccessibility to both the general audience and the competent authorities.
And what surprised us the most was that the DDoS attack was mainly aimed at making one investigation about the HighRisk organized crime group of Alexey Korneev and Ruslan Mannanov inaccessible - https://paycrime.com/posts/highrisk-korneev-mannanov/, only within 72 hours, a third of the attack was specifically on this link (highlighted in red). Here we will stop in more detail on these characters
DDoS attack on Paycrime aimed at making the investigation into HighRisk fraudsters Alexey Korneev and Ruslan Mannanov inaccessible
The reaction of our “tourists” is quite banal - the Instagram profiles of Korneev and Mannanov are completely cleaned by them of all publications.
Comrade Korneev is also cleaning up in his LinkedIn profile all traces of his direct connection with the companies Empayre.com and Gate.Express.
Korneev Alexey’s profile before our publications looks like this, with a clear indication of the criminal payment providers Empayre.com and Gate.Express.
Korneev Alexey’s profile was promptly updated after our publications - the connection with Empayre.com and Gate.Express was removed, which are the backbone of Korneev’s criminal business and bring in 99% of all income through HighRisk payments, from which all his other companies in his list are fed. At the same time, the fraudster is trying to create an image of a true family man, against the backdrop of the “Golden Gate” bridge in San Francisco, USA (notably, the photo is fresh, indicating that Korneev is already parking there). Moreover, the fraudster Korneev indicated his city of residence as Dubai, and it is clear why, the fact is that Mr. Korneev has purchased apartments in one of the prestigious areas of Dubai - Beachfront next to his accomplice Akopyan Arsen in the same building for more than 2 million dollars (we will discuss this in the following investigations). Apparently, it is in Dubai that Korneev Alexey is preparing his backup airfield to avoid imminent criminal prosecution.
The overall picture looks something like this:
Korneev Alexey, like his accomplice Mannanov Ruslan, is trying to sit on two chairs, for the English-speaking audience in the same LinkedIn, which is blocked in Russia, presents himself as a successful businessman, founder of some startups, indeed an investor, completely unrelated to HighRisk and fraudulent structures Empayre and Gate.Express.
On the other hand, it has become clear to everyone that it is Gate.Express, its copy, consider it a new brand - Empayre.com along with Calypso Pay, are links of one criminal purpose.
All companies process only HighRisk business and illegal casinos, as we mentioned earlier, for example, in the open source SimilarWeb, which collects analytics on websites, we additionally gathered further confirmations of this.
For instance, for Empayre.com we see that only for August 2024, the main source of traffic for this payment provider was mirrors of the banned online casino Pin-up, controlled by Ukrainian businessmen, essentially these are redirects to the payment forms of Empayre.com. It is not difficult to guess that these are mirrors of the casino Pin-up by looking at the link and the logo of the mirror and the characteristic photos of pin-up girls on the cover of the site. Moreover, we see from the statistics that almost all traffic from the casino comes from Russia, meaning that the main payers for the online casino are Russian citizens.
The main source of payment traffic for Empayre.com is the banned online casino Pin-up with Ukrainian founders, sponsoring the Armed Forces of Ukraine
For Calypso.finance (Calypso Pay), we see a similar situation - that for the same August 2024, the main source of traffic for this payment crypto provider was the online casino valor.bet and also Vulkan Vegas, mentioned in reviews by payers on the Trustpilot.com website for the company Calypso Pay.
The main source of payment traffic for Calypso Pay (Calypso.finance - Calypso Group) is the online casino Valor.bet
And this is just the tip of the iceberg and what is available to the ordinary citizen from open sources.
At the same time, in Russia, the pseudo-businessman, but in reality an ordinary online fraudster Alexey Korneev does not hesitate to mention himself in reputable media as an investor in various startups:
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Profile of pseudo-investor Korneev on RB.RU - Founder of the Calypso platform for accepting cryptocurrency for legal entities. Co-founder of IPSP and TeamJet Corp. From 2019 to 2021, he was the Chief Operating Officer at RBK.money, well, at least they didn’t forget about RBK.money, IPSP (Internet Payment Service Provider) refers to the criminal Empayre.com.
At the same time, comrade Korneev organized an entire football team named Empayre with the logo of this criminal structure (we have already seen similar “football players” in RBK Money), where he gathered all his accomplices and nominal directors of the dummy Russian LLCs - Soft Radar, Cardon, and others, which we previously mentioned. All the same nominees Abilin Viktor, Sazonov Dmitry, Vaneev Alexey, and other interesting characters in one team, also continue under Korneev’s leadership in partnership with Akopyan to carry out their criminal activities using P2P, droppers, cryptocurrency, and corrupt connections with the acquiring of MTS Bank.
Summing up:
Cyber fraudsters who organized the processing of illegal payments for online casinos in Russia, including children’s ones - Alexey Korneev, Arsen Akopyan, Ruslan Mannanov, and all their accomplices who are part of their criminal community, continue to thrive. With “dirty” money from online casinos, they create football teams in Russia, where, without hesitation, they gather their organized crime groups, buy real estate worth tens of millions of dollars (expect news) both in Russia and in Dubai, buy luxury cars, earning from gullible ordinary people who decided to play in premeditated fraudulent schemes. They organize orgies with escorts and drugs in the Emirates, pretending to be diligent family men, as in their foreign social media profiles, because they really want to live in America, while betraying clients in Russia.
And such people as Arharova and Bayazitova, through whose hands they eliminate competitors or undesirable people, go to prison and hypocritically ask for clemency instead of giving sincere confessions.
We hope that law enforcement agencies will finally pay close attention to this, especially in anticipation of the upcoming law on criminal liability for dropperism and P2P transfers, through which our main characters have already mastered several dozen billion rubles.
