Russian Spies Target Journalist Roman Dobrokhotov in the UK

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1. The Observer
Revealed: second Kremlin spy ring targeting Russian
dissidents discovered in UK
After the spying convictions of six Bulgarians, police have warned of
further Russian operations against opponents
Daniel Boffey Chief reporter
Sat 8 Mar 2025 17.00 GMT
A second Kremlin spy operation has been discovered targeting Russian dissidents in
Britain, it can be revealed.
Roman Dobrokhotov, a journalist in the sights of the six Bulgarians convicted of
spying for Russia, said he had been informed of fresh attempts to surveil his family.
“I received a warning from the police last spring,” said
Dobrokhotov, 41, who moved to the UK in January 2023. “These attempts are
ongoing.”
The details of the warning given to Dobrokhotov, who fled Moscow in 2021, are
being withheld on his request, as is the location of him and his wife, Kate, and their
two sons, aged eight and 10.
13.03.2025, 10:58 Revealed: second Kremlin spy ring targeting Russian dissidents discovered in UK | Espionage | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/revealed-second-kremlin-spy-ring-targeting-russian-dissidents-discovered-in-uk 1/9 UK-based Bulgarians Katrin Ivanova, Vanya Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanchev were part of a six-strong
Russian spying operation. Photograph: AP
Six Bulgarian nationals with resident status in the UK – Vanya Gaberova, 30, Katrin
Ivanova, 33, Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, Orlin Roussev, 47, Biser Dzhambazov, 43, and
Ivan Stoyanov, 34 – were convicted of carrying out espionage operations at home
and abroad.
Jan Marsalek, 44, an Austrian national believed to be working as a Russian agent,
masterminded the British operation from Moscow despite being wanted for his links
to an alleged £1.6bn fraud at the disgraced German financial company Wirecard.
Two of their targets were the journalists Christo Grozev and Dobrokhotov, who were
responsible for unmasking the two Russian military intelligence officers who tried to
murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury in 2018.
Messages discovered by the police revealed that Dobrokhotov had been followed so
closely that his iPhone pin number was picked up by one of the spies sitting next to
him on a plane.
There had also been discussions within the group about poisoning Dobrokhotov
with ricin on the streets of London or abducting him using a small boat.
13.03.2025, 10:58 Revealed: second Kremlin spy ring targeting Russian dissidents discovered in UK | Espionage | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/revealed-second-kremlin-spy-ring-targeting-russian-dissidents-discovered-in-uk 2/9

2. Austrian national Jan Marsalek, who is believed to be working as a Russian agent, allegedly
masterminded the British operation from Moscow. Photograph: Interpol/PA
The police warning of a new attempt to target Dobrokhotov came months after the
arrest of the spy ring in February 2024.
Dobrokhotov is the editor-in-chief of the Insider website, whose investigative work
has led to about 80 companies and 60 people being hit with economic sanctions by
the west over their roles in facilitating Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
13.03.2025, 10:58 Revealed: second Kremlin spy ring targeting Russian dissidents discovered in UK | Espionage | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/revealed-second-kremlin-spy-ring-targeting-russian-dissidents-discovered-in-uk 3/9 Dobrokhotov said: “I understood that after the arrest of the Bulgarians, there must
be still some continuous attention to me and Christo because we didn’t stop our
work.
“Also, because we were told by our source that, after this team controlled by [the]
FSB [Russia’s security service] was arrested, the task – the same task – is now given
to the GRU [military intelligence].
“We were expecting that there will be something continuing. So after police said
that they know about some new attempts, that was not very surprising, just
confirmation of what our Russian source was telling us.”
Dobrokhotov said he recognised the need to be constantly on
the move to avoid the attentions of the Kremlin.
He said: “All my family are worried, of course. They worry about me and they
understand that they are not safe – if they put novichok [the biological agent used in
the murder attempt on the Skripals] on the door handle, they can all suffer.
“On the other hand, it’s the worst situation when you don’t know whether you
should be very much worried, or you can relax. You always doubt if you are
paranoid about all of this stuff. So in some way, it’s good to know that you know this
situation.”
A counter-terrorism policing spokesperson said: “Counter-terrorism policing works
closely with police forces, partners and communities to identify any repressive
activity by foreign states in the UK and will seek to disrupt this activity where
possible.
“This has been shown to be the case with a number of recent arrests and charges
that have been made in relation to offences under the National Security Act.
“We would encourage members of the public to report any allegations of foreign
interference to their local police force.
“On receipt of any such reports, officers would also assess whether there are any
safeguarding or security concerns or issues and, in liaison with specialist officers,
would be able to provide individuals affected with appropriate safety and security
advice and support as required.
“Briefings on personal safety are not the limit of our activity to keep people safe, but
they do create direct connections between individuals, organisations and policing.
“The importance of that advice should not be underestimated, and neither should
the scale of operational activity taking place within our proactive investigations
teams and with partner agencies to keep people safe.”
13.03.2025, 10:58 Revealed: second Kremlin spy ring targeting Russian dissidents discovered in UK | Espionage | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/revealed-second-kremlin-spy-ring-targeting-russian-dissidents-discovered-in-uk 4/9

3. The Observer
‘Burn him alive on the street’: the Russian journalist
targeted in UK by spy ring
Old Bailey trial of six Bulgarians charged with espionage has provided
chilling evidence that Kremlin wanted reporter to be killed
Daniel Boffey Chief reporter
Sat 8 Mar 2025 18.25 GMT
The long-running trial of the Russian spy ring did at least bring clarity for journalist
Roman Dobrokhotov and his young family.
“The worst situation is when you don’t know,” the 41-year-old Russian said, nursing
a tumbler of whisky. “When you don’t know whether you should be very much
worried, or you can relax. Now, definitely I know there will be other attempts.”
As revelations tumbled out of the dock at the Old Bailey in
recent months, Dobrokhotov, editor of the Insider, a Russian news website, has had
to confront a host of uncomfortable truths.
Six Bulgarian nationals with settled status in the UK – Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya
Gaberova, 30, Tihomir Ivanchev, 39, Orlin Roussev, 46, Ivan Stoyanov, 32, and Biser
Dzhambazov, 43 – were operating between 2020 and 2023 as a Kremlin spy ring
based in London and Great Yarmouth that was highly sophisticated and seemingly
murderous in its intent.
13.03.2025, 10:57 ‘Burn him alive on the street’: the Russian journalist targeted in UK by spy ring | Russian spy ring | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/burn-him-alive-on-the-street-the-russian-journalist-targeted-in-uk-by-spy-ring-tasked-with-his 1/7 It was run remotely by Jan Marsalek, a former chief operating officer at Wirecard,
wanted over a £1.6bn bank fraud, who acted as an intermediary for the Russian
intelligence services.
Dobrokhotov, who in 2019 had revealed the identities of the Russian agents behind
the failed nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, was one of the ring’s
targets along with his colleague on that investigation, the Bulgarian journalist
Christo Grozev.
The court heard how two leading members of the ring, Roussev and Marsalek, had
discussed using ricin or the nerve agent VX to poison Dobrokhotov, who fled Russia
in 2021 and moved to the UK in January 2023.
In one message, Marsalek dismissed an idea, proposed by Roussev, that
Dobrokhotov could have an “accident” in the shower, saying: “I fear that’s not
dramatic enough … we need something of symbolic value.
“Maybe burn him alive on the street, spray him with some super-strong acid, VX,
like the North Koreans, or the ricin,” Marsalek said. “Shower accident won’t
discourage others. It must create a dramatic story.”
Dobrokhotov was followed closely, to the point that his iPhone pin ­number was
noted down by one of the female members of the gang who sat next to him during a
flight. They discussed abducting him and absconding with their prey by putting him
on a boat. “Dobrokhotov will be a counter migrant,” joked Marsalek. “The problem
is, how to collect him on international waters. I’m not sure the guys here will trust
our abilities enough to place a submarine at our command.”
“Having said that, a successful operation on British ground would be amazing after
the fuck-up Skripal stuff,” Marsalek said.
It appears that Roussev was only put off the kidnap plan after an intervention from
above. The “guys raised the valid concern that we shouldn’t run any such operation
with that team that has never done this before in the country of residence of some of
the team members”, Marsalek said.
The details were a shock, said Dobrokhotov. But not, perhaps, a surprise. The son of
a professor of philosophy and an engineer who had made a name for himself as an
investigative journalist exposing the creep of authoritarianism under Putin,
Dobrokhotov made the decision to flee Moscow in 2021 when his flat was raided and
passport confiscated by the authorities over a trumped-up defamation case.
After making a run for it via a smugglers’ route through the forest of the Russo-
Ukrainian border near Luhansk in the Donbas, the journalist’s first port of call had
been Kyiv.
He then moved to Vienna before coming to Britain where his sister had settled.
Dobrokhotov’s wife Kate, 40, and their two boys, aged eight and 10, along with his
13.03.2025, 10:57 ‘Burn him alive on the street’: the Russian journalist targeted in UK by spy ring | Russian spy ring | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/burn-him-alive-on-the-street-the-russian-journalist-targeted-in-uk-by-spy-ring-tasked-with-his 2/7

4. parents later joined him. Throughout his travels he had suspected he was still in the
Kremlin’s cross-hairs.
“Right after I left [Russia], I had a phone call from a Ukrainian source who is an FSB
[federal security services] officer,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Immediately hide.
Ukrainian mercenary guys are riding around Kyiv with your photo, and they are
promised $50,000 if they return you to Russia.’ I thought, OK, but I am in Vienna,
I’m safe now. What I didn’t know [until the trial] was that, when I was living on the
same street as Christo in Vienna, the Bulgarians had rented an apartment opposite to
watch us. Or that they had access to Amadeus, which is the ticket booking system
and so knew [in] advance about our every flight.”
There were moments in recent years outside Russia when he was sure he was being
followed. While in The Hague in autumn 2022 assisting on a film about the late
opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, he had spotted a man taking his photograph.
Dobrokhotov took his own picture of the man shadowing him and sent it to the
Dutch police. They did nothing. His own research subsequently suggested the
suspect was a Ukrainian national living in Germany.
But in the UK? His phone had been acting strangely at one point but he had not
spotted anyone lurking. He had been reassured by the close interest shown by the
British police in his safety. Then, in February last year, he was contacted by a senior
officer.
“They said that they had arrested Bulgarians who were residents in Britain and do
you know any of them?” Dobrokhotov said. “So they showed me pictures, and I
didn’t know any of them, though actually one of them was trying to befriend me on
Facebook … I learned only about all the details after the trial started.”
A treasure trove of espionage gadgets was discovered by the police in a former hotel
in Great Yarmouth but there was something decidedly unsophisticated about a love
triangle engaged in by three of the ring members.
Dobrokhotov was also reassured during the trial to some degree by the bravado and
“stupidity” shown by those after him. But he has since also learned that he remains
in danger.
A few months ago, the police called again. Further attempts at surveillance had been
made by what appears to be a second ring operating in Britain. “I received a warning
from the police last spring,” said Dobrokhotov. “These attempts are ongoing.” The
details of the warning are being withheld by the Guardian.
His wife worries. He worries. But there is only so much you can do to keep safe,
Dobrokhotov said. His friend and colleague, Grozev, now lives in the US, possibly
because of “Moscow rules”, the perhaps mythical convention that the US and Russia
do not strike on each other’s territory. Britain no longer feels safe. Dobrokhotov’s
current home must remain a secret.
13.03.2025, 10:57 ‘Burn him alive on the street’: the Russian journalist targeted in UK by spy ring | Russian spy ring | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/burn-him-alive-on-the-street-the-russian-journalist-targeted-in-uk-by-spy-ring-tasked-with-his 3/7 Most viewed
“If you want to have an ordinary life, it’s very difficult to protect yourself,” he said.
“We have to live with the facts that it’s either us or them. It’s either journalists are
winning and Vladimir Putin loses his power and there is a regime change – or he will
be going after us all the time. It never will stop. No arrest will help.”
13.03.2025, 10:57 ‘Burn him alive on the street’: the Russian journalist targeted in UK by spy ring | Russian spy ring | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/08/burn-him-alive-on-the-street-the-russian-journalist-targeted-in-uk-by-spy-ring-tasked-with-his 4/7

5. News>UK>Crime
Journalist targeted by ‘clumsy’ Russian spies says
he is ‘lucky to be alive’
Roman Dobrokhotov, an investigative journalist, said the spies were ‘clumsy’ but still ‘dangerous’.
Ellie CrabbeSaturday 08 March 2025 08:23 GMT
•
A surveillance image of Roman Dobrokhotov taken by the Russian spy ring. Mr Dobrokhotov says he is ‘lucky to be
alive’ after being targeted by the group (Handout/PA)
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13.03.2025, 10:57 Journalist targeted by ‘clumsy’ Russian spies says he is ‘lucky to be alive’ | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/roman-old-bailey-vladimir-putin-justice-europe-b2711374.html 1/8 A journalist targeted by a Russian spy ring said he is “lucky to be alive” after being
tracked by the group.
Roman Dobrokhotov, an investigative journalist and founder of The Insider, a
media organisation which was formerly based in Russia, was targeted by Bulgarian
spies based in the UK who were working for Moscow.
Bulgarians Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev,
39, were found guilty at the Old Bailey on Friday of spying on an “industrial scale”,
putting lives and national security at risk.
In an interview, Mr Dobrokhotov, who was followed across Europe by the spies in
November 2022, told the BBC: “I’m very lucky to be alive actually.
“I think assassination was one of the options that they reviewed.”
Asked who he thought ordered he was targeted, Mr Dobrokhotov said he believed
it was Russian President Vladimir Putin himself.
He said: “In this dictatorship, you would never take responsibility on your own to
do such a political stuff. You will always have a direct order from the president.”
Ivanova, Gaberova and Ivanchev were part of one of the “largest and most
complex” enemy operations to be uncovered on UK soil.
13.03.2025, 10:57 Journalist targeted by ‘clumsy’ Russian spies says he is ‘lucky to be alive’ | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/roman-old-bailey-vladimir-putin-justice-europe-b2711374.html 2/8

6. They will be sentenced alongside ringleader Orlin Roussev, 47, his second-in-
command Biser Dzhambazov, 43, and Ivan Stoyanov, 33, who admitted their roles
in the spy ring.
The group were directed by alleged Russian agent Jan Marsalek, 44, an Austrian
businessman wanted by Interpol after the collapse of German payment processing
firm Wirecard.
Mr Dobrokhotov told the BBC the spies were “clumsy”, but he was still concerned
for his safety.
During the trial, the court had heard how another investigative journalist Christo
Grozev was also targeted after he exposed Russian links to the Novichok
poisoning and the downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane in July 2014.
He was followed from Vienna to a conference in Valencia in Spain, with Ivanova
able to get close enough on the plane to record the PIN number on his phone with
a camera on the strap of her bag after the spies acquired his flight manifest.
Marsalek discussed kidnapping Mr Dobrokhotov by boat, the trial was told.
“The risk was that me and Christo (Grozev) would be killed,” Mr Dobrokhotov told
the BBC.
“And the fact that the spies were very clumsy doesn’t mean anything.
“You know because in the case of the Skripal poisoning they also did all the
possible mistakes and behaved in a very stupid way but they still poisoned Skripal
and his daughter and murdered a UK citizen.
“The fact that they are very, very unprofessional, very clumsy, very stupid, still
doesn’t mean that they are not dangerous.”
The three defendants made no reaction as the verdicts were delivered on Friday.
Mr Justice Hilliard KC remanded the defendants into custody until sentencing
between May 7 and May 12.
More about:RomanOld BaileyVladimir PutinJusticeEuropeInterpolNovichokMalaysia Airlines
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13.03.2025, 10:57 Journalist targeted by ‘clumsy’ Russian spies says he is ‘lucky to be alive’ | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/roman-old-bailey-vladimir-putin-justice-europe-b2711374.html 3/8 How spy ring did Russia's dirty
work from the UK
Chris Bell
BBC News Investigations
Tom Beal
BBC News Investigations
Roman Dobrokhotov is used to looking over his shoulder.
The Russian journalist's investigations into Vladimir Putin's regime - one of
which unmasked the agents responsible for the 2018 Salisbury poisonings -
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13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 1/25

7. have made him a target of the Kremlin.
But as the Insider editor waited on the tarmac to board a commercial flight
from Budapest to Berlin in 2021, where he was to give evidence in a murder
trial, he didn't notice the brunette woman stood behind him.
He thought nothing of it when she took a seat close to his. Nor did he see the
camera strapped to her shoulder, quietly recording.
Grabs of Roman Dobrokhotov onboard the flight were retrieved by police from a surveillance report
That morning, the woman had flown from Luton to Budapest to locate the
mark. Dobrokhotov's flight information had been obtained in advance.
As the aircraft approached its destination, the woman, a Bulgarian – Katrin
Ivanova – sent a message on Telegram.
Then two more.
METROPOLITAN POLICE HANDOUT
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 2/25 Her partner, Biser Dzhambazov, with whom she lived in Harrow, north London,
was waiting for her and Dobrokhotov in Berlin.
Another woman, an airport worker identified only as Cvetka, had already flown
a dummy run of the route.
Waiting in Berlin, she was another pair of eyes.
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 3/25

8. They'd lost him.
Operational for years, the cell tracked Russia's enemies across Europe. Its
leaders plotted honeytraps, kidnap and murder in service of the Kremlin.
Following a trial, three members were convicted on 7 March at the Old Bailey
in London for their part in the conspiracy. Three more had already pleaded
guilty.
"We're in a situation where only some of us will survive," Dobrokhotov would
later tell the BBC.
"It will be either Russian journalists and human rights watchers, or Vladimir
Putin and his killers."
Watching events in Berlin unfold from the UK was the final member of the
Telegram group, another Bulgarian, Orlin Roussev, 47.
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 4/25 An associate recalls Orlin Roussev as a man fascinated by espionage. An email
address associated with him includes the 007 sobriquet of the world's most
famous secret agent.
He moved to Britain in 2009, before he set up a company involved in signals
intelligence – the interception of communications or electronic signals.
When police officers searched the faded 33-room Great Yarmouth former
guest house in which he lived with his wife and stepson, they discovered, in the
assessment of one expert, "a vast amount of technical surveillance equipment
which could be used to enable intrusive surveillance".
I'm lucky to be alive, says journalist tracked by Russian spies
They might have been less dry. It was an Aladdin's cave disguised as a
cluttered seaside relic; sophisticated communications interception devices
worth £175,000; radio frequency jammers; covert cameras hidden in smoke
detectors, a pen, sunglasses, even men's ties; a horde of fake identity
documents and equipment to make more. An encrypted hard drive was left
open. Telegram conversations were visible on Roussev's laptop.
Among the masses of equipment, police discovered the business card of a
one-time finance executive, Jan Marsalek.
METROPOLITAN POLICE HANDOUT
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 5/25

9. When police searched Orlin Roussev's office, a webpage entitled "hacking more secure portable
storage devices" was open
Roussev first met Jan Marsalek in 2015, introduced, he recalled, by a mutual
acquaintance he had met at the offices of a British investor and wealth adviser.
In emails from that time seen by the BBC, Marsalek enlists Roussev's help in
acquiring a secure mobile phone from a Chinese company.
Jan Marsalek, a former finance executive linked to Russian intelligence, was directing operations using
the alias 'Rupert Ticz', prosecutors said
Then, Jan Marsalek was the respected chief operating officer of German
payments processing company Wirecard. While reports criticising Wirecard's
METROPOLITAN POLICE HANDOUT
PP MUENCHEN
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 6/25 business practices had started to appear in the Financial Times, the
company's reputation as a star performer in the European fintech sector,
valued in excess of £20 billion at its peak, was intact.
Now, he was directing operations as Roussev's controller on the run from
fraud charges - the subject of an Interpol red notice - following the company's
2020 collapse.
Together, the pair conceived operations targeting journalists, dissidents,
politicians, even Ukrainian soldiers thought to be training at a US military
installation in Stuttgart. They discussed selling US drones captured from
Ukrainian battlefields to China. And they did it for Russia.
Linked to the state's intelligence services, Marsalek is believed to be hiding in
Moscow. He faces no charges in the UK.
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 7/25

10. 13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 8/25 The group Roussev employed, all Bulgarians, were not the spies of popular
imagination.
Alongside Dzhambazov, a medical courier, and Ivanova, a laboratory assistant,
he employed a beautician with a salon in Acton, Vanya Gaberova; a painter and
decorator, Tihomir Ivanchev; plus an MMA fighter nicknamed "The Destroyer"
who wore his fights on his face, Ivan Stoyanov.
Clockwise from top left: Orlin Roussev, Katrin Ivanova, Ivan Stoyanov, Biser Dzhambazov, Vanya
Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanchev
A neighbour who knew two of the accused was sceptical they could be guilty.
They were too stupid and didn't know anything, the neighbour asserted,
though they admired the fighter's "enormous calves".
But they were not ineffective – Roman Dobrokhotov recognised none of the
group's faces when pictures were shown to him by police.
The group operated a clear hierarchy. Roussev reported to Marsalek, who
reported to his "friends in Russia". Roussev managed the rest of the
Bulgarians, who he referred to as his "minions", Dzhambazov chief among
them.
"There are no bosses here," Dzambhazov wrote, as he issued instructions to
Ivanchev.
Nonetheless, "minion" was attached to the decorator's number in
Dzhambazov's phone.
METROPOLITAN POLICE HANDOUT AND SOCIAL MEDIA
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 9/25

11. Katrin Ivanova told the jury she did not know Biser Dzhambazov and Vanya Gaberova were in a
relationship behind her back
The group dynamics were complicated. Dzhambazov and Ivanova were in a
long term relationship and lived together. Gaberova and Ivanchev were in a
relationship until 2022.
But it was Dzhambazov and Gaberova police found in bed together when they
burst into the beautician's northwest London flat in February 2023.
Between August 2020 and February 2023, Marsalek and Roussev exchanged
78,747 messages on the Telegram messaging app.
They reveal at least six operations the spy cell was tasked with over a period of
years – four of which targeted individuals who were enemies of Putin's regime.
As well as Dobrokhotov, the Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev
was watched at home in Vienna. Cameras in the window of a rented apartment
nearby were trained on his front door.
METROPOLITAN POLICE HANDOUT
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 10/25 Propped up with a stand and a water bottle, a phone camera is trained on Christo Grozev's door in
Vienna
He was tailed on flights and photographed in a Valencia hotel eating breakfast
with co-founder of the Bellingcat investigative collective Elliott Higgins.
A thorn in the side of Russian intelligence services, he was observed in
Bulgaria meeting with an arms trader who had been the victim of an
assassination attempt Grozev linked to the Russian state.
Gaberova was instructed to befriend him.
METROPOLITAN POLICE HANDOUT
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 11/25

12. 13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 12/25 In Montenegro, the cell searched for Kirill Kachur, who had worked for the
Investigative Committee of Russia until he fell foul of the Kremlin. They were
anxious to impress. A second Russian intelligence team circled, including a
chain-smoking blonde woman referred to only as "Red Sparrow".
Marsalek and Roussev discussed the kidnap and murder of both Grozev and
Kachur. It wasn't an empty threat – a colleague of Kachur's had separately
been taken to Moscow.
KIRILL KACHUR/YOUTUBE
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 13/25

13. 13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 14/25 A former Kazakh politician living with refugee status in London, Bergey
Ryskaliyev, was targeted at a luxury apartment in Hyde Park. Further
reconnaissance took place at his home.
Ivan Stoyanov, who acknowledged his part in the conspiracy, was spotted
parked in a Toyota Prius outside his address. Suspicious, an assistant of Mr
Ryskaliyev noted the licence plate.
When confronted, the MMA fighter claimed he was working for a Kensington
hospital, delivering tests. The next day, an NHS logo had been placed in the
windscreen.
Prosecutors said providing information on a political dissident like Ryskaliyev
"is predicated on Russian attempts to control diplomatic relations".
Indeed, Marsalek would further task Roussev with another project: a hare-
brained scheme to initiate a staged protest at the Kazakh Embassy featuring
blood dropped from drones, an astroturf human rights campaign involving
Just Stop Oil, a letter addressed to the President of the European Commission
Ursula von der Leyen, advertising on London buses and unrealised deepfake
pornographic video of the Kazakh president's son. Russia would then help
nervous Kazakh security services "uncover" the "activists" responsible.
In February 2022, Telegram exchanges between Marsalek and Roussev reveal
a preoccupation with following Christo Grozev to Kyiv, where he was believed
to have travelled.
Their offers to help were rebuffed.
BERGEY RYSKALIYEV/FACEBOOK
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 15/25

14. Fewer than three weeks later, Russian tanks surged across Ukraine's eastern,
southern and northern borders.
Later that year, Marsalek asked Roussev if one of the cell's three IMSI grabbers
– sophisticated communications interception equipment – could be deployed
to spy on Ukrainian soldiers in Germany. Roussev promised to retrieve it from
his "Indiana Jones garage", where it was "gathering dust".
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 16/25 Police found a number of IMSI grabbers at Orlin Roussev's Great Yarmouth address
Marsalek returned to the idea repeatedly.
METROPOLITAN POLICE HANDOUT
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 17/25

15. By February 2023, Roussev and Marsalek were plotting to send Dzhambazov
and "one more person" to Stuttgart, where they believed Ukrainian soldiers to
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 18/25 be training on Patriot missile systems.
Had they successfully deployed and captured Ukrainian troops' mobile phone
data as planned, they might have used it to pinpoint those same troops on the
battlefield – leading Russian forces to Western-supplied Ukrainian air
defences.
"This was espionage activity of the highest level of seriousness," prosecutor
Alison Morgan KC told the jury at the Old Bailey.
Before their plans could be put into action, they were arrested – Dzhambazov,
Ivanova, Gaberova and Stoyanov in London, Roussev in his guest house.
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 19/25

16. Orlin Roussev was arrested in Great Yarmouth on 8 February 2023
Though Ivanchev identified himself to police outside Gaberova's flat, he would
not be arrested for another year.
In his first police interview, he told officers he had spoken to MI5 in the
interim. The interview was paused.
Police bodycam footage shows Tihomir Ivanchev outside Vanya Gaberova's flat
None of the six denied their actions.
01:24
00:25
13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 20/25 Roussev, Dzhambazov and Stoyanov pleaded guilty before trial. Ivanova,
Gaberova and Ivanchev denied knowing they were working for Russia.
The jury disagreed.
Ivanova, Gaberova and Ivanchev were found guilty after the jury deliberated
for over 32 hours. Ivanova was also found guilty of possessing multiple false
identity documents.
They could face up to 14 years in prison. They will be sentenced in May.
But it is not the end.
"If there is no regime change, there will be new and new teams of people who
come to kill or kidnap you," Roman Dobrokhotov told the BBC.
"This is this actually something that motivates us to work.
"From the very beginning, I was sure it was something directly controlled by
Vladimir Putin.
"In his dictatorship you would never take responsibility on your own to do such
political stuff.
"You'd always have a direct order from the president.
"Putin is a psychopath who has no borders," he said.
Message extracts have been edited for brevity.
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13.03.2025, 10:56 How six Bulgarians did Russia's dirty work from the UK - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c627685p21eo 21/25

17. «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо
Грозева и Романа Доброхотова
Роман Доброхотов,Христо Грозев
7 March 2025
РАССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
Расследование: Ян Марсалек: мошенник, миллиардер, агент ФСБ
Сегодня присяжные Лондонского уголовного суда Олд-Бейли признали виновными в шпионаже в пользу России группу граждан Болгарии,
которые были наняты завербованным ФСБ мошенником Яном Марсалеком с целью похищения и возможного убийства расследователей The
Insider Христо Грозева и Романа Доброхотова. Как свидетельствует переписка Марсалека, заказ ФСБ на слежку за журналистами пришел в день
публикации их расследования об отравлении Навального.
СОДЕРЖАНИЕ
«Кто такой этот Христо Грозев?»1.
Первое фиаско ФСБ2.
Преследование продолжается: Украина и Вена3.
Охота за пустым телефоном и чужим ноутбуком4.
Убить, если похитить не получится5.
EN
«Кто такой этот Христо Грозев?»
Утром 14 декабря 2020 года The Insider и Bellingcat опубликовали расследование об отравлении Навального, вскрыв настоящие имена и
имена прикрытия сотрудников ФСБ из Второй службы и Центра специальных технологий (НИИ-2), которые несколько месяцев следовали за
оппозиционером по разным городам, с тем чтобы в конце концов отравить его «Новичком» в томской гостинице. Публикация стала
настоящим вызовом для ФСБ: там фигурировали фотографии самых засекреченных агентов, биллинги их телефонных соединений, маршруты
их перелетов, словом, все возможные данные об операции наивысшей степени секретности, о которой даже внутри ФСБ, помимо
исполнителей, знало всего несколько человек.
В тот же день Управлению собственной безопасности ФСБ было поручено разобраться, как данные сотрудников ведомства оказались у
журналистов. Высокопоставленный источник The Insider в спецслужбах утверждает, что распоряжение исходило лично от Владимира Путина.
Вечером того же дня бывший операционный директор Wirecard и агент российских спецслужб Ян Марсалек, курируемый тем самым
управлением собственной безопасности ФСБ, написал сообщение своему давнему знакомому, бывшему партнеру со времен Wirecard
болгарину Орлину Русеву, который специализировался на IT-технологиях и на протяжении многих лет помогал Марсалеку в вопросах слежки
за разными людьми:
Марсалек: «Нас интересует болгарский парень, который работает на Bellingcat, Христо Грозев. Мы можем его проверить, или это вызовет
слишком много вопросов?»
Русев: «Имя и правда болгарское, он работает в Bellingcat?»
Марсалек: «Да, он ведущий расследователь по делу Навального».
Русев: «Если всё сделать правильно, он и понятия иметь не будет».
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14.03.2025, 11:40 «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо Грозева и Р…
https://theins.ru/inv/279015 1/12 Марсалек: «Превосходно!»
Русев: «Ну, так с чего начнем? Я имею в виду, что если проводить настоящее полное расследование, то надо начинать с места, где он родился,
вся школьная история, кто были его друзья, подружки, одноклассники, университет, работодатели и т.д. и т.п. Особенно если он действует не
из Болгарии и живет где-то еще. В Болгарии у меня есть 4 секретные команды, каждая по 12 человек... Можем следить за ним 24 на 7».
Марсалек дает добро на «полное расследование», но очевидно ему этого мало, и аналогичное поручение он дает другому своему партнеру —
Мартину Вайсу, бывшему высокопоставленному офицеру австрийской спецслужбы BVT. В свою очередь, Вайс на следующее утро посылает
бывшему подчиненному в BVT Эгисто Отту ссылку на расследование отравления Навального и спрашивает: «Можем ли мы в Австрии
поспрашивать о Христо Грозеве? Работает в Bellingcat». На следующий день, 16 декабря, Отт уточняет: «Кто такой этот Христо Грозев?» Мартин
Вайс отвечает в меру своего понимания: «Бывший агент ЦРУ. А теперь работает фрилансером».
Возможно, про ЦРУ Мартин Вайс придумал сам, или так ему сказал Марсалек. Но интересно, что на следующий день, 17 декабря, Владимир
Путин в ходе своей большой пресс-конференции так говорит о расследовании The Insider и Bellingcat: «Мы прекрасно понимаем, это никакое
не расследование, это легализация материалов американских спецслужб. А что, мы не знаем, что они локацию отслеживают, что ли?»
Таким образом, поручая Управлению собственной безопасности ФСБ найти тех, кто отследил агентов ФСБ, Путин (вполне возможно,
искренне) намеревался найти следы деятельности ЦРУ.
УСБ ФСБ ретиво взялось за дело. Уже к 29 декабря следователи опросили операторов связи и выяснили, что информацию об их коллегах
выдавали на основании поддельных запросов ГУ МВД и поддельных решений Хамовнического суда Москвы, о чем к 19 января был составлен
подробный рапорт на имя главы Управления собственной безопасности ФСБ России генерала Вертяшкина.
Завербованный ФСБ мошенник Ян Марсалек
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https://theins.ru/inv/279015 2/12

18. Еще через 10 дней, 30 января 2021 года, оба главных автора расследования о Навальном — Христо Грозев и Роман Доброхотов — стали
официально объектами слежки ФСБ. За Романом Доброхотовым следить было удобно, он тогда жил в Москве, а за Христо Грозевым
приходилось следить посредством людей Марсалека.
Первое фиаско ФСБ
В феврале «пробивщиков» уже задержали, и они оказались совсем не агентами ЦРУ, а тремя самыми обычными мошенниками с
поддельными полицейскими документами. На этом расследование ФСБ могло бы остановиться, но, видимо, в ФСБ сочли, что такая
прозаическая развязка разъяренного президента не удовлетворит, и слежка за Доброхотовым и Грозевым продолжилась.Постановление, в котором ФСБ признает биллинги следовавших за Навальным отравителей биллингами сотрудников ФСБ
Христо Грозев и Роман Доброхотов
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14.03.2025, 11:40 «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо Грозева и Р…
https://theins.ru/inv/279015 3/12 Первоначально ФСБ интересовалась в основном гаджетами Доброхотова и Грозева, надеясь найти в них информацию о расследованиях и
подтвердить гипотезу о связях журналистов с ЦРУ. Вечером 6 марта сотрудники ФСБ остановили Романа Доброхотова в Шереметьево после
его возвращения из командировки и под предлогом «опроса о ситуации с коронавирусом в Европе», из-за которого они якобы рандомно
опрашивают некоторых прилетающих из Европы людей, потребовали от Доброхотова пройти в комнату, оставив свои гаджеты в коридоре на
столе (с их слов, в комнату пограничников с гаджетами входить нельзя). После нескольких абсурдных вопросов о доверии к вакцине
«Спутник» в Европе Роман Доброхотов решил проверить, лежат ли его гаджеты там, где он их оставил, и проводивший опрос сотрудник не
успел его остановить. Ни ноутбука, ни телефонов на столе, конечно, уже не было. Сотрудники ФСБ изображали величайшее удивление и
обещали незамедлительно вернуть пропавшее. Через 40 минут они и правда всё вернули. Как затем показала независимая проверка, они
безуспешно пытались войти в iPhone и Samsung в обход пин-кода и столь же безуспешно — проникнуть в компьютер. Единственное, что им
удалось, — это вставить в корпус ноутбука трекер, отслеживающий передвижения (который оказался бесполезен, так как Доброхотов,
разумеется, ноутбуком потом не пользовался).
Получить доступ к гаджетам Христо Грозева было еще сложнее — для этого надо было попытаться проникнуть к нему в дом. В апреле
Марсалек обсуждает со своими сообщниками детали наружного наблюдения за Грозевым. Этим параллельно начинают заниматься две
группы: одна — Эгисто Отта и другая — Орлина Русева.
Летом начинается эскалация. 22 июля Марсалек инициирует обсуждение не только слежки, но и похищения:
Марсалек: Какой-то херов гений только что опять предложил похитить Христо и вывезти его в Москву. Эти люди необучаемы (эмоджи с
фейспалмом).
Русев: Если ты серьезно об этом, и если Грозев будет в Болгарии, то у меня есть там ресурсы, чтобы похитить его, накачать наркотиками и
запереть в надежном месте. Потом можно продумать процесс экстрадиции. Нам понадобится самолет или судно.
Марсалек: Если честно, я считаю это плохой идеей. Это получит ужасную прессу, а полгода спустя появятся два новых Грозева. Это же как
гидра — одну голову отрубаешь, вырастает две новых.
Русев: Но если они этого хотят, то я готов. По-моему, это крутой проект.
26 июля, когда Христо Грозев приезжает в Болгарию и отдыхает неподалеку от Бургаса, Русев радостно рапортует: «Отличные новости, он
почти у нас. Взгляни на его селфи на лодке. Мы также знаем, где он остановился. С вероятностью 99,9% мы сделаем с ним селфи этим
вечером». Марсалек отвечает: «Вот бы нам сейчас найти какого-нибудь смертника для нападения на него. Еще мне нравится идея взорвать
лодку».
«Селфи», о котором идет речь, — это опубликованная Грозевым в Twitter (Х) фотография с лодки: он остановился порыбачить с другом по пути
на интервью с Эмилианом Гебревым тем же вечером.
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14.03.2025, 11:40 «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо Грозева и Р…
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19. На следующий день, 27 июля, Роман Доброхотов купил билеты в Бургас — он планировал 28 июля вылететь на конференцию в Тбилиси и сразу
после нее навестить Христо Грозева в Болгарии. Однако вылететь из России ему не удалось. В 6 утра 28 июля сотрудники ФСБ выбили дверь в
его квартире и устроили обыск. Силовики забрали все гаджеты, которые смогли найти, а главное — оба загранпаспорта. Формальный предлог
— якобы содержащаяся в одном из его твитов клевета на голландского блогера Макса ван дер Верфа, которого журналист обвинил в работе на
ГРУ. Блогер обратился со своим заявлением о клевете еще в декабре 2020 года, и полиция отказала ему в возбуждении дела, но в июне 2021-
го ФСБ тайком это дело возобновила и теперь использовала как предлог для обыска.
Доброхотов не был арестован (дело о клевете ареста не предусматривает), но в ФСБ были уверены — объект их наблюдения никуда не
денется, так как загранпаспорта у него изъяты как «вещественные доказательства» по делу о клевете. Роман Доброхотов рассудил, что если
ФСБ почему-то хочет, чтобы он оставался в стране, это сигнал к тому, что ее надо немедленно покинуть, что он и сделал через два дня,
перейдя российско-украинскую границу через лес.
Фиаско ждало и людей Марсалека. Команда Русева ошибочно предположила, что лодка, на которой фотографировался Грозев, ему и
принадлежит, в итоге они потратили несколько дней на отслеживание ее перемещений и еще больше времени — на попытки найти владельца
лодки, чтобы доказать, что журналист Христо Грозев купил себе яхту. Несколько дней спустя команда Русева, используя 3 мотоцикла Harley-
Davidson и две машины, смогла снова найти Грозева, когда он посещал музыкальное шоу в кафе на морском курорте южного побережья
Болгарии. Он и его семья сняли комнату на airbnb на ночь и уехали обратно в летний дом семьи рано утром следующего дня. Однако команда
Марсалека не заметила отъезда Грозева и провела следующие дни, следя за домом, который, как они ошибочно полагали, принадлежал
Грозеву.
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14.03.2025, 11:40 «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо Грозева и Р…
https://theins.ru/inv/279015 5/12 После нескольких дней ожидания (в течение которых рассматривался и вариант поджечь дом) Марсалек дал им указание ворваться в
помещение и избить Грозева (используя в качестве предлога выдуманный конфликт между Грозевым и посетителем пляжа). Однако в
Преступники несколько дней следили за домом в Болгарии, который не имел никакого отношения к Христо Грозеву
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14.03.2025, 11:40 «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо Грозева и Р…
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20. последний момент перед вторжением в случайную квартиру Марсалек написал Русеву: «WTF происходит, Грозев только что выложил селфи
из Киева». Затем Русев написал своей команде, что они его ужасно опозорили. Однако Марсалеку он сообщил, что «Грозев, возможно,
использовал двойника, который остановился в его доме, и, должно быть, покинул страну, используя документы под поддельным именем».
Преследование продолжается: Украина и Вена
Август Роман Доброхотов провел в Киеве, где ему не без труда удалось получить выданный на гуманитарных основаниях документ,
замещающий загранпаспорт. В конце августа он таки встретился с Христо Грозевым, но не в Бургасе, как планировалось изначально, а в
Карпатах, где они устроили поход. Как выяснилось позже, Украина для журналистов была тоже местом небезопасным. Источник в СБУ
месяцем позже сообщил Доброхотову, что им удалось перехватить информацию о том, что одна из украинских криминальных группировок
получила «заказ» из Москвы на похищение Романа Доброхотова и вывоз его в Россию, за эту работу предлагалось вознаграждение — $50
тысяч. Бандиты найти Доброхотова не успели — он 30 августа отправился в Вену, где поселился на той же улице, что и Христо Грозев. Как
выяснилось, буквально в те же дни на той же улице поселились и люди Марсалека, сняв квартиру ровно напротив квартиры Грозева, чтобы
удобнее было за ним наблюдать.
Хотя Орлин Русев рассказывал о том, что под его контролем находятся десятки человек, де-факто его основная команда состояла всего из
нескольких человек, включая пять граждан Болгарии, проживающих в Англии (43-летний медицинский курьер Бисер Джамбазов, его 33-
летняя подруга Катрин Иванова, работавшая ассистентом в медицинской лаборатории, 39-летний декоратор Тихомир Иванчев, его бывшая
девушка 30-летняя косметолог Ваня Габерова, которая в ходе описываемых событий стала встречаться с Джамбазовым, думая, что он уже
расстался с Ивановой, а также 32-летний бывший боец ММА Иван Стоянов).
У этой команды не было никакого опыта в операциях подобного рода, что немедленно стало сказываться на их успехах. Поначалу в их задачи
входило только следить за Христо Грозевым, но и с этим они справлялись плохо: то он внезапно для них оказывался за границей (хотя они
следили за его подъездом из дома напротив и даже снимали всех входящих и выходящих на камеру), то они теряли его в городе, потому что
он брал электросамокат и они не поспевали за ним.
Пятеро первых обвиняемых (по часовой стрелке сверху слева): Катрин Иванова, Ваня Габерова (в центре), Бисер Джамбазов, Орлин Русев и Иван Стоянов
Христо Грозев уезжает от преступников на электросамокате
Христо Грозев уезжает от преступнХристо Грозев уезжает от преступн……
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14.03.2025, 11:40 «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо Грозева и Р…
https://theins.ru/inv/279015 7/12 При этом в своих докладах Марсалеку Русев старается скрывать свои постоянные провалы и представлять дело так, будто внимательный и
осторожный Христо Грозев просто очень хорошо конспирируется и путает следы. Каждый раз, когда по рассеянности или из-за смены планов
Грозев внезапно возвращался или двигался не туда, куда ожидалось, Русев списывал это на изощренные методы конспирации.
Чтобы выглядеть чуть более профессионально, Русев постоянно придумывал какие-то несуществующие успехи и докладывал о них
Марсалеку: он регулярно сообщает о том, что они завербовали то консьержа в гостинице, то стюардессу (всё это было выдумкой), затем
отчитывается о том, что Ваня Габерова достигла невероятных успехов в соблазнении Христо Грозева, якобы он уже «попался на крючок»,
влюбился в нее и активно лайкает ее фотографии в Facebook (Христо Грозев почти не пользуется Facebook, и хотя ответил на запрос о
добавлении в друзья после того, как Ваня подружилась с несколькими членами его семьи и одноклассниками, не лайкал никаких фотографий
и вообще не помнил о существовании Габеровой). Марсалек предупреждает Русева: «Надеюсь, она не влюбится в него. Я один раз уже
сталкивался с похожей ситуацией» (вероятно, он имел в виду Наталью Злобину, которую ФСБ использовала при вербовке Марсалека и с
которой у него затем были отношения).
Камера, установленная напротив подъезда Христо Грозева
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14.03.2025, 11:40 «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо Грозева и Р…
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21. Марсалек, впрочем, и сам делился с Русевым информацией примерно такого же качества, сообщая ему, например, что США якобы платят
директору австрийской разведки миллион евро в год на «персональные расходы» Христо Грозева. Вряд ли Марсалек это выдумал сам, скорее
всего, этот слух он почерпнул от кураторов из ФСБ, которым поставили задачу найти связь Грозева с ЦРУ. При этом Русев удивляется, почему
же у Христо Грозева такие старые и истоптанные ботинки. «Трудно сказать, — отвечает Марсалек, — он странный парень. Может, ему просто
всё равно, а может, он культивирует образ честного и простого человека». (В действительности Христо Грозев просто не придавал большого
значения обуви, выходя за случайными покупками в магазин, но если бы он знал, что за ним следят, то непременно надел бы ботинки
получше.)
В какой-то момент, впрочем, кураторы Марсалека сменили точку зрения и стали считать Грозева уже агентом МИ-6: «Наши друзья на 95%
уверены, что Грозевым руководит МИ-6, — несколько источников в Великобритании указывают на это, — пишет Марсалек Русеву и через
некоторое время повторяет: Наши друзья отчаянно пытаются найти доказательства его связей с британцами».
Охота за пустым телефоном и чужим ноутбуком
Слежка продолжалась не только в Вене, в сентябре 2021-го Христо Грозев отправился в Валенсию на встречу Bellingcat. Одним рейсом с ним
отправилась Иванова, вслед за ними полетели Габерова и Джамбазов. Они забронировали номер на том же этаже гостиницы, что и Грозев,
вели за ним наблюдение и посылали Марсалеку фото, где Грозев завтракает с основателем Bellingcat Элиотом Хиггинсом.
Отслеживать перелеты Грозева и Доброхотова преступникам помогал доступ к системе «Амадеус» — оператору крупнейшей в мире системы
по бронированию билетов. Для этого команда Марсалека подкупила сотрудника логистического оператора аэропорта Swissport. Доступ к
этой системе позволил им увидеть, например, что Роман Доброхотов забронировал рейс из Будапешта в Берлин, куда он летел давать
показания по делу об убийстве Зелимхана Хангошвили. Расследование, авторами которого были Христо Грозев и Роман Доброхотов,
установило, что убийцей Хангошвили является сотрудник «Вымпела» ФСБ Вадим Красиков, и их свидетельские показания помогли
приговорить Красикова к пожизненному заключению (позже его обменяли на российских политзаключенных). Катрин Иванова немедленно
забронировала билет на тот же рейс. Она расположилась на соседнем сидении и записывала происходящее на скрытую камеру,
закрепленную у нее на плече. В режиме реального времени Русев рапортовал Марсалеку, что Доброхотов переписывается по телефону с
Грозевым, а также, что им удалось узнать пин-код на его телефоне (с одной, впрочем, неверной цифрой). Правда, по прилете в Берлин Иванова
потеряла Доброхотова и слежка провалилась.
На тот момент преступники еще не обсуждали конкретного плана похищения или убийства, их главной задачей было попытаться украсть
телефон или ноутбук. Сначала они обсуждали идею разбойного нападения с целью выхватить ноутбук и сбежать с ним, но этот план им не
очень нравился, потому что нельзя было гарантировать заранее, что у жертвы будет ноутбук с собой. Похитить компьютер из отеля было бы
куда удобнее. Видимо, впервые они попытались это сделать еще в Валенсии. Во всяком случае Русев отчитывался Марсалеку о том, что им
удалось войти в номер Грозева с помощью специального устройства, способного имитировать ключ от номера: «Устройству понадобится 30–
50 секунд, чтобы считать код с двери, а затем “воспроизвести“ и получить обратную связь, чтобы открыть дверь. А если вдруг кто-то решит
проверить логи, то увидит, что дверь была открыта настоящей картой».
В начале февраля 2022 года они обнаружили, что Христо Грозев летит в Киев. Поначалу преступники собирались следовать за ним, но
Марсалек остановил их, намекая, что у российских спецслужб есть на этот счет свои планы: «Наши друзья обеспокоены тем, что наше
присутствие может помешать другой операции в Украине. Они бы предпочли, чтобы мы воздержались от любой деятельности на территории
Украины в данный момент. Я не знаю, что они делают, но это касается Грозева и его встреч в Украине. Может, ему нужен только билет в один
конец».
В июне 2022 года преступников ждала первая удача: Роман Доброхотов и Христо Грозев отправились на журналистскую конференцию,
организованную «Редколлегией» в городе Бар в Черногории. Группа Русева заселилась в тот же отель и, улучив момент, смогла-таки украсть
из номера Христо Грозева его мобильный телефон (видимо, поначалу перепутав номер, потому что в отчетах они с ужасом сообщают, что,
зайдя в номер с помощью своего «волшебного» устройства, обнаружили там спящего человека). Удача, впрочем, оказалась весьма
относительной — это был специальный «левый» телефон для поездок, и никаких данных в нем не хранилось. Вместе с пустым телефономИз фотографий, сделанных преступниками
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14.03.2025, 11:40 «Вывезем его на лодке!» Как нанятые по заказу ФСБ болгарские шпионы планировали похищение Христо Грозева и Р…
https://theins.ru/inv/279015 9/12 Марсалеку достался другой почетный трофей — фотография Грозева и Доброхотова на пляже в плавках (не приводим фото в тексте по
эстетическим соображениям).
Решиться на что-то большее, чем похищение телефона, тогда они не смогли — не получили на это санкции. «ФСБ решила промолчать и не
отвечать, — пишет Марсалек Русеву третьего июня. — Наверное, все испугались, поэтому решение делегировали директору, а он всё “занят“».
Не удовлетворившись черногорскими трофеями, преступники планируют новую попытку — на этот раз они решили похитить ноутбук прямо
из венской квартиры Христо Грозева.
11 июня Русев отчитывается перед Марсалеком: «В 16:00 по местному времени <…> “специальный отряд“ успешно проник в квартиру Грозева.
Там был сейф. Они открыли сейф… И угадайте, что? В сейфе у нас лежит ноутбук IBM!» Позже он делится деталями этой спецоперации:
Всё бы хорошо, но в квартире у Христо Грозева нет и никогда не было никакого сейфа, и его личный ноутбук не пропадал. Либо люди Русева
вломились в какую-то чужую квартиру, либо, что более вероятно, про сейф Русев просто наврал для красного словца, а схватили они первый
попавшийся ноутбук, принадлежавший покойной матери Христо, умершей годом ранее от коронавируса (во всяком случае только этот
ноутбук Грозев не смог потом нигде обнаружить). Скорее всего, верен второй вариант, потому что впоследствии Марсалек передал ноутбук
ФСБ и в разговоре с Русевым посетовал на то, что там нет ничего, кроме фотографий (если бы фотографии вообще не имели отношения к
Грозеву, то в ФСБ, скорее всего, заподозрили бы неладное).
Убить, если похитить не получится
7 августа 2022 года Марсалек пишет Русеву: «Вероятно, у нас будет возможность похитить Романа Доброхотова на лодке. Есть идеи, как
сделать это?» Русев обещает побрейнстормить эту идею с Джамбазовым. В этот момент Роман Доброхотов проживал в Великобритании, и
преступники решили, что это очень удобно, — ведь они и сами жили в этой стране. Марсалек отмечает: «Успешная операция в Британии была
бы очень кстати после провала со Скрипалём».
Русев пишет, что полиция очень плохо контролирует восточное побережье, чем постоянно пользуются нелегальные мигранты. «Доброхотов
будет нелегальным мигрантом в обратную сторону!» — острит Марсалек. Они продумывают конкретный план, реализация которого требует
наличия нескольких человек для силового нападения (включая бывшего бойца ММА Ивана Стоянова), автомобилей с фальшивыми
номерами, маршрута обхода дорожных камер наблюдения и, конечно, двух скоростных лодок, которые в конце операции придется затопить.
Идея была в том, чтобы отдать Доброхотова российским спецслужбам в международных водах, но с этим, по мнению Марсалека, были
организационные сложности: «Проблема в том, как забрать его в международных водах. Я не уверен, что ребята здесь будут доверять нашим
способностям настолько, чтобы передать нам под командование подводную лодку».
Как альтернативный сценарий преступники обсуждают возможность убийства. Русев предлагает организовать «несчастный случай в ду́ше»,
но Марсалек считает это недостаточно драматичным: «Может быть, сжечь его заживо на улице — опрыскать какой-нибудь сверхсильной
кислотой, VX, как северокорейцы! Или рицином... Несчастный случай в ду́ше не отпугнет других. Нужно больше драматизма!»
Впрочем, планы убийства обсуждались без особой конкретики: Русев и Марсалек, судя по всему, даже не знали, где именно Доброхотов тогда
жил в Британии. Иронично, что Роман Доброхотов и Христо Грозев, в свою очередь, на тот момент уже не только знали точный адрес
проживания Марсалека в Москве, но и имена обеих его любовниц, имена и звания его кураторов, все его фальшивые паспорта, даты и
маршруты поездок за границу и даже результаты его медицинских анализов.
В середине августа Марсалек с сожалением сообщает Русеву, что ему не согласовали идею похищения — ее посчитали слишком
рискованной, потому что команда Русева состоит из резидентов Британии, и если что-то пойдет не так, местной полиции будет очень легко их
достать. Русев крайне разочарован.
В декабре 2022 года Русев пишет Марсалеку: «Сейчас в новостях болгарского телевидения <...> — якобы Россия официально запросила ордер
на арест Грозева. Фейк-ньюс?»
Марсалек обещает проверить и вскоре отвечает: «ФСБ подтвердила».
Незадолго до этого ФСБ обвинила Христо Грозева в причастности к попытке угона российских самолетов, а источники РИА «Новости»
сообщали, что его обвинили в распространении фейков о российской армии. Но в действительности Россия объявила Христо Грозева в
розыск по делу о «незаконном переходе государственной границы» Романом Доброхотовым. К слову, это единственное в мировой истории
уголовное дело, возбужденное по этой статье в отношении человека, который не проник в страну, а покинул ее.
В ответ на вопрос Русева, объявят ли Грозева теперь в розыск через Интерпол, Марсалек отвечает: «Я думаю, всё, кроме похищения, будет
бессмысленно. Это должно быть в списке наших дел на 2023 год». Два дня спустя он добавляет: «Ордер на арест, по-видимому, является
правовой основой, необходимой для похищения. Лично я считаю, что Грозев не очень ценная цель, но, судя по всему, Путин его серьезно
ненавидит».
Русев отвечает: «Я думаю... Более “эффективным“ и сильным посланием было бы не похищение Грозева, а его убийство, как: 1) Степана
Бандеры в Германии или 2) как Льва Троцкого в Мексике».
«Они сработали быстро: открыли квартиру, проверили по списку, вокруг было много книг, старый сейф сразу привлек их внимание...
Поскольку снаружи не было ничего дорогого/ценного, они подумали (логично), что всё в сейфе. Им потребовалось около 10 минут, чтобы
открыть его... Внутри, к сожалению, не было денег и драгоценностей — только ноутбук и, по-моему, несколько USB-накопителей и т.д. Они
решили, что не стоит дальше ворошить квартиру — закрыли сейф, заперли входную дверь. Элвис покинул здание».
«Лично я считаю, что Грозев не очень ценная цель, но, судя по всему, Путин его серьезно ненавидит»
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Марсалек отвечает: «Я согласен. Хотя ледоруб — это оружие вчерашнего дня. Лучше кувалда, в стиле Вагнера. Я передам это выше».
Планам на 2023 год не суждено было сбыться. В январе всю команду Русева, включая его самого, арестовывают.
В их офисе обнаруживают целый склад шпионского оборудования, множество фальшивых документов, в том числе фальшивые
журналистские удостоверения, а в их телефонах находят переписку с Марсалеком, которая затем ляжет в основу обвинения.
Двое из шести преступников вскоре дали признательные показания. Остальные пытались делать вид, что не отдавали себе отчета, в чем
участвуют (скажем, Ваня Габерова заявила, что думала, что работает на Интерпол), но присяжные им не поверили.
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Как прокуроры
привлекли к
ответственности
российскую
шпионскую сеть,
действовавшую в
Великобритании
Шесть болгар шпионили за известными
людьми и местами в пользу России — вот как
их преследовали

23. В период с августа 2020 года по февраль 2023 года группа из шести болгар
использовала сложные методы для сбора информации о лицах и местах,
представлявших интерес для российского государства.
Под руководством Орлина Русева группа осуществляла наблюдение за важными
объектами, иногда используя поддельные удостоверения личности, и применяла
передовые технологии для получения разведывательной информации.
Орлин Руссев Руссев подчинялся человеку по имени Ян Марсалек.
Марсалек, которого разыскивают в Германии и Австрии за мошенничество и
хищение после краха платежной компании Wirecard- выступал посредником
российских спецслужб и давал указания Русеву.
В свою очередь, Русев поручил своей сети, состоящей из Бизера Джамбазова,
Ивана Стоянова, Катрин Ивановой, Вани Габеровой и Тихомира Иванчева,
осуществлять шпионаж в отношении целей в Великобритании и по всей Европе.
Это включало в себя слежение за людьми, в том числе в самолетах, проведение
разведки вокруг важных зданий и передачу информации другим лицам.
Они составляли подробные отчеты о своих объектах и ​​получали за свою работу
щедрое вознаграждение.
Обвинение основывалось на большом количестве доказательств, включая
обширную переписку в Telegram, свидетельства поездок, финансовые
доказательства и многочисленные технические предметы, найденные по их
домашним адресам после ареста.
Обвинение успешно доказало, что, вступив в сговор с целью получения
информации такого рода, которая могла бы быть прямо или косвенно полезна
врагу, группа действовала с целью, которая наносила ущерб безопасности или
интересам Великобритании.
Осуществляя эту деятельность, организованную на территории Великобритании в
интересах России, они нанесли ущерб безопасности и интересам Великобритании.

24. Оперативники
Бизер Джамбазов
Джамбазов был заместителем Орлина
Русева и признал себя виновным в сговоре с
целью шпионажа.
Катрин Иванова
Иванова состояла в отношениях с
Джамбазовым, и пара жила вместе по адресу
в Харроу, Миддлсекс. Она была признана
виновной в сговоре с целью шпионажа и
хранении документов, удостоверяющих
личность, с неправомерным намерением в
отношении поддельных паспортов и
удостоверений личности.
Ваня Габерова
Габерова работала
косметологом, а также
состояла в отношениях с
Джамбазовым. Она жила в
Чёрчвее, на северо-западе
Лондона. Она была
признана виновной в
сговоре с целью шпионажа.
Тихомир Иванчев
Иванчев жил в Энфилде, на
севере Лондона, и
исторически состоял в
отношениях с Габеровой.
Он был признан виновным в
сговоре с целью шпионажа.
Иван Стоянов
Стоянов был бойцом
смешанных единоборств и
жил в Гринфорде, на западе
Лондона. Он признал себя
виновным в шпионаже.

25. Группа использовала ряд поддельных документов для своих операций. Они
выдавали себя за аккредитованных представителей СМИ и фотографов, а
также за сотрудников правоохранительных органов и здравоохранения. Во время одной из операций Руссев похвастался Марсалеку, что у них было
много разных униформ, чтобы попасть в здание, например, «DHL... Uber...
Deliveroo... Just Eat... Pizza Express... все разные наряды... и, конечно, машина
скорой помощи».

26. Принтер для удостоверений личности и сопутствующее программное
обеспечение были найдены по домашнему адресу Руссева. Производители
подтвердили, что принтер используется компаниями для печати
удостоверений личности, а руководство пользователя можно загрузить
онлайн. Полиция изъяла поддельные пропуска Discovery Channel и National
Geographic.

27. Также была обнаружена униформа National Geographic. Когда на базу Руссева в бывшем
гостевом доме в Грейт-Ярмуте,
Норфолк, был совершен обыск,
полиция обнаружила то, что было
описано как «пещера Аладдина» со
шпионским оборудованием.
Было обнаружено множество
шпионских камер, спрятанных в
таких предметах, как
солнцезащитные очки, галстуки,
мягкие игрушки, ручки, ключи от
машины и кошельки, а также
глушилки Wi-Fi и GPS, детекторы
подслушивающих устройств,
технологии подслушивания и GPS-
трекеры для автомобилей.
Всего по адресам оперативников
полиция изъяла следующее
оборудование:
221 мобильный телефон
258 жестких дисков/цифровых
запоминающих устройств;
495 SIM-карт
33 аудиозаписывающих
устройства
55 устройств визуальной
регистрации
11 дронов
16 радиостанций
3 IMSI-граббера
4 устройства для подслушивания
Wi-Fi Pineapple
6 устройств программирования
Raspberry Pi
110 различных цифровых
товаров, включая глушилки,

28. оборудование для
киберэксплуатации, хакерское
программное обеспечение,
считыватели/записывающие
устройства RFID-карт и GPS-
трекеры
91 банковская и иная карта
финансового учреждения, в том
числе 17 на имя других лиц
75 паспортов/документов,
удостоверяющих личность, в том
числе 55 на имя других лиц. Прокуроры сосредоточились на шести ключевых операциях, проведенных группой.
Не все члены команды были вовлечены во все операции, но каждый человек
сыграл свою роль по крайней мере в двух операциях.
Операция 1
Христо Грозев , болгарский журналист-расследователь, подвергался
преследованиям со стороны группы в период с декабря 2020 года по январь 2023
года. Г-н Грозев работал в группе Bellingcat и как ведущий следователь по
российским делам получил награды за свою работу, в том числе за раскрытие
российских связей с атакой в ​​Солсбери в 2018 году. В результате своей
деятельности он был объявлен в розыск МВД России.  
Операцию по слежке за г-ном Грозевым проводили Русев, Джамбазов, Габерова,
Иванова и Иванчев. Они следили за г-ном Грозевым в разных странах, включая
Австрию, Черногорию и Испанию, и составили ряд отчетов для своих российских
клиентов, в которых излагались его перемещения и предоставлялась информация
о его жилье, его транспортном средстве и его контактах. Похоже, что группа также
рассматривала потенциальный план «медовой ловушки», используя Габерову для
его преследования. 
Операция 2
Роман Доброхотов , россиянин, проживающий в Великобритании, подвергся
нападению в ноябре 2022 года. Он журналист-расследователь и основатель/
главный редактор медиа-издания The Insider , которое фокусируется на России и
ранее базировалось в этой стране. Г-ну Доброхотову пришлось бежать из России,
поскольку его арестовали, а затем лишили паспорта.  
Операция по слежке за г-ном Доброхотовым была проведена Русевым,
Джамбазовым и Ивановой. Наблюдение включало слежение за ним по всей
Европе, Иванова сидела рядом с ним на одном рейсе из Будапешта в Берлин.
Также обсуждался план похищения, но сообщения показали, что это было сочтено
слишком опасным. 
Операция 3
Бывший казахстанский политик Бергей Рыскалиев подвергся преследованию в
ноябре 2021 года, поскольку он попросил убежища в Соединенном Королевстве.  
Операция по слежке за г-ном Рыскалиевым была проведена Русевым,
Джамбазовым, Стояновым и Габеровой. Наблюдение включало в себя наблюдение
за местами, предположительно связанными с г-ном Рыскалиевым, и изучение
путей доступа к этим адресам. Стоянов был снят на видео двумя помощниками г-
на Рыскалиева, когда он вел наблюдение в припаркованной машине возле

29. резиденции г-на Рыскалиева в Лондоне. Когда они бросили ему вызов, он
предоставил историю о работе в близлежащей больнице, позже подтвердив эту
ложь, показав знак NHS в своей машине.   

30. Операция 4 
Группа также планировала подрывную деятельность в посольстве Казахстана в
сентябре 2022 года, включая распыление большого количества поддельной
свиной крови по зданию. План состоял в том, чтобы создать ложную
оппозиционную группу и провести демонстрацию возле посольства, прежде чем
передать «разведданные» о группе казахстанским разведывательным службам
через их российских коллег.  
Целью операции было повышение авторитета их российских клиентов в глазах
казахов, на благо России. Операцию провели Русев, Джамбазов, Стоянов и
Иванова. 
Операция 5 
Наблюдение за военной базой США в Штутгарте велось с конца 2022 года до
момента ареста группы в феврале 2023 года. Группа считала, что на этой базе
украинские войска проходили подготовку по применению зенитно-ракетного
оружия, которое Украина использовала для противодействия российскому
вторжению в эту страну.  
План состоял в том, чтобы атаковать базу, используя ряд сложных технологий,
разработанных для сбора ключевой разведывательной информации о тех, кто
присутствовал на базе, которую затем можно было бы использовать для
обнаружения украинских военнослужащих, когда они вернутся в свою страну.
Операция была проведена Русевым, Джамбазовым и Ивановой. С устройств были
извлечены изображения и видео наблюдения базы вместе с общими описаниями
безопасности на базе. Автомобиль, который был извлечен, был приспособлен для
размещения и развертывания технических устройств наблюдения за пределами
базы. 

31. Операция 6 
Кирилл Качур находился под прицелом с сентября
2021 по 2022 год. Г-н Качур — россиянин, который
провел некоторое время в Черногории в конце 2021 и
2022 годах. Он работал в Следственном комитете
России, но покинул страну в 2021 году и был заочно
обвинен Россией в хищении в ноябре 2022 года, что
делает его очевидным источником интереса для
России.  
Операция проводилась каждым членом группы. Был
составлен отчет о наблюдении с использованием
беспилотников и обсужден план похищения. Операция
включала аренду виллы недалеко от
местонахождения г-на Качура за 5000 евро в месяц и
прямую связь членов группы с сотрудниками
российской разведки на месте.  Построение дела: как доказать шпионаж?
Обвинение основывалось на большом количестве доказательств, включая
обширную переписку в Telegram; доказательства поездок; финансовые
доказательства; и многочисленные технические предметы, найденные по их
домашним адресам после ареста. Последнее включало обширную коллекцию
скрытых устройств наблюдения, спрятанных в повседневных предметах, таких как
поддельные бутылки с водой, камни, детские игрушки, зажигалки и ключи от
машины, а также несколько пар очков, способных записывать как аудио-, так и
визуальные кадры. Использование которых было доказано в ходе операций.  
The ability of the group to rely on technology is important as none of them could have
been in any doubt that they were engaged in serious espionage activity. They did not
simply follow people around in the hope of finding out something useful. They conducted
targeted, organised activity using sophisticated methodology.  
It was clear that the activity was for the benefit of Russia, not just from the choice of
targets but also from the nature of the Telegram messages that were exchanged
between members of the group. Discussions included:  
The facilitation of obtaining military equipment on behalf of Russia.  
The provision of espionage tools /data (digital devices, software, and manuals to assist
with hacking/communication interception).  
Arranging physical surveillance and hostile activity against targets of the Russian
state. 
Frequent references were also made to the FSB (Federal Security Service of Russia),
the GRU (Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia), and
President Putin.  
In order to be guilty of this offending, the defendants did not have to share a pro-Russian
ideology, or support Vladamir Putin.  
They simply had to join an agreement to obtain or communicate information, intending
that the information that was obtained or communicated would be directly or indirectly
useful to Russia. It was agreed that objectively, their actions were, or would have been,
prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom.

32. “This was a high-level espionage
operation with significant financial rewards for those involved
in the spy ring.
Frank Ferguson, Head of the CPS Special Crime and Counter
Terrorism Division, said:
“The group acted together, under the leadership of Orlin Roussev, to spy on prominent
individuals and locations on behalf of Russia using sophisticated methods.  
“The police raid on Roussev’s home revealed a spy factory, with a wide-ranging degree of
gadgets and technology with one clear purpose – to obtain information.
“By targeting individuals in the UK fleeing persecution as well as journalists opposing the
Russian regime, the group undermined the message that the UK is a safe country for
those people.
“This prolonged activity also undermined the security and safety of the UK; and there
can be no doubt that each of the defendants knew exactly who they were spying for.
“The Crown Prosecution Service worked very closely with the Metropolitan Police’s
Counter Terrorism Command in building this case and these convictions send a very
clear message that this type of offending will not be tolerated on UK soil.”
“The Crown Prosecution Service worked very
closely with the Metropolitan Police’s Counter
Terrorism Command in building this case and
these convictions send a very clear message that
this type of offending will not be tolerated on UK
soil.”
- Frank Ferguson - Edit article
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They Are Much Better Than Your
Chief Compliance Officer
Vladislav Solodkiy
March 27, 2024
Nansen.ID l Founder & ex-CEO @ ArivalBank.com, a.id,
SREDA.VC l Early investor in 5 digital banks
The CIA has announced a new strategy for working with open-source
information, aiming to expand and enhance the collection and analysis of
data amidst the ever-growing information stream. The document,
presented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
and the CIA, discusses the development of methods for collecting,
creating, and delivering intelligence from open sources (OSINT) until 2026.
Special attention is given to the potential of artificial intelligence and
machine learning in improving the processing of open data, as well as the
risks associated with verifying the authenticity and reliability of
information.
As part of the strategy, ODNI has enlisted leading cybersecurity
expert Jason Barrett to implement key directions. His task is to integrate
innovations into OSINT work based on the CIA's experience in this field over
the last year. The CIA has also developed AI technology, similar to
ChatGPT, for selecting relevant information from the vast amount of
available data. This new tool automates the OSINT processing workflow,
highlighting key data for analysis. Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the
U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, emphasized the importance of such
tools, noting that the traditional view of prioritizing covert information
collection is giving way to the recognition of the importance and
effectiveness of using open data.
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) involves searching and analyzing
public information to ultimately gain new knowledge. Essentially, OSINT
investigators primarily work with data that has already been published by
someone at some point. States and corporations possess a vast amount
of information, part of which can be found online or obtained upon
request. However, the path to this data often lies through websites that are
invisible to search engines, through cumbersome databases, little-known
archives, and clunky interfaces. The investigator's skill lies in finding
information, analyzing it, and making it understandable to a broad
audience.
Home My Network Jobs MessagingNotifications Me For Business
1 26 1
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33. OSINT emerged in the 20th century as a military technology. One of the
first entities specialized in such investigations was the Research and
Analysis Branch of the American Office of Strategic Services, the precursor
to the CIA. Today, open-source data intelligence methods are used by
intelligence and government employees, as well as professional
investigators and journalists.
OSINT primarily involves working with open data, but investigative teams
sometimes use non-public sources. For instance, the investigations into the
poisonings of Alexey Navalny or Sergei and Yulia Skripal are based on
mobile operators' billing data (information about incoming and outgoing
calls, SMS, internet traffic), passenger lists of trains and airplanes, leaked
databases of commercial companies, and other data. Such information
can be purchased on Telegram channels or in the darknet.
High-Risk Compliance for BaaS and
Correspondent Banks
Starting from January 1st, FinCEN introduced a new
regulation, AMLA, which requires banks to conduct
KYCC, which affects correspondent and BaaS bank…
linkedin.com
Other open services used by OSINT investigators can be divided into
groups:
Maps and satellite images, not only the popular Google or Yandex
but also Bing and OpenStreetMap (OSM). The latter operates on a
Wikipedia-like principle — users can add and mark objects on the
map themselves. For OSM, there's also the Overpass-turbo app,
allowing for the download of coordinates for specific objects on the
map, like all stores of a certain retail chain or all drinking water
fountains in a city.
Services that allow searching by photo, known not only to
investigators but also to ordinary people. You upload a photo of a
person, and the site shows you their social media page, and
sometimes even friends they preferred to hide. Many of these
platforms are paid but have limited free functionality, such as
PimEyes or Search4Faces. There are also services providing
information by phone number or car license plate.
Commercial company registries reveal the company's founding date,
authorized capital, legal address, and people associated with it.
Vehicle movement services. The popular site Flightradar collects
flight numbers, information about the starting and ending points of
routes, registration number, country of registration, and other data
about all flights. Similar services exist for tracking sea vessels.
Services for searching removed information. Resources like
WaybackMachine allow you to find and view old versions of websites
— in case they have stopped working or their data has been removed.
Metadata analysis systems can extract information from files of
various formats about the date, time, and device that created a
specific document. Or collect information about entire websites —
when and by whom a domain was registered and which other
domains are associated with that site. Services like who.is and
Domain Tools allow for this.
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of bank accounts and obtaining vis…
The European Parliament adopted a resolution in
connection with the murder of Alexey Navalny. It
openly questions the legitimacy of Vladimir Putin as…
linkedin.com
For example, In "OSINT Techniques for Sensitive Documents That Have
Escaped Into The Clear Web," Christina Lekati highlights a common
vulnerability among organizations: sensitive documents inadvertently
exposed online. Lekati notes that participants frequently discover
documents posing significant risks to their organizations on the clear web,
often due to employee errors or oversight. She emphasizes the importance
of proactive searches to identify and manage these documents before
they're exploited by threat actors. The article offers a tutorial on advanced
search queries, using special characters and operators to refine searches
for specific documents related to an organization. Lekati provides practical
advice on how to use Google Dorking, a technique that utilizes special
search strings to find sensitive information efficiently. Highlighting the
potential goldmine of information that documents like contracts, internal
processes, and admin credentials can represent, she warns of the exposure
risk to competitors, the media, and other entities. To combat this, Lekati
suggests several ready-to-use search queries involving operators that
focus on finding specific file types, such as PDFs, PowerPoints, and Excel
files. She encourages creativity in conducting OSINT checks and
underscores the ease of mitigating such risks by eliminating or managing
the exposure of sensitive documents. She advocates for OSINT as a
defensive discipline, crucial for organizations to act proactively against
potential security breaches.
Compliance Demystified: A
Beginner’s Guide
In today’s fast-paced digital world, where every
transaction leaves a digital footprint, the importance
of compliance can’t be overstated…
Medium
In 2015, 13-year-old Justin created a Twitter account under the nickname
Intel Crab and invented a fake persona of a teenager from Donetsk. He
collected videos, photographs, and quotes from people in the war-torn
Donbas to post on his account. When Justin realized he had become
popular—with thousands of followers—he stopped pretending to be a boy
from Donetsk.
Justin decided to take a more serious approach. He began analyzing and
verifying the information he gathered, as well as recreating context with
additional tools like plane tracking services and satellite images. Now 20
years old, Justin regularly finds photos and videos from event locations,
opens maps, and checks whether the specified geolocation matches what
is visible in the images. He publishes his findings, for example, tracking
changes in the amount of equipment at Russian military bases using
satellite images, and monitored photos posted by Kadyrovites in
Zaporizhzhia on VKontakte and Telegram, publishing their locations.
Justin now has nearly 309,000 followers. This year, he is graduating from
the University of Alabama and saving money to go to Ukraine to see the
country not just on a monitor screen.
Perhaps the most famous open-source investigation team is
Bellingcat. Its founder, Elliot Higgins, has been writing about the use of
banned weapons and violations of humanitarian law in Syria since 2012
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34. on the Brown Moses Blog. In 2014, he assembled a team and began
investigating war crimes in Ukraine.
One of Bellingcat's most notable works is the investigation of the downing
of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in Donetsk Oblast in July 2014.
Journalists established that the missile that downed the plane was
Russian and launched from territory controlled by Russian authorities.
Using photos and videos by eyewitnesses who captured the Buk missile
system in various locations, investigators tracked its movement from
Russia to Ukraine. They reconstructed its route thanks to a cargo platform
photographed in various places in Russia and Ukraine. Initially, the
platform carrying the system had four Buk missiles, but the day after the
plane's downing, only three were visible, and it was headed back towards
Russia. Even the shadows cast by objects in photos and videos were
important – using the SunСalc program, journalists calculated the
approximate time of filming. Another significant detail was the smoke trail
left by the missile. Using it, Bellingcat identified the missile's launch site on
satellite images and eyewitness recordings.
The MH17 case brought popularity to both Bellingcat and the OSINT
method itself. Media began to reference data from investigative teams
more frequently, and some newsrooms established their own data and
OSINT departments. The spread of the internet allowed OSINT methods to
extend beyond military intelligence and the professional community of
investigators, becoming a new form of digital activism.
Artificial intelligence could prevent errors and inaccuracies caused by the
human factor. OSINT blogs constantly write that potentially AI could be
delegated several tasks at once, such as determining the location of a shot
or distinguishing between tanks and IFVs in satellite images. However,
current software still struggles with this task. The military uses more
advanced AI developments: their algorithms can recognize enemy troops in
satellite images, predict the course of hypersonic missiles, and even
autonomously attack enemy targets. (Read about how artificial
intelligence learned to wage war.)
However, investigators can indeed have an impact on the world.
The results of work based on open data are sometimes considered by
courts. In 2018, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC)
issued an arrest warrant for Libyan General Mahmoud Werfalli, who carried
out public executions. The ICC based its evidence on the analysis and
geolocations done by the Bellingcat team. The Hague Court, which
considered the case of the MH17 crash in Ukraine, also cited materials
from Bellingcat investigations. The International Investigative Group on
War Crimes in Ukraine, initiated by Eurojust, requested materials from a
joint investigation by "Important Stories", OCCRP, and Der Spiegel on the
supply of microelectronics and drones to Russia bypassing sanctions.
However, investigators want their findings to be used more actively. The
Conflict Intelligence Team is currently working with other investigative
projects to propose amendments to the legislation of EU and US countries.
Investigators want their conclusions to have greater value in crime
investigations. Only those who are inconvenienced by these investigations
express outright distrust of OSINT researchers' materials.
The barrier to entry in OSINT is low—only internet access and free time are
needed. No special education is required—there is no university or training
program to graduate from and receive a diploma as an OSINT investigator
(although private courses are available). Investigators themselves say
that the main qualities needed for this work are patience and attentiveness.
"90% of the time, we sift through a huge amount of material, photos, and
videos. It's very tedious and hard work," says Ruslan Leviev in an interview
with Kit.
If you're already engaged in cyber investigations or want to gain
knowledge in this field, I recommend applying for the GIJN's free online
course (I've already applied). The GIJN course topics include: Basics of
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Websites and Infrastructure, Investigating Disinformation and Trolling,
Network Analysis. Instructors: Craig Silverman , ProPublica reporter; Jane
Lytvynenko , independent journalist (Guardian, BuzzFeed News, Joan
Shorenstein Center at Harvard); Etienne "tek" Maynier, Amnesty Tech Lab
staff; Luis Assardo , Reporters Without Borders staff and independent
researcher. The course starts on April 29 and will run every Monday and
Thursday for 6 weeks.
The Regulator doesn’t care about the
‘Truth’: there is no perfect KYC
Compliance is mistakenly perceived as a good/bad
person proof
Medium
We review and practice other popular OSINT tools:
Maigret is an innovative tool designed for data analysis from various
social platforms. It offers extensive capabilities for information
gathering, user activity analysis, connection finding, and other
functions. This tool has flexible settings for data collection and
analysis, allowing you to choose social networks and save results
into files. Maigret supports over 3000 sites for username searches.
An excellent tool for username searches, it's maximally simple to
install and equally easy to use.
Mr.Holmes is a project aimed at gathering information from open
sources about social networks, phone numbers, domains, and IP
addresses using Google Dorks. Plus, it can be installed on Linux as
well as Termux with Windows. The tool has a very nice feature of
maintaining a local database.
Holehe is a powerful tool for detecting registered accounts by email.
Holehe checks for email attachment to accounts on various
platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Imgur, and over 120 other
sites. Our tool is very simple to install and use.
Ghunt is a powerful and versatile OSINT tool designed for gathering
information about users through their Gmail addresses. It provides
access to the owner's name, identifiers, active Google services such
as YouTube, Photos, Maps, and others. You can also get information
about possible locations, Google documents, scheduled meetings in
the calendar, and much more.
H8Mail is a tool that scans the specified email inbox in its databases
and provides a set of possible passwords. With its help, you can gain
access not only to the email but also to all other accounts if the user
reuses the same passwords. This is a very decent tool for checking
against databases of various conditionally free services to search for
leaked email passwords.
DarkGPT offers advanced capabilities for working with leaked
databases, significantly differing from previous tools based on
ChatGPT, such as OSINVGPT, PentestGPT, and others. The Spanish
pentester known as "luijait" recently introduced to the global
community a novelty in the field of OSINT - the DarkGPT tool, which
utilizes the power of GPT-4-200K for precise data leak analysis.
Based on the latest advancements in artificial intelligence, it not only
provides users with access to information but also tools for its
analysis. DarkGPT stands out among its competitors due to the
integration with GPT-4-200K, allowing for advanced data processing.
The tool ensures secure access to leaked databases. Its interface,
implemented through the command line, makes the tool accessible
even for beginners in OSINT. The ease of use and intuitive interface
significantly simplify the data collection and analysis process.
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35. Navalny's Utopia for Realists
"The fight should not be solely against the fact that
Russia is unfree, but that it is unhappy in all aspects.
We have everything - yet we are an unhappy country.
linkedin.com
OSINT Skills Made Alexey Navalny and His Team Popular
It was the skills in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that helped Alexey
Navalny and his team gain popularity. Most of their anti-corruption
investigations are based on open data. One of their most striking
investigations, "He Is Not Dimon to You," has garnered 46 million views. It
details how friends, classmates, and trusted persons of Dmitry Medvedev
own non-profit organizations that receive generous donations from
oligarchs and state loans. The investigation triggered protests across
Russia, and online shopping orders helped prove the connection between
Medvedev and the man registered as the owner of his non-profit
organizations. Shirts and sneakers ordered under the name and address of
the formal owner eventually ended up with Medvedev, who appeared in
them publicly without issue.
Their investigations have often put them at odds with powerful state
actors, leading to legal challenges and personal risks. The work of Grozev,
Shmagun, and Dobrokhotov exemplifies the critical role of investigative
journalism in uncovering truth and holding the powerful to account. And
regarding compliance, KYC, and AML - I would recommend regulators,
banks, and fintechs to learn from them (as the CIA does), rather than from
conferences and office research by major consulting firms.
Christo Grozev , Olesya Shmagun , and Roman Dobrokhotov are well-
known investigative journalists and researchers renowned for their work
in exposing various illicit activities, money laundering and government
malfeasance, often involving high-profile cases and sensitive political
matters.
Christo Grozev is known for his association with Bellingcat, an
international collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists
that uses open-source and social media investigation. Grozev has been
instrumental in investigations into the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and
Alexei Navalny, the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, and other
notable cases involving Russia.
Like Grozev, Olesya Shmagun has contributed to uncovering corrupt
practices and AML. Her work, much like that of her peers, involves
meticulous research and the use of open-source intelligence (OSINT)
techniques.
Roman Dobrokhotov is the editor-in-chief of The Insider, known for his
involvement in major investigative efforts alongside Bellingcat.
Dobrokhotov has faced significant legal and political pressure within
Russia, including police raids and being targeted by defamation lawsuits,
as a result of his investigative work. His efforts have contributed to
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various international incidents.
Roman Dobrokhotov (read the full article on Wired) has become a notable
figure in exposing the clandestine operations of Moscow's GRU military
intelligence agency. Dobrokhotov's journey from a protester challenging
Kremlin narratives to a fearless investigative journalist is marked by his
crucial role in uncovering the identities and activities of Russia's most
covert military spies and assassins, including their involvement in high-
profile cases like the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal with a
nerve agent. Dobrokhotov's work not only exemplifies journalistic bravery
but also underscores the vital importance of independent OSINT-media in
challenging state-sponsored narratives and uncovering the truth via ‘follow
the money’ approach.
Recently, Grozev, who won an Oscar for the documentary film about
Navalny, has been focused (together with Dobrokhotov) on investigating
the activities of Jan Marsalek from Wirecard and is preparing a
documentary film about him. Following the unexpected death of Navalny,
Christo has temporarily concentrated, along with other independent
investigators, on collecting and analyzing data related to the death of the
opposition figure, known for his investigations into corruption and money
laundering, and those involved in it.
A most wanted man: Fugitive
Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek…
Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek wasn’t just
responsible for Germany’s largest financial fraud in
history. He was also a decade-long Russian spy.
The Insider
Hristo Grozev is a Bulgarian investigative journalist, media expert, and
media investor, leading investigator at The Insider, previously worked with
Bellingcat. He is one of the main authors of the investigation into the
involvement of FSB Russia employees in the poisoning of Alexey Navalny.
Winner of the European Press Prize and the Emmy Award for his
investigative journalism. Around 2014, he started investigative journalism
with Bellingcat: "I'm doing something I'm good at, finding things others
miss, using my knowledge of Russia, the neighboring countries, including
Ukraine, working with people in these countries, and being concerned about
their governments (both in Russia and Ukraine) deceiving citizens. I do this
voluntarily, spending my own funds on investigations."
In 2019, Grozev (together with Roman Dobrokhotov and Daniel Romein)
was awarded the European Press Prize for Investigative Journalism &
London Press Club Prize for Digital Journalism. In 2021, Bellingcat and
CNN received an Emmy Award in the category of "Outstanding
Investigative Report in News" for Hristo Grozev's investigation. They also
made reports against NATO, which was illegally selling weapons to Saudi
Arabia for the civil war in Yemen, did analysis of Turkish and Greek crimes
during the migrant crisis. Grozev was accused of organizing the escape
abroad of journalist Roman Dobrokhotov.
Grozev lived in Vienna for 20 years until 2023, where he was under police
protection due to his exposes about Russia. In February 2023, he stated
that he moved to the USA after Austrian authorities told him they could no
longer guarantee his safety. In August 2020, Grozev stated in an interview
with Deutsche Welle that the poisoning of Alexey Navalny was similar to
the attempts on Emelyan Gebrev and Sergei Skripal, in which Russian
special services are suspected.
Responding to a question about informants, Grozev said: "We work only
with sources who understand the risk they are taking." He also denied any
connection with the CIA, noting that Western intelligence had not even
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36. reached the information published by independent journalists. Grozev has
bet on crowdsourcing: now anyone can join the work of investigative
journalists, comparing data from flight tables with information about the
time and place of high-profile poisonings and strange deaths. Several
matches were immediately found.
From Dissident to Detective: On the
Way to ShmagunGPT
OSINT Skills Made Alexey Navalny and His Team
Popular
Medium
Olesya Shmagun (Princeton University , previously graduated from the
Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University in 2012, continued her
studies in graduate school) - Pulitzer Prize winner for the investigation of
the Panama Papers, co-founder of the publication "Important Stories",
employee of the Center for the Study of Corruption and Organized Crime
(OCCRP), four-time winner of the monthly journalism prize "Redkollegiya".
In April 2017, as part of the International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists along with 300 other journalists, received the Pulitzer Prize in
the category for explanatory journalism for the investigation into the
"Panama archive". In 2023, she graduated from the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, earning a
master's degree in public policy.
Recently, Olesya and I were chatting about Nansen.ID and… ShmagunGPT,
and I really think a tool for Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD), inspired by
Olesya’s investigative magic, is exactly what we need, especially in the
worlds of banking and fintech. I threw an idea at Olesya about creating a
digital identity solution for opposition figures or maybe even a digital bank
for those in exile... With Olesya’s incredible knack for digging into money
laundering schemes, imagine digitizing her expertise to become a nemesis
for money launderers everywhere with something like ShmaGUNGPT.
I dream of Nansen.ID as a business with a heart, channeling profits into
the hands-on investigative work of journalists like Olesya, Christo, and
Roman. Their investigative work provides insanely useful data for
compliance in banks and fintechs—at the very least.
From a regulator's perspective, KYC is less about knowing your customer
and more about understanding where their money's from, how they got it,
and where it's headed. I've been around the block with bank compliance,
and Olesya’s battled against the baddies, uncovering corruption and
laundering schemes. We're basically enriching traditional data with fresh,
unconventional insights. Plus, imagine if we built a backend sort of like
ShmagunGPT, training a neural network based on Olesya’s investigative
methods. It’d be like an automated sidekick for other investigators and
compliance officers.
Filling out the same personal info over and over for every new bank
account, insurance policy, mobile plan, flight, hotel stay, apartment lease,
and more—isn’t it exhausting? That's where the last bit about
"convenience" comes in (i.e., no need to re-answer if you’ve already
addressed a question; digital ID will auto-fill the existing answer). That's for
the end users.
For banks and other entities, it’s crucial to grasp that the slickest KYC
process at onboarding won’t shield you from fraud and scammers: only
20% get caught at the get-go, while the other 80% are nabbed based on
their transactions later on. To catch these guys later, you need to "cast a
net" at onboarding so that any anomalies in behavior can be spotted more
swiftly, allowing a quick rewind to pinpoint accomplices. The real slick
criminals layer their operations with legit transactions by innocent folks—
no system will red-flag them at onboarding. But setting up the system to
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doable.
Banks, fintechs, and insurers pay for this. But who really benefits? End
users!, especially those who’ve been denied accounts or visas. It’s a boon
for the whole regulatory ecosystem, from visa centers and telecoms to
hotels and airlines, even extending to online election services. In essence,
it’s a trade-off:
1, I get that my nationality (or additionally, my industry affiliation) blocks
me from certain benefits and creates hurdles I’d rather not have; I want to
enjoy those benefits.
2, I know you don’t see me as the bad guy; you’re just covering your bases
because you can’t tell us apart. So, my "payment" is becoming more open
and transparent with you.
3, You accept this "payment," allowing you a closer look into my life, with
the agreement that if someone linked to me steps out of line, they get cut
off from the network of benefits.
It’s a way of saying, “I’m cool, let me in,” while also ensuring everyone plays
by the rules. As in Ancient Greece: exile from the polis ("collective
responsibility" in action) as the main possible “punishment”.
Compliance crowdsourcing (and
crowdfunding)
Investigations like the Panama Papers increasingly
show that successful investigations against
corruption and money laundering are carried out by…
nansen.id
Comments
21· 4 comments·1 repost
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37. From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to
ShmagunGPT
Slava Solodkiy·Follow
16 min read·Mar 27, 2024
Listen Share
OSINT Skills Made Alexey Navalny and His Team Popular
It was the skills in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that helped Alexey Navalny and
his team gain popularity. Most of his AML and anti-corruption investigations were
based on open data. One of their most striking investigations, “He Is Not Dimon to
You,” has garnered 46 million views. It details how friends, classmates, and trusted
persons of Dmitry Medvedev own non-profit organizations that receive generous
donations from oligarchs and state loans. The investigation triggered protests across
Russia, and online shopping orders helped prove the connection between Medvedev
and the man registered as the owner of his non-profit organizations. Shirts and
sneakers ordered under the name and address of the formal owner eventually
ended up with Medvedev, who appeared in them publicly without issue.
EU on easing the opening of bank accounts for anti-Putins
EU lawmakers on easing the opening of bank accounts and
obtaining visas for Russian opposition
medium.com
Their investigations have often put them at odds with powerful state actors, leading
to legal challenges and personal risks. The work of Grozev, Shmagun, and
Dobrokhotov exemplifies the critical role of investigative journalism in uncovering
truth and holding the powerful to account. And regarding compliance, KYC, and
Open in app Sign up Sign in
Search
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 1/22 AML — I would recommend regulators, banks, and fintechs to learn from them (as
the CIA does), rather than from conferences and office research by major
consulting firms.
Christo Grozev, Olesya Shmagun, and Roman Dobrokhotov are well-known
investigative journalists and researchers renowned for their work in exposing
various illicit activities, money laundering and government malfeasance, often
involving high-profile cases and sensitive political matters.
Christo Grozev is known for his association with Bellingcat, an international
collective of researchers, investigators, and citizen journalists that uses open-source
and social media investigation. Grozev has been instrumental in investigations into
the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny, the downing of Malaysian
Airlines flight MH17, and other notable cases involving Russia.
Like Grozev, Olesya Shmagun has contributed to uncovering corrupt practices and
AML. Her work, much like that of her peers, involves meticulous research and the
use of open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques.
Roman Dobrokhotov is the editor-in-chief of The Insider, known for his involvement
in major investigative efforts alongside Bellingcat. Dobrokhotov has faced
significant legal and political pressure within Russia, including police raids and
being targeted by defamation lawsuits, as a result of his investigative work. His
efforts have contributed to revealing the actions of Russian intelligence and military
services in various international incidents.
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 2/22

38. Roman Dobrokhotov (read the full article on Wired) has become a notable figure in
exposing the clandestine operations of Moscow’s GRU military intelligence agency.
Dobrokhotov’s journey from a protester challenging Kremlin narratives to a fearless
investigative journalist is marked by his crucial role in uncovering the identities and
activities of Russia’s most covert military spies and assassins, including their
involvement in high-profile cases like the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal
with a nerve agent. Dobrokhotov’s work not only exemplifies journalistic bravery
but also underscores the vital importance of independent OSINT-media in
challenging state-sponsored narratives and uncovering the truth via ‘follow the
money’ approach.
Recently, Grozev, who won an Oscar for the documentary film about Navalny, has
been focused (together with Dobrokhotov) on investigating the activities of Jan
Marsalek from Wirecard and is preparing a documentary film about him. Following
the unexpected death of Navalny, Christo has temporarily concentrated, along with
other independent investigators, on collecting and analyzing data related to the
death of the opposition figure, known for his investigations into corruption and
money laundering, and those involved in it.
A most wanted man: Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed
as decade-long GRU spy
Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek wasn't just responsible for
Germany's largest financial fraud in history. He was…
theins.ru
Hristo Grozev is a Bulgarian investigative journalist, media expert, and media
investor, leading investigator at The Insider, previously worked with Bellingcat. He
is one of the main authors of the investigation into the involvement of FSB Russia
employees in the poisoning of Alexey Navalny. Winner of the European Press Prize
and the Emmy Award for his investigative journalism. Around 2014, he started
investigative journalism with Bellingcat: “I’m doing something I’m good at, finding
things others miss, using my knowledge of Russia, the neighboring countries,
including Ukraine, working with people in these countries, and being concerned
about their governments (both in Russia and Ukraine) deceiving citizens. I do this
voluntarily, spending my own funds on investigations.”
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 3/22 In 2019, Grozev (together with Roman Dobrokhotov and Daniel Romein) was
awarded the European Press Prize for Investigative Journalism & London Press Club
Prize for Digital Journalism. In 2021, Bellingcat and CNN received an Emmy Award
in the category of “Outstanding Investigative Report in News” for Hristo Grozev’s
investigation. They also made reports against NATO, which was illegally selling
weapons to Saudi Arabia for the civil war in Yemen, did analysis of Turkish and
Greek crimes during the migrant crisis. Grozev was accused of organizing the
escape abroad of journalist Roman Dobrokhotov.
Grozev lived in Vienna for 20 years until 2023, where he was under police protection
due to his exposes about Russia. In February 2023, he stated that he moved to the
USA after Austrian authorities told him they could no longer guarantee his safety. In
August 2020, Grozev stated in an interview with Deutsche Welle that the poisoning
of Alexey Navalny was similar to the attempts on Emelyan Gebrev and Sergei
Skripal, in which Russian special services are suspected.
Responding to a question about informants, Grozev said: “We work only with
sources who understand the risk they are taking.” He also denied any connection
with the CIA, noting that Western intelligence had not even reached the information
published by independent journalists. Grozev has bet on crowdsourcing: now
anyone can join the work of investigative journalists, comparing data from flight
tables with information about the time and place of high-profile poisonings and
strange deaths. Several matches were immediately found.
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 4/22

39. Olesya Shmagun (Princeton, previously graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at
Moscow State University in 2012, continued her studies in graduate school) —
Pulitzer Prize winner for the investigation of the Panama Papers, co-founder of the
publication “Important Stories”, employee of the Center for the Study of Corruption
and Organized Crime (OCCRP), four-time winner of the monthly journalism prize
“Redkollegiya”. In April 2017, as part of the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists along with 300 other journalists, received the Pulitzer Prize
in the category for explanatory journalism for the investigation into the “Panama
archive”. In 2023, she graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs at Princeton University, earning a master’s degree in public
policy.
Recently, Olesya and I were chatting about Nansen.ID and… ShmagunGPT, and I
really think a tool for Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD), inspired by Olesya’s
investigative magic, is exactly what we need, especially in the worlds of banking and
fintech. I threw an idea at Olesya about creating a digital identity solution for
opposition figures or maybe even a digital bank for those in exile… With Olesya’s
incredible knack for digging into money laundering schemes, imagine digitizing her
expertise to become a nemesis for money launderers everywhere with something
like ShmagunGPT.
Nansen ID
NANSEN.ID is a digital identity solution designed for opposition
members and political emigrants from sanctioned…
www.nansen.id
I dream of Nansen.ID as a business with a heart, channeling profits into the hands-
on investigative work of journalists like Olesya, Christo, and Roman. Their
investigative work provides insanely useful data for compliance in banks and
fintechs — at the very least.
From a regulator’s perspective, KYC is less about knowing your customer and more
about understanding where their money’s from, how they got it, and where it’s
headed. I’ve been around the block with bank compliance, and Olesya’s battled
against the baddies, uncovering corruption and laundering schemes. We’re basically
enriching traditional data with fresh, unconventional insights. Plus, imagine if we
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 5/22 built a backend sort of like ShmagunGPT, training a neural network based on
Olesya’s investigative methods. It’d be like an automated sidekick for other
investigators and compliance officers.
Filling out the same personal info over and over for every new bank account,
insurance policy, mobile plan, flight, hotel stay, apartment lease, and more — isn’t it
exhausting? That’s where the last bit about “convenience” comes in (i.e., no need to
re-answer if you’ve already addressed a question; digital ID will auto-fill the existing
answer). That’s for the end users.
For banks and other entities, it’s crucial to grasp that the slickest KYC process at
onboarding won’t shield you from fraud and scammers: only 20% get caught at the
get-go, while the other 80% are nabbed based on their transactions later on. To
catch these guys later, you need to “cast a net” at onboarding so that any anomalies
in behavior can be spotted more swiftly, allowing a quick rewind to pinpoint
accomplices. The real slick criminals layer their operations with legit transactions
by innocent folks — no system will red-flag them at onboarding. But setting up the
system to notice oddities sooner or swiftly backtrack to find connections? Totally
doable.
They Are Much Better Thank Your Chief Compliance Officer
The CIA has announced a new strategy for working with open-source
information, aiming to expand and enhance the…
www.linkedin.com
Banks, fintechs, and insurers pay for this. But who really benefits? End users!,
especially those who’ve been denied accounts or visas. It’s a boon for the whole
regulatory ecosystem, from visa centers and telecoms to hotels and airlines, even
extending to online election services. In essence, it’s a trade-off:
1, I get that my nationality (or additionally, my industry affiliation) blocks me from
certain benefits and creates hurdles I’d rather not have; I want to enjoy those
benefits.
2, I know you don’t see me as the bad guy; you’re just covering your bases because
you can’t tell us apart. So, my “payment” is becoming more open and transparent
with you.
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 6/22

40. 3, You accept this “payment,” allowing you a closer look into my life, with the
agreement that if someone linked to me steps out of line, they get cut off from the
network of benefits.
It’s a way of saying, “I’m cool, let me in,” while also ensuring everyone plays by the
rules. As in Ancient Greece: exile from the polis (“collective responsibility” in
action) as the main possible “punishment”.
Compliance Demystified: A Beginner’s Guide
In today’s fast-paced digital world, where every transaction leaves a
digital footprint, the importance of compliance…
medium.com
The CIA has announced a new strategy for working with open-source information,
aiming to expand and enhance the collection and analysis of data amidst the ever-
growing information stream. The document, presented by the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the CIA, discusses the development of methods
for collecting, creating, and delivering intelligence from open sources (OSINT) until
2026. Special attention is given to the potential of artificial intelligence and machine
learning in improving the processing of open data, as well as the risks associated
with verifying the authenticity and reliability of information.
As part of the strategy, ODNI has enlisted leading cybersecurity expert Jason Barrett
to implement key directions. His task is to integrate innovations into OSINT work
based on the CIA’s experience in this field over the last year. The CIA has also
developed AI technology, similar to ChatGPT, for selecting relevant information
from the vast amount of available data. This new tool automates the OSINT
processing workflow, highlighting key data for analysis. Senator Mark Warner, the
chair of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, emphasized the importance of such
tools, noting that the traditional view of prioritizing covert information collection is
giving way to the recognition of the importance and effectiveness of using open
data.
The Regulator doesn’t care about the ‘Truth’: there is no perfect
KYC
Compliance is mistakenly perceived as a good/bad person proof
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 7/22 medium.com
Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) involves searching and analyzing public
information to ultimately gain new knowledge. Essentially, OSINT investigators
primarily work with data that has already been published by someone at some
point. States and corporations possess a vast amount of information, part of which
can be found online or obtained upon request. However, the path to this data often
lies through websites that are invisible to search engines, through cumbersome
databases, little-known archives, and clunky interfaces. The investigator’s skill lies
in finding information, analyzing it, and making it understandable to a broad
audience.
OSINT emerged in the 20th century as a military technology. One of the first entities
specialized in such investigations was the Research and Analysis Branch of the
American Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. Today, open-source
data intelligence methods are used by intelligence and government employees, as
well as professional investigators and journalists.
OSINT primarily involves working with open data, but investigative teams
sometimes use non-public sources. For instance, the investigations into the
poisonings of Alexey Navalny or Sergei and Yulia Skripal are based on mobile
operators’ billing data (information about incoming and outgoing calls, SMS,
internet traffic), passenger lists of trains and airplanes, leaked databases of
commercial companies, and other data. Such information can be purchased on
Telegram channels or in the darknet.
Other open services used by OSINT investigators can be divided into groups:
Maps and satellite images, not only the popular Google or Yandex but also Bing
and OpenStreetMap (OSM). The latter operates on a Wikipedia-like principle —
users can add and mark objects on the map themselves. For OSM, there’s also
the Overpass-turbo app, allowing for the download of coordinates for specific
objects on the map, like all stores of a certain retail chain or all drinking water
fountains in a city.
Services that allow searching by photo, known not only to investigators but also
to ordinary people. You upload a photo of a person, and the site shows you their
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 8/22

41. social media page, and sometimes even friends they preferred to hide. Many of
these platforms are paid but have limited free functionality, such as PimEyes or
Search4Faces. There are also services providing information by phone number
or car license plate.
Commercial company registries reveal the company’s founding date, authorized
capital, legal address, and people associated with it.
Vehicle movement services. The popular site Flightradar collects flight
numbers, information about the starting and ending points of routes,
registration number, country of registration, and other data about all flights.
Similar services exist for tracking sea vessels.
Services for searching removed information. Resources like WaybackMachine
allow you to find and view old versions of websites — in case they have stopped
working or their data has been removed.
Metadata analysis systems can extract information from files of various formats
about the date, time, and device that created a specific document. Or collect
information about entire websites — when and by whom a domain was
registered and which other domains are associated with that site. Services like
who.is and Domain Tools allow for this.
For example, In “OSINT Techniques for Sensitive Documents That Have Escaped
Into The Clear Web,” Christina Lekati highlights a common vulnerability among
organizations: sensitive documents inadvertently exposed online. Lekati notes that
participants frequently discover documents posing significant risks to their
organizations on the clear web, often due to employee errors or oversight. She
emphasizes the importance of proactive searches to identify and manage these
documents before they’re exploited by threat actors. The article offers a tutorial on
advanced search queries, using special characters and operators to refine searches
for specific documents related to an organization. Lekati provides practical advice
on how to use Google Dorking, a technique that utilizes special search strings to find
sensitive information efficiently. Highlighting the potential goldmine of information
that documents like contracts, internal processes, and admin credentials can
represent, she warns of the exposure risk to competitors, the media, and other
entities. To combat this, Lekati suggests several ready-to-use search queries
involving operators that focus on finding specific file types, such as PDFs,
PowerPoints, and Excel files. She encourages creativity in conducting OSINT checks
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 9/22 and underscores the ease of mitigating such risks by eliminating or managing the
exposure of sensitive documents. She advocates for OSINT as a defensive discipline,
crucial for organizations to act proactively against potential security breaches.
In 2015, 13-year-old Justin created a Twitter account under the nickname Intel Crab
and invented a fake persona of a teenager from Donetsk. He collected videos,
photographs, and quotes from people in the war-torn Donbas to post on his account.
When Justin realized he had become popular — with thousands of followers — he
stopped pretending to be a boy from Donetsk.
Justin decided to take a more serious approach. He began analyzing and verifying
the information he gathered, as well as recreating context with additional tools like
plane tracking services and satellite images. Now 20 years old, Justin regularly finds
photos and videos from event locations, opens maps, and checks whether the
specified geolocation matches what is visible in the images. He publishes his
findings, for example, tracking changes in the amount of equipment at Russian
military bases using satellite images, and monitored photos posted by Kadyrovites
in Zaporizhzhia on VKontakte and Telegram, publishing their locations. Justin now
has nearly 309,000 followers. This year, he is graduating from the University of
Alabama and saving money to go to Ukraine to see the country not just on a monitor
screen.
Perhaps the most famous open-source investigation team is Bellingcat. Its founder,
Elliot Higgins, has been writing about the use of banned weapons and violations of
humanitarian law in Syria since 2012 on the Brown Moses Blog. In 2014, he
assembled a team and began investigating war crimes in Ukraine.
One of Bellingcat’s most notable works is the investigation of the downing of
Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in Donetsk Oblast in July 2014. Journalists established
that the missile that downed the plane was Russian and launched from territory
controlled by Russian authorities. Using photos and videos by eyewitnesses who
captured the Buk missile system in various locations, investigators tracked its
movement from Russia to Ukraine. They reconstructed its route thanks to a cargo
platform photographed in various places in Russia and Ukraine. Initially, the
platform carrying the system had four Buk missiles, but the day after the plane’s
downing, only three were visible, and it was headed back towards Russia. Even the
shadows cast by objects in photos and videos were important — using the SunСalc
program, journalists calculated the approximate time of filming. Another
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 10/22

42. significant detail was the smoke trail left by the missile. Using it, Bellingcat
identified the missile’s launch site on satellite images and eyewitness recordings.
The MH17 case brought popularity to both Bellingcat and the OSINT method itself.
Media began to reference data from investigative teams more frequently, and some
newsrooms established their own data and OSINT departments. The spread of the
internet allowed OSINT methods to extend beyond military intelligence and the
professional community of investigators, becoming a new form of digital activism.
Artificial intelligence could prevent errors and inaccuracies caused by the human
factor. OSINT blogs constantly write that potentially AI could be delegated several
tasks at once, such as determining the location of a shot or distinguishing between
tanks and IFVs in satellite images. However, current software still struggles with this
task. The military uses more advanced AI developments: their algorithms can
recognize enemy troops in satellite images, predict the course of hypersonic
missiles, and even autonomously attack enemy targets. (Read about how artificial
intelligence learned to wage war.)
However, investigators can indeed have an impact on the world. The results of work
based on open data are sometimes considered by courts. In 2018, the prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Libyan General
Mahmoud Werfalli, who carried out public executions. The ICC based its evidence
on the analysis and geolocations done by the Bellingcat team. The Hague Court,
which considered the case of the MH17 crash in Ukraine, also cited materials from
Bellingcat investigations. The International Investigative Group on War Crimes in
Ukraine, initiated by Eurojust, requested materials from a joint investigation by
“Important Stories”, OCCRP, and Der Spiegel on the supply of microelectronics and
drones to Russia bypassing sanctions.
However, investigators want their findings to be used more actively. The Conflict
Intelligence Team is currently working with other investigative projects to propose
amendments to the legislation of EU and US countries. Investigators want their
conclusions to have greater value in crime investigations. Only those who are
inconvenienced by these investigations express outright distrust of OSINT
researchers’ materials.
The barrier to entry in OSINT is low — only internet access and free time are
needed. No special education is required — there is no university or training
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 11/22 program to graduate from and receive a diploma as an OSINT investigator (although
private courses are available). Investigators themselves say that the main qualities
needed for this work are patience and attentiveness. “90% of the time, we sift
through a huge amount of material, photos, and videos. It’s very tedious and hard
work,” says Ruslan Leviev in an interview with Kit.
If you’re already engaged in cyber investigations or want to gain knowledge in this
field, I recommend applying for the GIJN’s free online course (I’ve already applied).
The course topics include: Basics of Digital Investigations, Threat Landscape:
Malicious and Spyware, DNS: Websites and Infrastructure, Investigating
Disinformation and Trolling, Network Analysis. Instructors: Craig Silverman,
ProPublica reporter; Jane Lytvynenko, independent journalist (Guardian, BuzzFeed
News, Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard); Etienne “tek” Maynier, Amnesty Tech
Lab staff; Luis Assardo, Reporters Without Borders staff and independent
researcher. The course starts on April 29 and will run every Monday and Thursday
for 6 weeks.
We review and practice other popular OSINT tools:
Maigret is an innovative tool designed for data analysis from various social
platforms. It offers extensive capabilities for information gathering, user activity
analysis, connection finding, and other functions. This tool has flexible settings
for data collection and analysis, allowing you to choose social networks and save
results into files. Maigret supports over 3000 sites for username searches. An
excellent tool for username searches, it’s maximally simple to install and equally
easy to use.
Mr.Holmes is a project aimed at gathering information from open sources about
social networks, phone numbers, domains, and IP addresses using Google
Dorks. Plus, it can be installed on Linux as well as Termux with Windows. The
tool has a very nice feature of maintaining a local database.
Holehe is a powerful tool for detecting registered accounts by email. Holehe
checks for email attachment to accounts on various platforms, including Twitter,
Instagram, Imgur, and over 120 other sites. Our tool is very simple to install and
use.
Ghunt is a powerful and versatile OSINT tool designed for gathering information
about users through their Gmail addresses. It provides access to the owner’s
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 12/22

43. name, identifiers, active Google services such as YouTube, Photos, Maps, and
others. You can also get information about possible locations, Google
documents, scheduled meetings in the calendar, and much more.
H8Mail is a tool that scans the specified email inbox in its databases and
provides a set of possible passwords. With its help, you can gain access not only
to the email but also to all other accounts if the user reuses the same passwords.
This is a very decent tool for checking against databases of various conditionally
free services to search for leaked email passwords.
DarkGPT offers advanced capabilities for working with leaked databases,
significantly differing from previous tools based on ChatGPT, such as
OSINVGPT, PentestGPT, and others. The Spanish pentester known as “luijait”
recently introduced to the global community a novelty in the field of OSINT —
the DarkGPT tool, which utilizes the power of GPT-4–200K for precise data leak
analysis. Based on the latest advancements in artificial intelligence, it not only
provides users with access to information but also tools for its analysis. DarkGPT
stands out among its competitors due to the integration with GPT-4–200K,
allowing for advanced data processing. The tool ensures secure access to leaked
databases. Its interface, implemented through the command line, makes the
tool accessible even for beginners in OSINT. The ease of use and intuitive
interface significantly simplify the data collection and analysis process.
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 13/22 Follow
Aml Kyc Compliance Digital Identity Navalny
21.10.2024, 07:35 From Dissident to Detective: On the Way to ShmagunGPT | by Slava Solodkiy | Medium
https://medium.com/@slavasolodkiy_67243/from-dissident-to-detective-on-the-way-to-shmagungpt-6bcf05c3fbba 14/22

44. UK NEWS WEBSITE OF THE YEAR 2024
See all News
Russian spymaster’s plot to use private army to control migration
into Europe
Jan Marsalek planned to create 15,000-strong band of mercenaries to control border in
key migration route through Libya
689
Jan Marsalek and Stanislav Petlinsky, his ‘handler’, during a trip to Syria in 2017
Hayley Dixon
Special Correspondent
08 March 2025 7:15pm GMT
A Russian spymaster plotted to use private armies to control migration into
Europe, The Telegraph can reveal.
Jan Marsalek, the fugitive boss of the disgraced tech company Wirecard,
planned to create a 15,000-strong band of mercenaries to control the border in
the key migration route through Libya.
Your SayNewsSportBusinessMoneyOpinionUkraineTravelHealthLifesty
Gift this article free
13.03.2025, 11:27 Russian spymaster’s plot to use private army to control migration into Europe
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/08/russian-spymaster-plot-private-army-migration-europe/?ICID=continue_without_subscribing_reg_first1/9 Weaponising the flow of migrants is said to be a key aim of Vladimir Putin,
with the issue being a major factor in elections across Europe.
Marsalek, who is on the run, even bought a private military company and
succeeded in getting the first Russian boots on the ground in Libya.
The revelations come at a key time in the war in Ukraine, with Donald Trump
putting pressure on Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president to get round
the table with Putin for peace talks. European leaders have previously warned
that the West could see a tidal wave of migrants if Ukraine falls to Russia.
The details of Marsalek’s plans can be revealed for the first time after a ring of
UK-based spies he was running were found guilty at the Old Bailey on Friday.
Leader Orlin Roussev, 47, and his team of Bulgarian operatives face jail after
being caught plotting kidnapping and surveillance campaigns in one of the
Metropolitan Police’s biggest-ever spying operations.
Marsalek has been on the run since 2020, when German payments firm
Wirecard collapsed with a €1.9 billion hole in its books. He was able to flee
from Austria on a private jet and has been on Interpol’s most wanted list for his
alleged part in the fraud ever since.
It is understood he is currently being investigated for espionage by several
European countries, and the Metropolitan Police has not ruled out future
charges against the spymaster.
It can now be reported that Marsalek was working for the Kremlin whilst
running Wirecard, Germany’s answer to PayPal, and planning to control flows
of migration from Africa with the help of one of Britain’s allies.
The Telegraph has seen evidence that, in 2017, Austrian government officials
had promised investment of more than €120,000 to help with the plan, which
Marsalek told the EU would help “solve the migration crisis”. Yet the security
for the plan was being overseen by a suspected colonel in Russia’s military
intelligence service, known as the GRU.
13.03.2025, 11:27 Russian spymaster’s plot to use private army to control migration into Europe
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/08/russian-spymaster-plot-private-army-migration-europe/?ICID=continue_without_subscribing_reg_first2/9

45. Warnings to officials in Germany and Austria about his involvement and his
links to Russia were ignored, sources have told The Telegraph.
At the same time as he was trying to set up militia to influence migration,
Marsalek also bought a Russian private army, the RSB Group, which has
supported Gen Khalifa Haftar, the Libyan warlord.
Since he fled in 2020 the RSB Group, which has been widely sanctioned, is
also understood to have been involved in security agreements in Sudan
alongside the Wagner Group. Sudan is described by the EU as “at the heart of
migratory routes connecting East and West Africa to the Mediterranean Sea
and Europe”.
Mercenaries including Wagner have been fuelling migration by increasing
instability and violence in parts of Africa under their control and by physically
moving migrants to the borders and supporting smugglers, experts have said.
According to security sources, Marsalek has been involved in the
reorganisation of Wagner’s interest in the region following the death of
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the notorious mercenary leader, after his failed attempt at
an insurrection in Russia.
Marsalek’s interests in private armies go back to his time at Wirecard. In 2017
and early 2018, he held meetings with Killian Kleinschmidt, a humanitarian
and former UN worker, to discuss plans for a project in Libya. The meetings
were also attended by Gustav Gustenau, then a senior brigadier in Austria’s
ministry of defence.
Where Russian mercenaries are active
EUROPEEUROPE
Mediterranean Sea
South
Atlantic
Ocean
Migration
route
LIBYALIBYA
MALI
SUDANSUDANAFRICAAFRICA
Arabian
Sea
BURKINA
FASO
CENTRAL
AFRICAN REPUBLIC
13.03.2025, 11:27 Russian spymaster’s plot to use private army to control migration into Europe
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/08/russian-spymaster-plot-private-army-migration-europe/?ICID=continue_without_subscribing_reg_first3/9 The Telegraph has seen a declaration of intent signed by the brigadier
promising €20,000 towards the plan for “stabilisation and migration
management in Libya”.
Mr Kleinschmidt was also promised a further €100,000 for the private-public
partnership project through the Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and
Technology. It is understood that payments were not made.
Mr Gustenau has denied any wrongdoing or a close relationship with
Marsalek, saying he was authorised by his bosses to explore the project and
was unaware at the time of Marsalek’s connection to Russia. The ministry has
said no money changed hands.
The payments for the project were due to be made by Marsalek via the “the
Russian-Libyan cultural institute, which had an address in Moscow”. No
record of such a company exists.
In one meeting, Marsalek was heard joking that he had footage from body
cameras that “the boys” were using but said “we cannot use it as the boys are
killing all the prisoners”, Mr Kleinschmidt has told The Telegraph.
Corruption investigators in Austria have been told that these “are probably
recordings of the Wagner Group”.
Minutes from a meeting at his villa in Munich to discuss the plans in early
2018, seen by The Telegraph, explain: “The priority for JM is ‘to close the
border’ preferably via an ‘15,000 man-strong border police force’ that would
be composed of former militias.
“He repeated this throughout the conversation. This could also be used in his
opinion with the national government in Tripoli as leverage against the power
brokers in the east.
“Closing the border can be sold to the EU as ‘solving the migration crisis’ and
the frozen Libyan funds in the EU can be used for this purpose.”
THE DAILY T: INVESTIGATES • PODCAST
Listen to Hayley Dixon’s journey into the world of the
Russian spy ring uncovered in Norfolk
The Telegraph can now publish details of a year-long investigation into wanted man Jan Marsalek’s
extraordinary double life for the first time.
13.03.2025, 11:27 Russian spymaster’s plot to use private army to control migration into Europe
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/08/russian-spymaster-plot-private-army-migration-europe/?ICID=continue_without_subscribing_reg_first4/9

46. Jan Marsalek fled to Russia in 2020
The plan failed in 2018 amid concern from Mr Kleinschmidt’s team about the
true purpose of the project and a failure by Marsalek to provide funding.
Mr Kleinschmidt said the aim of his team had been to provide aid and help in
the reconstruction of the country, not to train border forces.
It is now known that, by this time, Marsalek owned the RSB Group and had
secured Russian mercenaries on the ground through a mine-clearing contract.
Their presence is said to have opened the door for Wagner in the region, and
since then thousands of the country’s mercenaries have been on the ground in
the country.
Mr Kleinschmidt said he believed his team was intended to be used to
“whitewash” the plans.
He told The Telegraph he had been warning about Russia’s “weaponisation” of
migration for some time, adding: “As we know, migration has become a major
theme for the Right sphere of politics. We have populists saying that ‘they’re
coming, we have to stop them’.
“So the Russians clearly use that theme to make Europe nervous and influence
elections.”
13.03.2025, 11:27 Russian spymaster’s plot to use private army to control migration into Europe
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/08/russian-spymaster-plot-private-army-migration-europe/?ICID=continue_without_subscribing_reg_first5/9
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The Wagner Group's Inner CircleThe Wagner Group's Inner Circle
Key Players in Russia's Shadow ArmyKey Players in Russia's Shadow Army
BLOG POST
BLOG POST
By   and 
Feb. 28, 2025Feb. 28, 2025
This blog post offers an overview of key figures in the Wagner Group-Russian government nexus,This blog post offers an overview of key figures in the Wagner Group-Russian government nexus,
supplementing our comprehensive report. For a full analysis and deeper insights, we encouragesupplementing our comprehensive report. For a full analysis and deeper insights, we encourage
Future FrontlinesFuture Frontlines
Ben DaltonBen Dalton Candace RondeauxCandace Rondeaux
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 1/18

47. readers to explore the complete report,readers to explore the complete report, The Wagner Group’s Little Black Book:The Wagner Group’s Little Black Book:
Decoding Command and Control of Russia’s Irregular ForcesDecoding Command and Control of Russia’s Irregular Forces..
Yevgeny PrigozhinYevgeny Prigozhin
On a day-to-day basis, the head of the Wagner Group managed the businesses thatOn a day-to-day basis, the head of the Wagner Group managed the businesses that
facilitated the network’s paramilitary wing, liaised with high-level officials within thefacilitated the network’s paramilitary wing, liaised with high-level officials within the
Russian government, including the president’s office, and personally steered informationRussian government, including the president’s office, and personally steered information
operations such as Lakhta Media, one of the entities accused of operations such as Lakhta Media, one of the entities accused of meddlingmeddling in the 2016 in the 2016
U.S. presidential election. From his perch in the back office’s St. Petersburg hub,U.S. presidential election. From his perch in the back office’s St. Petersburg hub,
Prigozhin’s calendar was filled with meetings: lawyers, accountants, filmmakers, mediaPrigozhin’s calendar was filled with meetings: lawyers, accountants, filmmakers, media
managers, and real estate specialists, all working to keep his sprawling empire ofmanagers, and real estate specialists, all working to keep his sprawling empire of
hundreds of limited liability companies (LLCs) humming along.hundreds of limited liability companies (LLCs) humming along.
In the last year of his life Prigozhin often made grandiose claims about his role as aIn the last year of his life Prigozhin often made grandiose claims about his role as a
swashbuckling paramilitary leader. But the available data painted a somewhat differentswashbuckling paramilitary leader. But the available data painted a somewhat different
picture, indicating that he likely rarely directly oversaw Wagner’s military fieldpicture, indicating that he likely rarely directly oversaw Wagner’s military field
operations. He delegated that task to Wagner Group director Andrei Troshev, who servedoperations. He delegated that task to Wagner Group director Andrei Troshev, who served
as Prigozhin’s primary conduit to the group’s paramilitary wing. This division of laboras Prigozhin’s primary conduit to the group’s paramilitary wing. This division of labor
underscores the Wagner Group's dual nature: part business venture, part shadow army.underscores the Wagner Group's dual nature: part business venture, part shadow army.
Analysis of leaked documents, calendar entries, and a network mapping of theAnalysis of leaked documents, calendar entries, and a network mapping of the
paramilitary’s administrative structures and phone book schema further confirms thatparamilitary’s administrative structures and phone book schema further confirms that
Prigozhin was more an executive frontman than paramilitary commander. Instead, itPrigozhin was more an executive frontman than paramilitary commander. Instead, it
appears that high-level Kremlin gatekeepers inside President Vladimir Putin’s office andappears that high-level Kremlin gatekeepers inside President Vladimir Putin’s office and
in the upper echelons of the defense ministry controlled and shaped the overall strategyin the upper echelons of the defense ministry controlled and shaped the overall strategy
while active duty and semi-retired reserve officials in Russia’s military and securitywhile active duty and semi-retired reserve officials in Russia’s military and security
services coordinated operations at the field level.services coordinated operations at the field level.
Prigozhin’s Prigozhin’s personal calendarpersonal calendar from 2012 to 2022 reads like a Kremlin rolodex, revealing from 2012 to 2022 reads like a Kremlin rolodex, revealing
a decade of extensive coordination with Russia’s military and security elite. Between 2012a decade of extensive coordination with Russia’s military and security elite. Between 2012
and 2022, he held 128 meetings with Anton Vaino, Putin’s chief of staff and likelyand 2022, he held 128 meetings with Anton Vaino, Putin’s chief of staff and likely
Prigozhin’s most direct line to the president. Prigozhin’s calendar entries confirm that hePrigozhin’s most direct line to the president. Prigozhin’s calendar entries confirm that he
met at least twice with Andrei Belousov during his tenure as First Deputy Prime Ministermet at least twice with Andrei Belousov during his tenure as First Deputy Prime Minister
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 2/18 and Putin’s economic advisor. Moreover, reporting by theand Putin’s economic advisor. Moreover, reporting by the Dossier Center Dossier Center suggests that suggests that
the two likely met more frequently and enjoyed cozy relations, working closely to resolvethe two likely met more frequently and enjoyed cozy relations, working closely to resolve
any issues that came up with management of the Wagner portfolio on an informal basisany issues that came up with management of the Wagner portfolio on an informal basis
almost from the inception of the Wagner Group concept in 2014. Belousov would go on toalmost from the inception of the Wagner Group concept in 2014. Belousov would go on to
replace Sergei Shoigu as Minister of Defense in May 2024.replace Sergei Shoigu as Minister of Defense in May 2024.
Prigozhin’s calendar shows occasional meetings with then-Minister of Defense SergeiPrigozhin’s calendar shows occasional meetings with then-Minister of Defense Sergei
Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, but the bulk of his recordedShoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, but the bulk of his recorded
interactions were with deputy defense ministers and heads of defense ministryinteractions were with deputy defense ministers and heads of defense ministry
directorates. Prigozhin met at least 122 times with Ruslan Tsalikov, the first deputydirectorates. Prigozhin met at least 122 times with Ruslan Tsalikov, the first deputy
minister of defense and Shoigu’s longtime close associate. He also met 91 times withminister of defense and Shoigu’s longtime close associate. He also met 91 times with
Dmitry Bulgakov, deputy minister of defense for logistics, who played a central role inDmitry Bulgakov, deputy minister of defense for logistics, who played a central role in
provisioning the Wagner Group with equipment and transportation resources.provisioning the Wagner Group with equipment and transportation resources.
Both Tsalikov and Bulgakov were caught up in the sweeping purge the Kremlin initiatedBoth Tsalikov and Bulgakov were caught up in the sweeping purge the Kremlin initiated
in the wake of the Wagner mutiny. Putin removed Tsalikov from his position in Junein the wake of the Wagner mutiny. Putin removed Tsalikov from his position in June
2024, part of a cabinet shuffle that saw the 2024, part of a cabinet shuffle that saw the ousterouster of four top deputy defense officials on of four top deputy defense officials on
the same day who oversaw ministry finance, contracting, and information management.the same day who oversaw ministry finance, contracting, and information management.
The government dismissed Bulgakov in September 2022 due to logistical failures duringThe government dismissed Bulgakov in September 2022 due to logistical failures during
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and arrestedarrested him on corruption charges in July him on corruption charges in July
2024. Bulgakov’s replacement, Mikhail Mizintsev, also appears in Prigozhin’s calendar:2024. Bulgakov’s replacement, Mikhail Mizintsev, also appears in Prigozhin’s calendar:
he served as the Ministry of Defense’s logistics chief for less than a year before joininghe served as the Ministry of Defense’s logistics chief for less than a year before joining
the Wagner Group as deputy commander. Timur Ivanov, another deputy minister ofthe Wagner Group as deputy commander. Timur Ivanov, another deputy minister of
defense, appeared in Prigozhin’s calendar 15 times. As with Bulgakov, authoritiesdefense, appeared in Prigozhin’s calendar 15 times. As with Bulgakov, authorities
dismissed and arrested Ivanov on corruption charges in April 2024.dismissed and arrested Ivanov on corruption charges in April 2024.
Prigozhin’s calendar shows four meetings with Sergei Rudskoy, head of the MainPrigozhin’s calendar shows four meetings with Sergei Rudskoy, head of the Main
Operations Directorate; 23 with Igor Kostyukov, chief of the GRU, Russia’s militaryOperations Directorate; 23 with Igor Kostyukov, chief of the GRU, Russia’s military
intelligence agency; and 17 with Kostyukov’s deputy, Vladimir Alekseyev, who was a keyintelligence agency; and 17 with Kostyukov’s deputy, Vladimir Alekseyev, who was a key
architect of both the Wagner Group and Redut, a paramilitary recruiting hub that hasarchitect of both the Wagner Group and Redut, a paramilitary recruiting hub that has
largely supplanted Wagner in Ukraine. This constant engagement with the top echelonslargely supplanted Wagner in Ukraine. This constant engagement with the top echelons
of Russia’s military, security, and intelligence establishment points to Prigozhin’s role asof Russia’s military, security, and intelligence establishment points to Prigozhin’s role as
the chief liaison between the state and the Wagner Group.the chief liaison between the state and the Wagner Group.
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48. Beyond these high-level government contacts, Prigozhin focused on steering his businessBeyond these high-level government contacts, Prigozhin focused on steering his business
interests, taking a particularly keen interest in the network’s information operations. Heinterests, taking a particularly keen interest in the network’s information operations. He
met frequently with figures like Mikhail Burchik, who headed Lakhta Media andmet frequently with figures like Mikhail Burchik, who headed Lakhta Media and
spearheaded Internet Research Agency disinformation campaigns, and lawyer Yevgenyspearheaded Internet Research Agency disinformation campaigns, and lawyer Yevgeny
Burleev, whose team coordinated Prigozhin’s Burleev, whose team coordinated Prigozhin’s international lawfare campaignsinternational lawfare campaigns,,
including lawsuits against foreign investigative journalists. Prigozhin also maintainedincluding lawsuits against foreign investigative journalists. Prigozhin also maintained
regular contact with Valery Chekalov, the Wagner Group’s logistics chief, likely ensuringregular contact with Valery Chekalov, the Wagner Group’s logistics chief, likely ensuring
the paramilitary wing had what it needed to operate across multiple theaters.the paramilitary wing had what it needed to operate across multiple theaters.
Andrei TroshevAndrei Troshev
While Yevgeny Prigozhin managed the Wagner Group’s business affairs and cultivatedWhile Yevgeny Prigozhin managed the Wagner Group’s business affairs and cultivated
high-level government connections, Andrei Troshev emerged as the command nexus ofhigh-level government connections, Andrei Troshev emerged as the command nexus of
its paramilitary operations. A battle-hardened veteran of Afghanistan and Chechnya andits paramilitary operations. A battle-hardened veteran of Afghanistan and Chechnya and
former commander in the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ special forces, Troshev servedformer commander in the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ special forces, Troshev served
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https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 4/18 under the title of “director” or “executive director,” effectively operating as chief of staffunder the title of “director” or “executive director,” effectively operating as chief of staff
from 2014 onward.from 2014 onward.
Internal documents reveal his direct oversight of both tactical field operations and theInternal documents reveal his direct oversight of both tactical field operations and the
organization's internal security apparatus. Troshev’s unique position at the nexus of theorganization's internal security apparatus. Troshev’s unique position at the nexus of the
back office network connected him to more sectors than any other figure. He bridged theback office network connected him to more sectors than any other figure. He bridged the
St. Petersburg Combat Group administrators (which later evolved into the “Council ofSt. Petersburg Combat Group administrators (which later evolved into the “Council of
Commanders”), the group’s internal security service, and its operations in Sudan, theCommanders”), the group’s internal security service, and its operations in Sudan, the
Central African Republic, and Syria. This central role made Troshev the linchpin ofCentral African Republic, and Syria. This central role made Troshev the linchpin of
Wagner’s sprawling paramilitary machine.Wagner’s sprawling paramilitary machine.
Among all the figures directly involved in Wagner’s paramilitary operations, Troshev hadAmong all the figures directly involved in Wagner’s paramilitary operations, Troshev had
the most frequent contact with Prigozhin, with the possible exception of logistics chiefthe most frequent contact with Prigozhin, with the possible exception of logistics chief
Valery Chekalov. Between 2012 and 2022, Prigozhin’s calendar logged nearly 200 calls orValery Chekalov. Between 2012 and 2022, Prigozhin’s calendar logged nearly 200 calls or
meetings with Troshev, identified by his nickname “BB” or code number 102. Bymeetings with Troshev, identified by his nickname “BB” or code number 102. By
comparison, Dmitry Utkin, the titular commander of the paramilitary operation undercomparison, Dmitry Utkin, the titular commander of the paramilitary operation under
Troshev, appears in only eight entries, listed by his code number 555.Troshev, appears in only eight entries, listed by his code number 555.
Troshev parted ways with Prigozhin and the Wagner Group just before their short-livedTroshev parted ways with Prigozhin and the Wagner Group just before their short-lived
mutiny, sparking resentment among some of the organization’s field commanders, whomutiny, sparking resentment among some of the organization’s field commanders, who
disparaged him on social media as an ineffective drunk. Nonetheless, Putin disparaged him on social media as an ineffective drunk. Nonetheless, Putin selectedselected
Troshev to coordinate volunteer units for the Ministry of Defense in Ukraine, appearingTroshev to coordinate volunteer units for the Ministry of Defense in Ukraine, appearing
with him publicly in September 2023. Troshev’s loyalty appears to have shifted to thewith him publicly in September 2023. Troshev’s loyalty appears to have shifted to the
government, continuing a role similar to his Wagner responsibilities.government, continuing a role similar to his Wagner responsibilities.
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49. Dmitry UtkinDmitry Utkin
The third figure in the Wagner Group triumvirate, alongside Yevgeny Prigozhin andThe third figure in the Wagner Group triumvirate, alongside Yevgeny Prigozhin and
Andrei Troshev, was Dmitry Utkin, whose call sign “Wagner” became the group’sAndrei Troshev, was Dmitry Utkin, whose call sign “Wagner” became the group’s
namesake. A veteran special forces operator, Utkin was field commander from thenamesake. A veteran special forces operator, Utkin was field commander from the
organization’s inception. After the Wagner mutiny in June 2023, Russian media publishedorganization’s inception. After the Wagner mutiny in June 2023, Russian media published
a document dated May 1, 2014, signed by both Prigozhin and Utkin, outlining theira document dated May 1, 2014, signed by both Prigozhin and Utkin, outlining their
respective duties. Utkin’s responsibilities included recruiting and training a team andrespective duties. Utkin’s responsibilities included recruiting and training a team and
maintaining discipline within the group.maintaining discipline within the group.
However, Utkin’s role within the Wagner network appeared more focused on fieldHowever, Utkin’s role within the Wagner network appeared more focused on field
operations. In the group’s 2018 back office directory, where he was listed under both Syriaoperations. In the group’s 2018 back office directory, where he was listed under both Syria
and St. Petersburg Combat Group administrators, Utkin had three backup contacts,and St. Petersburg Combat Group administrators, Utkin had three backup contacts,
compared to Troshev’s six. Two of these contacts, a communications officer and a dutycompared to Troshev’s six. Two of these contacts, a communications officer and a duty
officer for Syria, were shared with Troshev. Furthermore, Utkin met with Prigozhin farofficer for Syria, were shared with Troshev. Furthermore, Utkin met with Prigozhin far
less frequently than Troshev, with only eight recorded meetings in Prigozhin’s calendar.less frequently than Troshev, with only eight recorded meetings in Prigozhin’s calendar.
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https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 6/18 Internal documents consistently depict Utkin as subordinate to Troshev within Wagner’sInternal documents consistently depict Utkin as subordinate to Troshev within Wagner’s
organizational structure.organizational structure.
Anton VainoAnton Vaino
As Chief of Staff of Putin’s Presidential Executive Office, Anton Vaino served as anAs Chief of Staff of Putin’s Presidential Executive Office, Anton Vaino served as an
important gatekeeper between the Wagner Group and the highest echelons of Russianimportant gatekeeper between the Wagner Group and the highest echelons of Russian
power. Prigozhin’s personal calendar records 128 entries for Vaino between 2012 andpower. Prigozhin’s personal calendar records 128 entries for Vaino between 2012 and
2022. These meetings occurred regularly, regardless of fluctuations in Prigozhin’s other2022. These meetings occurred regularly, regardless of fluctuations in Prigozhin’s other
business activities. The frequency and consistency of these interactions suggest thatbusiness activities. The frequency and consistency of these interactions suggest that
Vaino was one of Prigozhin’s primary conduits to President Vladimir Putin, likelyVaino was one of Prigozhin’s primary conduits to President Vladimir Putin, likely
facilitating Wagner’s operations and ensuring their alignment with Kremlin objectives.facilitating Wagner’s operations and ensuring their alignment with Kremlin objectives.
Vaino's connection to Putin runs deep, with their relationship dating back to Vaino’s roleVaino's connection to Putin runs deep, with their relationship dating back to Vaino’s role
as Putin’s chief of protocol. This position likely made him instrumental in cateringas Putin’s chief of protocol. This position likely made him instrumental in catering
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50. arrangements, including the 2006 Group of Eight (G8) Summit in St. Petersburg, wherearrangements, including the 2006 Group of Eight (G8) Summit in St. Petersburg, where
President Bush dined at Prigozhin’s Old Customs House restaurant.President Bush dined at Prigozhin’s Old Customs House restaurant.
The ties between Wagner and the president’s office extend beyond personal connections.The ties between Wagner and the president’s office extend beyond personal connections.
Internal documents, such as Prigozhin’s requests for state medals for Wagner personnel,Internal documents, such as Prigozhin’s requests for state medals for Wagner personnel,
contain metadata linking them to the Federal Agency for State Property Management.contain metadata linking them to the Federal Agency for State Property Management.
This agency, under the president’s office, controls strategic state corporations like Rostec,This agency, under the president’s office, controls strategic state corporations like Rostec,
Russia’s massive military-industrial conglomerate.Russia’s massive military-industrial conglomerate.
Sergei Shoigu and Valery GerasimovSergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov
Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov wereMinister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov were
key figures in Russia’s military hierarchy and its relationship with the Wagner Group.key figures in Russia’s military hierarchy and its relationship with the Wagner Group.
Despite Prigozhin’s public animosity towards them, his calendar reveals a workingDespite Prigozhin’s public animosity towards them, his calendar reveals a working
relationship: 32 meetings with Shoigu and 11 with Gerasimov between 2012 and 2022.relationship: 32 meetings with Shoigu and 11 with Gerasimov between 2012 and 2022.
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 8/18 While both the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff fall under the same umbrella,While both the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff fall under the same umbrella,
they serve distinct functions. The Ministry of Defense handles administrative andthey serve distinct functions. The Ministry of Defense handles administrative and
logistical matters, while the General Staff, though technically within the Ministry oflogistical matters, while the General Staff, though technically within the Ministry of
Defense, operates as a parallel structure responsible for planning and executing militaryDefense, operates as a parallel structure responsible for planning and executing military
operations.operations.
Prigozhin’s calendar shows more frequent meetings with Shoigu and Gerasimov’sPrigozhin’s calendar shows more frequent meetings with Shoigu and Gerasimov’s
immediate subordinates, suggesting that joint task force management occurred at theimmediate subordinates, suggesting that joint task force management occurred at the
deputy minister level, while higher-level strategic planning involved Shoigu anddeputy minister level, while higher-level strategic planning involved Shoigu and
Gerasimov directly.Gerasimov directly.
The careers of both men diverged in the aftermath of the Wagner mutiny and subsequentThe careers of both men diverged in the aftermath of the Wagner mutiny and subsequent
military shakeup. In May 2024, Shoigu transitioned from his role as Minister of Defensemilitary shakeup. In May 2024, Shoigu transitioned from his role as Minister of Defense
to Secretary of the Security Council, replacing Nikolai Patrushev, while Gerasimov, as ofto Secretary of the Security Council, replacing Nikolai Patrushev, while Gerasimov, as of
September 2024, has retained his position as Chief of the General Staff, weatheringSeptember 2024, has retained his position as Chief of the General Staff, weathering
Putin’s reorganization of military leadership.Putin’s reorganization of military leadership.
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51. Ruslan TsalikovRuslan Tsalikov
As First Deputy Minister of Defense from 2015 to 2024, Ruslan Tsalikov was a linchpin inAs First Deputy Minister of Defense from 2015 to 2024, Ruslan Tsalikov was a linchpin in
the Wagner Group’s operations. Prigozhin’s calendar records 122 entries for Tsalikovthe Wagner Group’s operations. Prigozhin’s calendar records 122 entries for Tsalikov
between 2012 and 2022, second only to Anton Vaino among high-ranking officials. Thisbetween 2012 and 2022, second only to Anton Vaino among high-ranking officials. This
frequent contact suggests Tsalikov was a key liaison between Wagner and the Russianfrequent contact suggests Tsalikov was a key liaison between Wagner and the Russian
military establishment, likely coordinating logistical support and strategic alignment.military establishment, likely coordinating logistical support and strategic alignment.
However, following Prigozhin’s August 2023 death, Tsalikov fell victim to Putin’s shakeupHowever, following Prigozhin’s August 2023 death, Tsalikov fell victim to Putin’s shakeup
of the Russian military establishment. As Defense Minister Shoigu moved to the Securityof the Russian military establishment. As Defense Minister Shoigu moved to the Security
Council in May 2024, Tsalikov, Shoigu’s longtime confidant, abruptly stepped down toCouncil in May 2024, Tsalikov, Shoigu’s longtime confidant, abruptly stepped down to
pursue local politics in Tuva.pursue local politics in Tuva.
Dmitry BulgakovDmitry Bulgakov
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https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 10/18 Dmitry Bulgakov, Deputy Minister of Defense for Logistics from 2008 to 2022, was a keyDmitry Bulgakov, Deputy Minister of Defense for Logistics from 2008 to 2022, was a key
figure in sustaining Wagner Group operations. Prigozhin’s calendar shows 91 entries forfigure in sustaining Wagner Group operations. Prigozhin’s calendar shows 91 entries for
Bulgakov, highlighting his pivotal role in the Wagner-military nexus. Bulgakov'sBulgakov, highlighting his pivotal role in the Wagner-military nexus. Bulgakov's
oversight of logistics facilitated the flow of weapons and supplies to Wagner forces. Afteroversight of logistics facilitated the flow of weapons and supplies to Wagner forces. After
taking over military logistics in 2008, taking over military logistics in 2008, the costthe cost of soldiers’ rations doubled and quantity of soldiers’ rations doubled and quantity
tripled, despite troop reductions. This raised suspicions of corruption, with tripled, despite troop reductions. This raised suspicions of corruption, with accusationsaccusations
that Bulgakov favored Prigozhin’s catering company, Concord. The governmentthat Bulgakov favored Prigozhin’s catering company, Concord. The government
dismissed Bulgakov in September 2022 for his role in logistical failures during Russia’sdismissed Bulgakov in September 2022 for his role in logistical failures during Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine and arrested him on corruption charges in July 2024 amid a widerinvasion of Ukraine and arrested him on corruption charges in July 2024 amid a wider
purge of the Ministry of Defense.purge of the Ministry of Defense.
Mikhail MizintsevMikhail Mizintsev
Mikhail Mizintsev’s career exemplifies the fluid boundaries between Russia’s officialMikhail Mizintsev’s career exemplifies the fluid boundaries between Russia’s official
military and paramilitary structures. From December 2014, he headed the Nationalmilitary and paramilitary structures. From December 2014, he headed the National
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52. Defense Control Center, a key command structure subordinate to the General Staff,Defense Control Center, a key command structure subordinate to the General Staff,
meeting with Prigozhin at least six times in this capacity. In September 2022, Mizintsevmeeting with Prigozhin at least six times in this capacity. In September 2022, Mizintsev
replaced Dmitry Bulgakov as Deputy Minister of Defense for Logistics, a role thatreplaced Dmitry Bulgakov as Deputy Minister of Defense for Logistics, a role that
involved involved approvingapproving ammunition transfers to Wagner forces. After less than a year, he ammunition transfers to Wagner forces. After less than a year, he
left this position to become the Wagner Group’s deputy commander.left this position to become the Wagner Group’s deputy commander.
Timur IvanovTimur Ivanov
Timur Ivanov, Deputy Minister of Defense from 2016 to 2024, embodied the close tiesTimur Ivanov, Deputy Minister of Defense from 2016 to 2024, embodied the close ties
between Russia’s military structures and private interests in the defense sector.between Russia’s military structures and private interests in the defense sector.
Prigozhin’s calendar includes 15 entries for Ivanov, whose responsibilities includedPrigozhin’s calendar includes 15 entries for Ivanov, whose responsibilities included
approving many of the defense contracts won by Prigozhin’s companies, which helpedapproving many of the defense contracts won by Prigozhin’s companies, which helped
finance Wagner Group operations. Even after Prigozhin’s death, Ivanov’s influencefinance Wagner Group operations. Even after Prigozhin’s death, Ivanov’s influence
persisted, allegedly negotiating with Prigozhin’s son, Pavel, over control of oil and gaspersisted, allegedly negotiating with Prigozhin’s son, Pavel, over control of oil and gas
fields in Syria and diamond mines in the Central African Republic. Ivanov’s career endedfields in Syria and diamond mines in the Central African Republic. Ivanov’s career ended
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 12/18 abruptly in April 2024 when he was arrested on charges of accepting $12.2 million inabruptly in April 2024 when he was arrested on charges of accepting $12.2 million in
bribes from defense contractors.bribes from defense contractors.
Sergei SurovikinSergei Surovikin
Sergei Surovikin, dubbed “General Armageddon” for his brutal tactics in Syria, includingSergei Surovikin, dubbed “General Armageddon” for his brutal tactics in Syria, including
mass bombing campaigns, embodies the complex relationship between Russia’s militarymass bombing campaigns, embodies the complex relationship between Russia’s military
and the Wagner Group. As Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces fromand the Wagner Group. As Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces from
2017 to 2023, Surovikin maintained significant Wagner connections. Prigozhin’s calendar2017 to 2023, Surovikin maintained significant Wagner connections. Prigozhin’s calendar
shows eight entries for Surovikin between 2012 and 2022, with their relationship likelyshows eight entries for Surovikin between 2012 and 2022, with their relationship likely
deepening during shared involvement in Russia’s Syria campaign. Internal documentsdeepening during shared involvement in Russia’s Syria campaign. Internal documents
reveal that Surovikin had a “VIP” Wagner employee number, suggesting an honoraryreveal that Surovikin had a “VIP” Wagner employee number, suggesting an honorary
status within the paramilitary. He reportedly status within the paramilitary. He reportedly liaisedliaised between the Ministry of Defense between the Ministry of Defense
and Wagner, with Prigozhin advocating for his leadership in the Ukraine war. Notably,and Wagner, with Prigozhin advocating for his leadership in the Ukraine war. Notably,
during Prigozhin’s June 2023 mutiny, Surovikin was one of only two figures (along withduring Prigozhin’s June 2023 mutiny, Surovikin was one of only two figures (along with
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 13/18

53. Vladimir Alekseyev) chosen to publicly call for Prigozhin to stand down—a telling choiceVladimir Alekseyev) chosen to publicly call for Prigozhin to stand down—a telling choice
in crisis. Following the mutiny, Surovikin vanished from public view, was removed fromin crisis. Following the mutiny, Surovikin vanished from public view, was removed from
his position as Aerospace Forces chief in August 2023, and later resurfaced as head of thehis position as Aerospace Forces chief in August 2023, and later resurfaced as head of the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Air Defense Coordinating Committee inCommonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Air Defense Coordinating Committee in
September 2023.September 2023.
Sergei RudskoySergei Rudskoy
Sergei Rudskoy, head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff and FirstSergei Rudskoy, head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff and First
Deputy Chief of the General Staff, met with Prigozhin only four times between 2012 andDeputy Chief of the General Staff, met with Prigozhin only four times between 2012 and
2022, according to Prigozhin’s calendar. However, other evidence points to a deeper2022, according to Prigozhin’s calendar. However, other evidence points to a deeper
connection. A February 2018 letter from Prigozhin’s employees to Rudskoy advocated forconnection. A February 2018 letter from Prigozhin’s employees to Rudskoy advocated for
increased Russian engagement in Africa, outlining potential geostrategic goals. Duringincreased Russian engagement in Africa, outlining potential geostrategic goals. During
the July 2020 the July 2020 arrestarrest of 33 Wagner members in Minsk, Prigozhin’s team urgently drafted a of 33 Wagner members in Minsk, Prigozhin’s team urgently drafted a
letter to Rudskoy explaining their perspective, indicating an ongoing workingletter to Rudskoy explaining their perspective, indicating an ongoing working
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 14/18 relationship. As head of the Main Operational Directorate, Rudskoy holds one of therelationship. As head of the Main Operational Directorate, Rudskoy holds one of the
most prominent positions in planning and executing Russian military operations. As ofmost prominent positions in planning and executing Russian military operations. As of
September 2024, he has weathered Putin’s shakeup of the military leadership andSeptember 2024, he has weathered Putin’s shakeup of the military leadership and
remains in his position, which he has held since 2015.remains in his position, which he has held since 2015.
Igor KostyukovIgor Kostyukov
Igor Kostyukov, head of the Main Directorate—better known as the GRU, Russia’sIgor Kostyukov, head of the Main Directorate—better known as the GRU, Russia’s
military intelligence agency—met with Prigozhin 23 times between 2012 and 2022,military intelligence agency—met with Prigozhin 23 times between 2012 and 2022,
according to Prigozhin’s calendar.according to Prigozhin’s calendar.
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
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54. Vladimir AlekseevVladimir Alekseev
Vladimir Alekseev, First Deputy Head of the GRU, has been a pivotal figure in Russia’sVladimir Alekseev, First Deputy Head of the GRU, has been a pivotal figure in Russia’s
intelligence operations and the GRU’s involvement with irregular military formations.intelligence operations and the GRU’s involvement with irregular military formations.
Alekseev's ties to the Wagner Group run deep. During Prigozhin’s June 2023 mutiny,Alekseev's ties to the Wagner Group run deep. During Prigozhin’s June 2023 mutiny,
Alekseev appeared in a video attempting to dissuade the mutineers, claiming he hadAlekseev appeared in a video attempting to dissuade the mutineers, claiming he had
worked with Wagner “from the first day of the existence of the organization.” Internalworked with Wagner “from the first day of the existence of the organization.” Internal
documents confirm close cooperation between Wagner and the GRU under Alekseev'sdocuments confirm close cooperation between Wagner and the GRU under Alekseev's
management in Syria in 2016. Moreover, phone records show Alekseev and Prigozhin inmanagement in Syria in 2016. Moreover, phone records show Alekseev and Prigozhin in
contact at crucial moments, including just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine andcontact at crucial moments, including just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and
during the mutiny itself.during the mutiny itself.
In January 2022, Alekseevand Prigozhin reportedly clashed over Alekseev's privateIn January 2022, Alekseevand Prigozhin reportedly clashed over Alekseev's private
military company, Redut, recruiting Wagner veterans. Redut, a GRU-run recruiting hubmilitary company, Redut, recruiting Wagner veterans. Redut, a GRU-run recruiting hub
for irregular formations operating in Ukraine, has largely replaced the Wagner Group asfor irregular formations operating in Ukraine, has largely replaced the Wagner Group as
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
https://www.newamerica.org/future-frontlines/blogs/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 16/18 the primary means by which the Russian state funnels irregular volunteer units into thethe primary means by which the Russian state funnels irregular volunteer units into the
Ukraine war effort.Ukraine war effort.
As of late November 2023, Alekseev was seen awarding fighters of the HispaniolaAs of late November 2023, Alekseev was seen awarding fighters of the Hispaniola
Battalion, a volunteer unit within the Redut system. Post-mutiny reports suggest the GRUBattalion, a volunteer unit within the Redut system. Post-mutiny reports suggest the GRU
assigned all unconventional operations targeting Ukraine to Alekseev, affirming hisassigned all unconventional operations targeting Ukraine to Alekseev, affirming his
continued significance in Russia’s military intelligence operations and the GRU’s use ofcontinued significance in Russia’s military intelligence operations and the GRU’s use of
irregular formations.irregular formations.
Gennady Kornienko, Sergei Pavlenko, and the FederalGennady Kornienko, Sergei Pavlenko, and the Federal
Penitentiary Service (FSIN)Penitentiary Service (FSIN)
An analysis of Prigozhin’s calendar shows that one of his most frequent contacts wasAn analysis of Prigozhin’s calendar shows that one of his most frequent contacts was
Sergei Vladimirovich Pavlenko, with 821 entries under the code number 575. PavlenkoSergei Vladimirovich Pavlenko, with 821 entries under the code number 575. Pavlenko
shares the same name as the shares the same name as the Russian officialRussian official who has led the Federal Penitentiary who has led the Federal Penitentiary
13.03.2025, 11:39 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle
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55. Service (FSIN) in the Kirov region since 2020. If they are the same man, Prigozhin’sService (FSIN) in the Kirov region since 2020. If they are the same man, Prigozhin’s
regular coordination with a colonel in Russia’s prison service—along with occasionalregular coordination with a colonel in Russia’s prison service—along with occasional
meetings with other FSIN officials, including at least two with Gennady Kornienko, FSINmeetings with other FSIN officials, including at least two with Gennady Kornienko, FSIN
director from 2012 to 2019—fits with Wagner’s extensive history of prison recruitment.director from 2012 to 2019—fits with Wagner’s extensive history of prison recruitment.
Many of Wagner’s senior field commanders had criminal backgrounds, with severalMany of Wagner’s senior field commanders had criminal backgrounds, with several
joining the group immediately after serving prison sentences.joining the group immediately after serving prison sentences.
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Rostov-on-Don, Ukraine. 24th June, 2023. A screen grab of Russian Yevgeny
Prigozhin, owner of the Wagner Group of mercenaries broadcasting from
inside the Russian Military Southern District headquarters surrounded by his
loyal fighters, June 24, 2023 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Prigozhin launched a
rebellion against Moscow accusing the government of lying to the nation and
corruption. Credit: Pool Photo/Wagner Group/Alamy Live News
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56. RELATED CONTENT
Dr. Peter Singer,
PhD. Featured in
the Chief of Naval
Operations
Professional
Reading Library
01.14.2025 at 05:40am
Disinformation’s
Sputnik Moment
– ASU
Leadership,
Diplomacy and
National Security
Lab
Dalton and Candace
Rondeaux of Arizona
State University and
New America.
Click the title right above or here for the
post.
From New America:
This blog post offers an overview of key figures in
the Wagner Group-Russian government nexus,
supplementing our comprehensive report. For a full
analysis and deeper insights, we encourage readers
to explore the complete report, The Wagner
Group’s Little Black Book: Decoding
Command and Control of Russia’s Irregular
Forces.
Yevgeny Prigozhin
On a day-to-day basis, the head of the Wagner
Group managed the businesses that facilitated the
network’s paramilitary wing, liaised with high-level
officials within the Russian government, including
the president’s office, and personally steered
information operations such as Lakhta Media, one
of the entities accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election. From his perch in the back
office’s St. Petersburg hub, Prigozhin’s calendar was
filled with meetings: lawyers, accountants,
filmmakers, media managers, and real estate
specialists, all working to keep his sprawling empire
or Learn More
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by SWJ Staff
13.03.2025, 11:37 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/03/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 2/9 12.04.2024 at 10:37am
Office of the
Director of
National
Intelligence
Selects Arizona
State University
as one of the
newest members
of the
Intelligence
Community
Centers for
Academic
Excellence (IC
CAE) Program
01.08.2025 at 06:50am
of hundreds of limited liability companies (LLCs)
humming along.
In the last year of his life Prigozhin often made
grandiose claims about his role as a swashbuckling
paramilitary leader. But the available data painted a
somewhat different picture, indicating that he likely
rarely directly oversaw Wagner’s military field
operations. He delegated that task to Wagner
Group director Andrei Troshev, who served as
Prigozhin’s primary conduit to the group’s
paramilitary wing. This division of labor underscores
the Wagner Group’s dual nature: part business
venture, part shadow army.
Analysis of leaked documents, calendar entries, and
a network mapping of the paramilitary’s
administrative structures and phone book schema
further confirms that Prigozhin was more an
executive frontman than paramilitary commander.
Instead, it appears that high-level Kremlin
gatekeepers inside President Vladimir Putin’s office
and in the upper echelons of the defense ministry
controlled and shaped the overall strategy while
active duty and semi-retired reserve officials in
Russia’s military and security services coordinated
operations at the field level.
Prigozhin’s personal calendar from 2012 to 2022
reads like a Kremlin rolodex, revealing a decade of
extensive coordination with Russia’s military and
security elite. Between 2012 and 2022, he held 128
meetings with Anton Vaino, Putin’s chief of staff and
likely Prigozhin’s most direct line to the president.
Prigozhin’s calendar entries confirm that he met at
least twice with Andrei Belousov during his tenure
by SWJ Staff
13.03.2025, 11:37 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/03/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 3/9

57. as First Deputy Prime Minister and Putin’s economic
advisor. Moreover, reporting by the Dossier
Center suggests that the two likely met more
frequently and enjoyed cozy relations, working
closely to resolve any issues that came up with
management of the Wagner portfolio on an informal
basis almost from the inception of the Wagner
Group concept in 2014. Belousov would go on to
replace Sergei Shoigu as Minister of Defense in May
2024.
Prigozhin’s calendar shows occasional meetings
with then-Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and
Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, but the
bulk of his recorded interactions were with deputy
defense ministers and heads of defense ministry
directorates. Prigozhin met at least 122 times with
Ruslan Tsalikov, the first deputy minister of defense
and Shoigu’s longtime close associate. He also met
91 times with Dmitry Bulgakov, deputy minister of
defense for logistics, who played a central role in
provisioning the Wagner Group with equipment and
transportation resources.
Both Tsalikov and Bulgakov were caught up in the
sweeping purge the Kremlin initiated in the wake of
the Wagner mutiny. Putin removed Tsalikov from his
position in June 2024, part of a cabinet shuffle that
saw the ouster of four top deputy defense officials
on the same day who oversaw ministry finance,
contracting, and information management. The
government dismissed Bulgakov in September
2022 due to logistical failures during Russia’s full-
scale invasion of Ukraine and arrested him on
corruption charges in July 2024. Bulgakov’s
replacement, Mikhail Mizintsev, also appears in
13.03.2025, 11:37 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/03/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 4/9 Prigozhin’s calendar: he served as the Ministry of
Defense’s logistics chief for less than a year before
joining the Wagner Group as deputy commander.
Timur Ivanov, another deputy minister of defense,
appeared in Prigozhin’s calendar 15 times. As with
Bulgakov, authorities dismissed and arrested Ivanov
on corruption charges in April 2024.
Prigozhin’s calendar shows four meetings with
Sergei Rudskoy, head of the Main Operations
Directorate; 23 with Igor Kostyukov, chief of the
GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency; and 17
with Kostyukov’s deputy, Vladimir Alekseyev, who
was a key architect of both the Wagner Group and
Redut, a paramilitary recruiting hub that has largely
supplanted Wagner in Ukraine. This constant
engagement with the top echelons of Russia’s
military, security, and intelligence establishment
points to Prigozhin’s role as the chief liaison
between the state and the Wagner Group.
Beyond these high-level government contacts,
Prigozhin focused on steering his business interests,
taking a particularly keen interest in the network’s
information operations. He met frequently with
figures like Mikhail Burchik, who headed Lakhta
Media and spearheaded Internet Research Agency
disinformation campaigns, and lawyer Yevgeny
Burleev, whose team coordinated
Prigozhin’s international lawfare campaigns,
including lawsuits against foreign investigative
journalists. Prigozhin also maintained regular
contact with Valery Chekalov, the Wagner Group’s
logistics chief, likely ensuring the paramilitary wing
had what it needed to operate across multiple
theaters.
13.03.2025, 11:37 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/03/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 5/9

58. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The work also surveys Andrei Troshev, Dmitry Utkin,
Anton Vaino, Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov,
Ruslan Tsalikov, Dmitry Bulgakov, Mikhail Mizintsev,
Timur Ivanov, Sergei Surovikin, Sergei Rudskoy, Igor
Kostyukov, Vladimir Alekseev, Gennady Kornienko,
Sergei Pavlenko, and the Federal Penitentiary Service
(FSIN).
This piece offers an
unprecedented look
into the internal
mechanics of Wagner
Group, revealing how a
private military
company navigated
Russia’s complex
power structures. Read
the full post to learn
more!
Tags: Arizona State University, Candace Rondeaux,
New America, Wagner Group
13.03.2025, 11:37 The Wagner Group's Inner Circle | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/03/the-wagner-groups-inner-circle/ 6/9 WASHINGTON — President Trump swapped Russian prisoner Alexander Vinnik in exchange for
the release of American teacher Marc Fogel, an administration official confirmed to The Post
Wednesday.
Vinnik was arrested back in 2017 in Greece and extradited to France and the US to face charges
of fraud and money laundering.
For six years prior to Vinnik’s arrest, he had been in charge of the BTC-e cryptocurrency
exchange — which funneled more than $9 billion worth of transactions.
Trump agreed to release Russian
bitcoin fraud suspect Alexander
Vinnik in exchange for Marc Fogel
POLITICS
By Diana Glebova
Published Feb. 12, 2025, 10:22 a.m. ET
22
Keep Watching Next video in 8 seconds
 
Marc Fogel meets with President Trump after being wrongfully
detained by Russia
US NewsMetroLong IslandPoliticsWorld News
13.03.2025, 11:19 Trump agreed to release Russian bitcoin fraud suspect Alexander Vinnik for Marc Fogel
https://nypost.com/2025/02/12/us-news/trump-agreed-to-release-russian-bitcoin-fraud-suspect-alexander-vinnik-for-marc-fogel/ 1/11

59. In December 2020, Vinnik was convicted by a French court of money laundering and sentenced
to five years in prison. In May 2024, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering
before a San Francisco federal judge. 
Vinnik had not registered BTC-e in the US as a money services business, despite having several
customers in America, and the DOJ had said his case showed just how far the department could
reach to thwart cybercrime around the world.
“We view this as a very fair deal. We are not trading the Merchant of Death for a basketball
player,” a White House official told The Post, referring to former President Joe Biden swapping
basketball star Brittney Griner for notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout.
President Trump welcomes Marc Fogel back to the United Stated after he was released from Russian custody,
on February 11, 2025.
Getty Images
3
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13.03.2025, 11:19 Trump agreed to release Russian bitcoin fraud suspect Alexander Vinnik for Marc Fogel
https://nypost.com/2025/02/12/us-news/trump-agreed-to-release-russian-bitcoin-fraud-suspect-alexander-vinnik-for-marc-fogel/ 2/11 The second administration official added that Vinnik is “currently in custody in northern California
awaiting transportation back to Russia.”
Fogel returned to the US Tuesday night after being held captive in Russia for three and a half
years on marijuana charges.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, told reporters at the White House on Wednesday he
got a call the previous day that Fogel had been released by Russia and was instructed by Trump
to get him back to the US.
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arrived at home where actor, wife died
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will block GOP funding bill
Alexander Vinnik (center) was accused of laundering money through a digital currency exchange that he ran.
3
13.03.2025, 11:19 Trump agreed to release Russian bitcoin fraud suspect Alexander Vinnik for Marc Fogel
https://nypost.com/2025/02/12/us-news/trump-agreed-to-release-russian-bitcoin-fraud-suspect-alexander-vinnik-for-marc-fogel/ 3/11

60. “I would say that without President Trump’s election, none of this would’ve happened,” Witkoff
said of the exchange, noting that the agreement “came together” in the last few days.
The envoy also said Saudi Arabia was involved in finalizing the swap.
The president personally met Fogel at the White House Tuesday night and gave him a tour of the
Lincoln Bedroom. 
Fogel kissed the ground after disembarking from his plane and stepping on American soil. 
“I want you to know that I am not a hero in this at all. And President Trump is a hero,” the former
detainee said late Tuesday night.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
Fogel arrives in the United States after being held in Russia for three and
a half years.
@WhiteHouse/X
3
13.03.2025, 11:19 Trump agreed to release Russian bitcoin fraud suspect Alexander Vinnik for Marc Fogel
https://nypost.com/2025/02/12/us-news/trump-agreed-to-release-russian-bitcoin-fraud-suspect-alexander-vinnik-for-marc-fogel/ 4/11 What do you think? Post a comment.
Trump has indicated another American is set to be released as soon as Wednesday, without
providing their identity. 
Several Americans are still detained in Russia, including 72-year-old Stephen Hubbard, who was
accused of fighting the Russian army with Ukrainian mercenaries. 
FILED UNDER DONALD TRUMP , RUSSIA , TEACHERS , 2/12/25
22
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13.03.2025, 11:19 Trump agreed to release Russian bitcoin fraud suspect Alexander Vinnik for Marc Fogel
https://nypost.com/2025/02/12/us-news/trump-agreed-to-release-russian-bitcoin-fraud-suspect-alexander-vinnik-for-marc-fogel/ 5/11

61. US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime
kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official
Detained in Russia since 2021, Marc Fogel landed back in the U.S. on Tuesday.
ByKatherine Faulders, Aaron Katersky, Luke Barr, Peter Charalambous, and Kevin Shalvey
February 12, 2025, 8:07 PM
The United States is preparing to return cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik to
Russian custody as part of an exchange for American Marc Fogel, a U.S. official said
Wednesday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to identify Vinnik but acknowledged
earlier Wednesday that a Russian citizen was freed in exchange for Fogel, who had
been held in Russian since his arrest in 2021.
US swaps Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpinABC News’ Shannon Kingston reports on the
release of Fogel, 63, who had been serving a 14-year prison sentence in a Russian prison colony after being
arrested in 2021 on drug charges. 2:54
Video Live Shows Shop Stream on
13.03.2025, 11:18 US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official - ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-held-us-released-wake-fogel-release-kremlin/story?id=118725555 1/8 "This citizen of the Russian Federation will also be returned to Russia in the coming
days," Peskov said Wednesday.
Fogel was returned to the United States on Tuesday.
Vinnik's lawyers, Arkady Bukh & Associates, said he remained in the U.S. on
Wednesday afternoon.
"At the moment, we can confirm that a hearing has recently been held in the Federal
Court of the State of Florida regarding Mr. Vinnik," they said in a statement.
"However, due to the judge's decision, the materials of the hearing are classified, and
we cannot comment on its course and content."
Vinnik, the owner and operator of one of the world's largest currency exchanges, was
allegedly instrumental in facilitating the transfer of billions of dollars for criminals
across the globe, supporting drug trafficking rings, ransomware attacks and the
corruption of public officials.
Last year, Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder billions of dollars through
cryptocurrency exchange BTC-e. The Department of Justice alleged under Vinnik's
operation, BTC-e facilitated over $9 billion in worldwide transactions, serving as one
of the main ways for cyber criminals to launder and move their criminal proceeds.
MORE: Marc Fogel greeted by Trump at the White House after being freed from
Russia
13.03.2025, 11:18 US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official - ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-held-us-released-wake-fogel-release-kremlin/story?id=118725555 2/8

62. BTC-e has been implicated in multiple wide-ranging crimes, according to the
Department of Justice, which alleges Vinnik himself was responsible for more than
$120 million in losses.
As part of the deal, Vinnik is forfeiting $100 million of his criminal proceeds, an
official said.
NurPhoto via Getty Images, FILE
In this Oct. 11, 2017 file photo Alexander Vinnik escorted to the courthouse of Thessaloniki to examine the
Russian request for extradition of the accused in Russia, Thessaloniki, Greece.
13.03.2025, 11:18 US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official - ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-held-us-released-wake-fogel-release-kremlin/story?id=118725555 3/8 White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it "a very good deal for the United
States of America and for the rest of the world."
She continued, "As part of this exchange, he has forfeited more than $100 million that
he obtained in that illegal crime. And in exchange, of course, we got Marc Fogel, who
is a middle school teacher who kissed the American soil that kissed the ground last
night when he returned to the United States of America. It was a great deal. And a
great day for our country."
Vinnik was arrested in Greece in July 2017 after he was charged in a 21-count
indictment that implicated the Russian cryptocurrency operator in the infamous 2014
hack of Mt. Gox, which at one point handled more than 70% of the world's bitcoin
transaction. The DOJ alleges Vinnik laundered money he received as a result of the
hack to conceal his involvement in the subsequent investigation of Mt. Gox's collapse.
Vinnik and his lawyers have been outspoken about their interest in a potential
prisoner swap, making the unusual request in 2023 to be released from a protective
order so they could lobby for an exchange.
"Mr. Vinnik's case is unquestionably one of significant public interest. He has been
the subject of political negotiations over a prisoner swap with Russia at the highest
levels of the government," his lawyers wrote in a court filing.
Vinnik's sentencing in California was scheduled to take place in June, though a
federal judge held an abruptly scheduled status conference in the case Tuesday.
Ahead of his sentencing, Vinnik was housed at Alameda County Jail in California and
was transferred Tuesday, ABC News has learned.
13.03.2025, 11:18 US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official - ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-held-us-released-wake-fogel-release-kremlin/story?id=118725555 4/8

63. President Donald Trump didn't disclose on Tuesday the negotiations that led to
Fogel's release or say whether there had been any conversations with Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
"I can only say this: We got a man home whose mother and family wanted him
desperately," Trump said.
Mike Waltz, the White House national security adviser, said in a statement on
Tuesday that Washington had "negotiated an exchange that serves as a show of good
faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the
brutal and terrible war in Ukraine." His statement did not include details on the
exchange.
Trump earlier on Tuesday had been asked if Russia had given the United States
anything in return.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
President Donald Trump holds an event to welcome back released American schoolteacher Marc Fogel, who
had been held in Russia since 2021, at the White House in Washington, D.C., Feb. 11, 2025.
13.03.2025, 11:18 US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official - ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-held-us-released-wake-fogel-release-kremlin/story?id=118725555 5/8 "Not much, no," Trump said. "They were very nice. We were treated very nicely by
Russia, actually."
Peskov on Wednesday declined to say whether additional prisoner exchanges were
expected in the future, but said that "contacts between the relevant departments have
intensified in the last few days."
Then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in October 2024 that Fogel, an American
teacher, had been "wrongfully detained," the State Department confirmed to ABC
Turar Kazangapov/Reuters
In this file photo, Russian President Vladimir Putin talks to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov during a
signing ceremony following Russia-Kazakhstan talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, Nov. 27, 2024.
13.03.2025, 11:18 US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official - ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-held-us-released-wake-fogel-release-kremlin/story?id=118725555 6/8

64. News.
The U.S. tried but was unable to include Fogel in the large prisoner swap in August
2024 that freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine
Paul Whelan, a State Department spokesperson said last year.
ABC News' Joe Simonetti, Michelle Stoddart, Nathan Luna and Meredith Deliso
contributed to this report.
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13.03.2025, 11:18 US to swap Marc Fogel for Russian cybercrime kingpin Alexander Vinnik: Official - ABC News
https://abcnews.go.com/International/russian-held-us-released-wake-fogel-release-kremlin/story?id=118725555 7/8 BY ANDY GREENBERGTHE BIG STORYFEB 10, 2025 6:00 AM
The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into
Nigerian Prison
As a US federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan pioneered modern crypto
investigations. Then at Binance, he got trapped between the world’s
biggest crypto exchange and a government determined to make it pay.
PHOTOGRAPHS: PIERA MOORE
SAVE
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.1… 1/44

65. Listen to this story
00:00 01:07:17
1x
15 15
AT 8 AM on March 23 of 2024, Tigran Gambaryan woke up on a couch in Abuja,
Nigeria, where he’d been dozing since the predawn call to prayer. The house
around him, which often buzzed with the nearby sound of generators, was eerily
quiet. In that silence, the harsh reality of Gambaryan’s situation flooded back into
his mind the way it had every morning for nearly a month: That he and his
colleague at the cryptocurrency firm Binance, Nadeem Anjarwalla, were being
held hostage in a Nigerian government-owned compound—detained without
access to their own passports under military guard in a building circled by
barbed-wire walls.
Gambaryan got up from the couch. The 39-year-old Armenian-American wore a
white T-shirt over his compact, muscular build, his right arm covered with an
Eastern Orthodox tattoo. His usually shaved head and trimmed black beard were
now stubbled and scraggly from a month of growth. Gambaryan found the
compound’s cook, and asked if she would buy him some cigarettes. Then he
walked out into the house’s internal courtyard, and began to restlessly pace and
make phone calls to his lawyers and other contacts at Binance—the world’s
largest cryptocurrency exchange—restarting his daily efforts to “unfuck the
situation,” as he put it.
Just the day before, the pair of Binance staffers and their crypto giant employer
were told they were about to be charged with tax evasion. The two men seemed
to be wedged into the middle of a bureaucratic conflict between an
unaccountable foreign government and one of the most controversial players in
the crypto economy. Now they were not only being confined against their will,
with no end in sight, but also charged as criminals.
Gambaryan spoke on the phone for more than two hours as the sun rose in the
sky and began to bake the courtyard. When he finally hung up and went back
inside, he still couldn’t see any sign of Anjarwalla. Before dawn that morning,
Anjarwalla had gone to the local mosque to pray, accompanied by minders who
kept him under close watch. When Anjarwalla returned to the house, he had told
Gambaryan he was going back upstairs to sleep.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.1… 2/44 Several hours had passed since then, so Gambaryan went up to their second-floor
bedroom to check on his colleague. He nudged the door open to find Anjarwalla
seemingly asleep, his foot sticking out from under the sheets. Gambaryan called
out to him from the doorway but got no response. For a moment, he worried that
Anjarwalla might be having another panic attack—the young British-Kenyan
Binance exec had been sleeping in Gambaryan’s bed for days, too anxious to
spend nights alone.
Gambaryan walked across the dark room—he had heard the house’s government
caretakers were behind on the electricity bills and short on diesel for the
generators, so all-day blackouts were common—and put his hand on the blanket.
It sank, strangely, as if there was no actual body beneath it.
Gambaryan pulled the sheets away. He found, underneath, a T-shirt stuffed with a
pillow. He looked down to the foot that had been protruding from the blanket and
now saw that it was, in fact, a sock with a water bottle inside it.
Gambaryan didn’t call out for Anjarwalla again or search the house. He knew
already that his Binance colleague and fellow prisoner had escaped. He was
immediately aware, too, that his own situation was about to become far worse.
He didn’t yet know just how much worse—that he would be thrown in a Nigerian
jail, charged with money laundering crimes that carried a 20 year prison
sentence, and denied medical care even as his health deteriorated to the point of
near death, all while being used as a pawn in a multibillion-dollar crypto
extortion scheme.
For that moment, he just sat on the bed in silence, in the dark, 6,000 miles from
home, and considered the fact that he was now utterly alone.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.1… 3/44

66. Challenge coins from Gambaryan's time at IRS Criminal Investigation and Binance, as well as his handcuffs and a round
from his federally issued firearm. PHOTOGRAPH: PIERA MOORE
TIGRAN GAMBARYAN’S SPIRALING Nigerian nightmare stemmed, at least in
part, from a clash that’s been a decade and a half in the making. Since the
mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto revealed Bitcoin to the world in 2009,
cryptocurrency has promised a kind of libertarian holy grail: digital money that
can’t be controlled by any government, defying inflation and crossing borders
with impunity, as if it exists in an entirely different dimension. Yet the reality
today is that crypto has become a multitrillion-dollar industry, run to a large
degree by companies with flashy offices and well-paid executives—assets and
people that exist very much in this dimension, in countries with laws and law
enforcement agencies capable of applying pressure to crypto companies and
their staff just as they can with any other real-world industry.
Before Gambaryan became one of the world’s most prominent victims of that
collision between anarchic financial technology and global law enforcement, he
embodied it in a very different sense: as one of world’s most effective and
innovative crypto-focused cops. For a decade prior to going to work for Binance
in 2021, Gambaryan served as a special agent for IRS Criminal Investigation, the
law enforcement division of the US tax authority. At IRS-CI, Gambaryan
pioneered the technique of deciphering Bitcoin’s blockchain to trace
cryptocurrency and identify suspects. He’d used that follow-the-money playbook
to take down one cybercriminal conspiracy after another and entirely flip the
myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity on its head.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.1… 4/44 Starting in 2014, following the FBI seizure of the Silk Road dark-web drug market,
it was Gambaryan who traced the bitcoins that identified two corrupt federal
agents who had taken over $1 million from the drug market as they investigated it
—the first time blockchain evidence was ever included in a criminal complaint.
Over the next several years, Gambaryan helped track down half a billion dollars’
worth of bitcoins stolen from the first crypto exchange, Mt. Gox, eventually ID-ing
a group of Russian hackers behind the heist.
In 2017, Gambaryan worked with the blockchain analysis startup Chainalysis to
create a secret Bitcoin tracing method that located—and allowed the FBI to seize
—the server that hosted AlphaBay, a dark-web crime market that was estimated
to be 10 times the size of the Silk Road. Just months later, Gambaryan played a
key role in the takedown of the crypto-funded child sexual abuse video network,
Welcome to Video, the biggest-ever market of its kind, along with the arrest of
337 of the site’s users worldwide and the rescue of 23 children.
Finally, in 2020, Gambaryan and another IRS-CI agent traced and seized nearly
70,000 bitcoins that had been stolen from the Silk Road years earlier by a hacker.
That sum today is worth $7 billion, making it the biggest criminal seizure of
currency of any kind to flow into the US Treasury.
“The cases he was involved in are a who’s who of the biggest crypto cases of that
time,” says Will Frentzen, a former US prosecutor who at times worked closely
with Gambaryan and prosecuted the crimes Gambaryan uncovered. “He was
innovative in investigating things in ways that very few people in the country had
figured out, and incredibly selfless in terms of who got credit.” In the fight against
cryptocurrency-powered crime, Frentzen says, “I don’t think anyone had a bigger
impact.”
After that epic run, Gambaryan took a private sector job that shocked many of his
former government colleagues. He became head of the investigations team at
Binance, a behemoth that oversaw the daily trade of hundreds of billions of
dollars worth of crypto assets—and had a reputation for doing so with remarkably
little concern for when its users were breaking the law.
When Gambaryan joined Binance in the fall of 2021, the company was already
under investigation by the US Justice Department—a probe that would eventually
determine that it had enabled billions of dollars’ worth of transactions that
violated anti-money-laundering laws and evaded international sanctions on Iran,
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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67. Cuba, Syria, and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. The company had directly
processed more than $100 million in crypto from the Russian dark-web crime
market Hydra, too, and had even in some cases cashed out funds from the sale of
child sexual abuse materials and the financing of designated terrorist groups, the
DOJ would later allege.
Some of Gambaryan’s old law enforcement peers quietly grumbled about him
selling out—or worse, joining the enemy. But Gambaryan insists he was actually
taking on the most important role of his career. As part of Binance’s efforts to
belatedly clean up its act after years of quick and dirty growth, Gambaryan built a
new team of investigators within the company—recruiting many of the best
agents he’d worked with at IRS-CI and other agencies around the world—and
helped open up Binance’s cooperation with law enforcement like never before.
By digging through data from a volume of transactions bigger than that of the
New York Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, and the Tokyo Stock
Exchange combined, Gambaryan says his team enabled busts of child sexual
abusers, terrorists, and organized crime members on an immense, global scale.
“There were literally tens of thousands of cases around the world that we assisted
with. I probably had a bigger impact at Binance than I did in law enforcement,”
Gambaryan told me at one point. “I’m completely proud of the work we did, and
I’ll debate anyone on the merits of me joining Binance any day.”
Still, that new, more law-abiding Binance that Gambaryan was helping to create
couldn’t erase the company’s past as a rogue exchange—or spare it from the
consequences of those crimes. In November 2023, US attorney general Merrick
Garland announced at a press conference that Binance had agreed to pay $4.3
billion in fines and forfeitures, one of the biggest corporate penalties in the
history of US criminal justice. The company’s founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao,
was personally fined $150 million and later sentenced to four months in prison.
The US wasn’t the only country with Binance grievances. By early 2024, Nigeria,
too, was casting blame on the company, not only for the past compliance
violations it had confessed to in its US plea agreement, but also for allegedly
contributing to the devaluation of Nigeria’s currency, the naira. Over late 2023
and early 2024, as the naira lost close to 70 percent of its value, Nigerians had
rushed to trade their local currency for crypto, in particular blockchain-based
“stablecoins” pegged to the US dollar.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.1… 6/44 The real cause of that disastrous sell-off was the decision by the administration of
the new Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, to relax restrictions on the exchange
rate between the naira and the dollar, combined with the revelation that the
Central Bank of Nigeria held a surprisingly small reserve of foreign currency, says
Amaka Anku, an analyst and Africa head at business advisory Eurasia Group.
Once the naira began to tumble, though, cryptocurrency’s role as an unregulated
means to sell off naira created more downward pressure, she says. “You can’t say
Binance or any crypto exchange caused this devaluation,” says Anku. “But they
did exacerbate it.”
For years, cryptocurrency’s advocates had imagined a day when Satoshi’s
invention would offer a safe haven for citizens of a country experiencing an
inflation crisis. Now that day had come, and the government of the nation with
the biggest economy on the African continent was furious. In December 2023, a
committee in Nigeria’s National Assembly called upon Binance executives to
attend a hearing in its capital, Abuja, to explain how it would right its alleged
wrongs. And when Binance assembled its Nigerian delegation, it naturally tapped
its star investigator and former federal agent, the symbol of its commitment to
partnership with law enforcement and governments around the world: Tigran
Gambaryan.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.1… 7/44

68. Gambaryan with awards and memorabilia from his career at IRS-CI and Binance. PHOTOGRAPH: PIERA MOORE
BEFORE THE COERCION and the hostage-taking, there was the demand for a
bribe.
Gambaryan was a few days into his trip to Abuja in January of last year, and it had
been going well. As a kind of olive branch, he’d met with investigators at the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, or EFCC—essentially the Nigerian
counterpart to Gambaryan’s old shop at the IRS, responsible for everything from
hunting scammers to investigating government corruption—and discussed
training its staff in cryptocurrency investigations. Then he joined a larger meeting
with Binance execs and members of the Nigerian House of Representatives, a
roundtable discussion of business people and government officials in suits
assuring one another in friendly tones that they would work out their differences.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.1… 8/44 When Gambaryan first arrived in Nigeria, he’d been picked up at the airport by
Olalekan Ogunjobi, a detective at the EFCC who had read about Gambaryan’s
career and professed his admiration for Gambaryan’s legendary record as a
federal agent. Almost every evening of the trip, Ogunjobi had met up with him for
dinner at his hotel, the palm-tree-lined Transcorp Hilton Abuja. Gambaryan
shared advice with Ogunjobi about investigative work in the world of crypto
crime, how to run a case, how to set up a task force. They swapped war stories,
and when Gambaryan gave Ogunjobi a copy of Tracers in the Dark—a book I
wrote about cryptocurrency tracing that featured Gambaryan as one of its central
subjects—Ogunjobi asked him to sign it.
Then, one evening when Gambaryan was at dinner with Ogunjobi and a group of
Binance colleagues, a Binance staffer at the table got a phone call from one of the
company’s lawyers. Beneath the pleasantries, the lawyers told Gambaryan, the
meeting with the Nigerian officials hadn’t been as friendly as it seemed. The
officials now were asking for a payment of $150 million to make Binance’s issues
in the country go away—to be paid in cryptocurrency, directly into officials’
crypto wallets—and suggesting that they wouldn’t let the group leave the country
until the money was received.
Gambaryan was so disturbed, he says, that he didn’t even offer an explanation to
Ogunjobi or say goodbye as he gathered up Binance’s staffers and hurried out of
the restaurant to reassemble in a Transcorp Hilton conference room to discuss
their dilemma. Cough up what appeared to be a straightforward bribe, and they’d
be violating a US law known as the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Refuse, and
they might be detained indefinitely. The team decided on a third option: Get the
hell out of Nigeria immediately. They spent that night in the conference room
strategizing and planning how to get all the Binance staffers on planes as soon as
possible, changing their flights to early the following morning.
The Binance team gathered that morning on the second floor of the hotel with
their suitcases packed, avoiding the lobby for fear that Nigerian officials might be
staking them out to prevent them from leaving. They took Ubers to the airport,
rushed nervously through security, and boarded flights home—all without
incident, feeling collectively like they’d dodged a bullet.
Not long after he’d gotten home to the suburbs of Atlanta, Gambaryan received a
call from Ogunjobi. Gambaryan says the Nigerian expressed his dismay that the
Binance team had been pressured for a bribe, and said he was scandalized by his
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.1… 9/44

69. countrymen’s behavior. He suggested that Gambaryan report the demand to
Nigerian authorities so they could pursue an anti-corruption investigation.
Eventually Ogunjobi set up a call between Gambaryan and Ahmad Sa’ad
Abubakar, an official at the EFCC who was described to Gambaryan as the right-
hand man of Nigeria’s national security adviser, Nuhu Ribadu. Ogunjobi had told
Gambaryan that Ribadu had made his name as a corruption fighter—he’d even
given a TEDx talk about it. Now Ribadu was inviting Gambaryan to come meet
with him to resolve Binance’s problems in Nigeria and get to the bottom of the
bribery attempt. In person.
Gambaryan told his Binance colleagues about the call, which sounded like it
might offer a way out of the company’s Nigerian conflict. Perhaps, Binance’s
executives and Gambaryan began to think, Gambaryan could use this invitation
to go back to Nigeria and untangle the company’s increasingly problematic
relationship with the country’s government. As fraught as the idea sounded—they
had only just fled the same country weeks earlier—Gambaryan believed he’d
been offered a friendly meeting with a powerful official, and given the personal
assurance of his friend Ogunjobi. Binance’s staff in the region told Gambaryan
that they’d done their own checks and heard that the offer of finding a resolution
seemed legitimate.
Gambaryan had told his wife, Yuki, about the bribe attempt and the invitation to
return to Nigeria. To her, the idea sounded glaringly dangerous. She repeatedly
asked Gambaryan not to go.
Gambaryan admits now that he was perhaps still operating with an image of
himself as a federal agent of the US government—with both the protections and
sense of responsibility that carried. “I guess it was part of what was left over from
before: When duty calls, you do it,” he says. “I was asked to go.”
So, in what he now considers one of the most ill-advised decisions of his life,
Gambaryan packed his suitcase, kissed Yuki and their two small children
goodbye, and left in the early morning hours of February 25 to catch a flight back
to Abuja.
THE SECOND TRIP began with another airport pickup from Ogunjobi, who
repeated all of his reassurances on their drive to the Transcorp Hilton and at
dinner at the hotel that evening. This time, rather than a full coterie of Binance
staff, Gambaryan was accompanied only by Nadeem Anjarwalla, the company’s
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 10/44 regional manager for East Africa, a fresh-faced British-Kenyan Stanford grad with
a baby son back in Nairobi.
When Gambaryan and Anjarwalla walked into their meeting with Nigerian
officials the next day, however, they were surprised to see that Abubakar was
accompanied by a full table of staff from the EFCC and Nigeria's Central Bank.
Very quickly, it became clear that the meeting was not about Nigerian corruption.
After a few innocuous questions about Binance’s cooperation with Nigerian law
enforcement, Abubakar quickly turned the conversation to the EFCC’s request for
certain trading data about Binance’s Nigerian users. Binance had responded with
only the data for the last year, Abubakar said—not what he’d asked for.
Gambaryan, feeling ambushed, said it must have been an oversight due to a last-
minute request, and he’d get him everything he requested. Abubakar looked
visibly rankled, but the meeting went ahead with the usual promises of
cooperation and ended with friendly swapping of business cards.
Tigran Gambaryan (left) and Nadeem Anjarwalla in the office of the National Security Adviser in Abuja, just before they
were detained. PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF TIGRAN GAMBARYAN
Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were left in a hallway to await their next
appointment. After a while, Anjarwalla got up to use the bathroom. When he
returned, he said he’d overheard some of the officials they’d just met in a nearby
conference room sounding angry, as Gambaryan remembers it.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 11/44

70. After close to two hours of waiting, Ogunjobi returned to lead them into a
different conference room. The officials inside this one had a noticeably somber
air, Gambaryan remembers, as everyone sat silently waiting for someone—
Gambaryan didn’t know whom—to arrive. He noticed that Ogunjobi had a look of
blank shock on his face and wouldn’t meet Gambaryan’s eye. “What the fuck is
going on?” he thought to himself.
Then a man named Hamma Adama Bello, a bearded EFCC official in a gray suit
who looked to be in his mid-forties, walked into the room. Rather than offer any
greeting or ask questions, he put a folder down on the table and immediately
launched into a diatribe, as Gambaryan remembers it, about how Binance was
“destroying our economy” and financing terrorism.
Then he explained what was going to happen: Gambaryan and Anjarwalla would
be taken to their hotels to pack their things and moved to a different location,
where they would stay until Binance handed over all the data it had on every
Nigerian who had ever used the exchange.
Gambaryan felt his adrenaline spike. He protested that he didn’t have the
authority or even the ability to give the Nigerians so much data—that he had, in
fact, come to Nigeria to report a bribery allegation to Bello’s agency.
Bello seemed surprised, as if it were his first time hearing about any such bribe,
then immediately disregarded it. The meeting was over. Gambaryan managed to
quickly type out a text message on his phone to his boss, Binance’s chief
compliance officer Noah Perlman, telling him they were about to be detained.
Then the officials took Gambaryan’s and Anjarwalla’s phones.
The two men were led outside to a black Land Cruiser with tinted windows. The
SUV took them to the Transcorp Hilton, where they were led back to their rooms
—Anjarwalla by Bello and another official, Gambaryan by Ogunjobi. They were
told to pack their belongings.
“You know this is fucked up, right?” Gambaryan remembers saying to Ogunjobi,
who he says could barely meet his gaze.
“I know. I know,” Ogunjobi replied, according to Gambaryan.
Then the Land Cruiser drove them to a large, two-story house in its own walled
compound, with marble floors, enough bedrooms for the two Binance staffers
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 12/44 and several EFCC officials, and a private cook. Gambaryan would later learn that
it was officially the government-designated house for Ribadu, the national
security adviser, but that he had chosen to live in his own home and leave this
property for official use—in this case, as a holding pen for Gambaryan and
Anjarwalla.
That night, there were no more demands from Bello. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla
were served a meal of Nigerian stew made by the house’s cook and told to go to
bed. Gambaryan lay awake, his mind racing, near panic from the feeling of being
incommunicado without his phone, unable even to tell his family where he was.
Finally at 2 am, he fell asleep, then woke up a few hours later just before the
muezzin’s call to prayer. Too anxious to stay in bed, he walked out into the
internal courtyard of the house and chain-smoked cigarettes as he considered the
clusterfuck that he now found himself in: He was being held hostage and
implicated in the same financial crimes he’d spent his career fighting.
But even more than that irony, he was overwhelmed with the feeling of total
uncertainty. “What the fuck is going to happen to me? What is Yuki going to go
through?” he asked himself, thinking of his wife, frantic thoughts cycling. “How
long are we going to be here?”
Gambaryan stood in the courtyard, thinking and smoking, until the sun came up.
A view of barbed-wire walls from the Abuja guesthouse where Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were held for nearly a
month. PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF TIGRAN GAMBARYAN
THEN CAME THE interrogation.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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71. After the cook served breakfast—which Gambaryan was too stressed to eat—Bello
sat down with the detainees and told them what he’d need for their release: that
Binance turn over all data on Nigerians and that it disable peer-to-peer trading
for Nigerian users, a feature of Binance’s platform that allowed traders to
advertise crypto for sale at an exchange rate the traders partially controlled,
which the Nigerian officials felt was contributing to the naira’s freefall.
A third demand went unspoken in the room: that Binance pay a massive sum. As
the Nigerians held Gambaryan and Anjarwalla, their contacts were also back-
channeling with Binance executives, and the company was hearing requests that
it pay billions of dollars, according to people familiar with those conversations. At
one point, government officials even publicly told the BBC the fine would be at
least $10 billion, more than twice the record settlement Binance had paid the US.
(According to several people involved in those negotiations, Binance at some
points did offer a “down payment” based on what it agreed was an estimate of its
tax liability in Nigeria. But the offers were never accepted. Meanwhile, a day after
Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were detained, the US embassy received a bizarre
letter from the EFCC, stating that Gambaryan was being held “purely for the
purpose of constructive dialogue” and was “participating willingly in the
aforementioned strategic talks.”)
Gambaryan repeated to Bello that he had no real role in Binance’s business
decisions and couldn’t help him with any of his demands. Bello, he says,
responded with long, loud speeches about the harm Binance had allegedly done
and what Nigeria was owed. At times, Gambaryan says, Bello showed off the gun
he carried and photos of himself training with the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, an
apparent display of his authority and US connections.
Ogunjobi, too, participated in the questioning. He was quieter and more
respectful than Bello, Gambaryan says—but no longer the deferential mentee.
When Gambaryan at one point referred to all the help he’d given Nigerian law
enforcement, Ogunjobi responded that he’d seen comments on LinkedIn that
Binance had hired him only to give the impression of legitimacy, a jab that
shocked Gambaryan after all their previous conversations.
Incensed and unable to give the Nigerians what they wanted, Gambaryan
demanded an attorney, access to the US embassy, and his phone back. All his
requests were refused, though he was allowed to call his terrified wife with a
guard present.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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wouldn’t eat until he was given access to an attorney and contact with the
embassy. It took five days of that hunger strike, stuck in the house surrounded by
government minders and guards, dazedly watching Nigerian TV on the couch,
before the officials relented.
Pages of a journal the EFCC officials k ept of the two men's detention. PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF TIGRAN
GAMBARYAN
He and Anjarwalla were given back their phones, but told not to speak to any
media, and officials took their passports away. They were allowed to meet with
local Nigerian attorneys that Binance had hired to represent them. And at the end
of a week of detention, Gambaryan was driven to a Nigerian government building
to meet with State Department officials there, who said they would monitor
Gambaryan’s situation but that, for now, there was nothing they could do to get
him free.
They settled into a “Groundhog Day” routine, as Gambaryan later described it to
his wife, puttering around their new home. The house was spacious and clean but
run-down, with a leaky roof and no electricity on many days. Gambaryan
befriended the cook and some of his minders, and watched hours of pirated
episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender with them. Anjarwalla got into a routine of
doing yoga and drinking smoothies the cook made for him every morning.
Anjarwalla seemed to be taking the anxiety of their captivity harder than
Gambaryan, and was upset that he would likely miss his son’s first birthday. The
Nigerians had taken his British passport, but they hadn’t realized that Anjarwalla
still had his Kenyan one. He and Gambaryan joked about escaping. Yet
Gambaryan says he never seriously considered it. Yuki had told him “not to do
anything stupid,” he says, and he didn’t intend to.
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72. Then one day, lying on the couch, Anjarwalla told Gambaryan he was feeling ill
and freezing cold. Gambaryan piled blankets on him, but he kept shivering.
Eventually the Nigerians took Anjarwalla and Gambaryan to the hospital in
another Land Cruiser and tested Anjarwalla for malaria. Gambaryan says the tests
came back negative, and doctors told Anjarwalla that he had instead suffered a
panic attack. Every night from then on, Gambaryan says, Anjarwalla would sleep
in his bed next to him, too afraid to sleep alone.
By the middle of Gambaryan and Anjarwalla’s second week of captivity, Binance
had agreed to the demand that it shut down its Nigerian peer-to-peer trading
feature and even removed all naira trading on the exchange. The EFCC officials
told Gambaryan and Anjarwalla to pack their things in preparation to finally be
released. The two men took the good news seriously enough that Gambaryan
used his phone to shoot a video tour of the house as a kind of souvenir of the
strange weeks he’d spent there.
Left: Gambaryan and Anjarwalla in the government guesthouse where they were held. Gambaryan is pointing to a
surveillance camera in the house's living room. Right: Gambaryan's view from the guesthouse's couch, where he spent
weeks killing time, often watching pirated television episodes with the government officials who were assigned to be
his minders. PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF TIGRAN GAMBARYAN
But before they could be freed, a government minder drove them in the Land
Cruiser to the EFCC office. The agency’s chairman there demanded to know if
Binance had turned over all of its data on Nigerians. When he learned it hadn’t, he
immediately rescinded their release and sent the two men back to the guest
house.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 16/44 Around that time, the crypto site DLNews was the first outlet to publicly reveal
that two Binance executives were being detained in Nigeria, without naming
them. The Wall Street Journal and WIRED reported days later that the two
detainees were Anjarwalla and Gambaryan.
Bello was furious about the news leaking, Gambaryan says, blaming him and
Anjarwalla. If they would just hand over the information the government
requested, they could go free, he told them. Gambaryan, losing his temper, asked
Bello how he expected him to produce that data. “Do you want me to take it out
of my right pocket? Or my left one?” he remembers asking Bello, standing up and
theatrically emptying one pocket and then the other. “I don’t have any control
over this.”
Weeks went by, and the negotiations were still at an impasse. Ramadan had
begun, and Gambaryan would get up before dawn every morning with Anjarwalla
for his prayers and then fast with him throughout the day in a show of friendly
solidarity.
Then, one morning after nearly a month in the guesthouse, that routine came to
an abrupt end. Gambaryan woke up on the couch after Anjarwalla returned from
the mosque, went looking for his colleague, and discovered the shirt with the
pillow stuffed in it. The water bottle in a sock. The empty bed. Anjarwalla had
escaped.
Gambaryan would later learn that Anjarwalla had managed to get a flight out of
the country. He figures that his colleague must have somehow jumped the
compound’s wall, gotten past the guards—who were often asleep early in the
morning—paid for a ride to the airport, then used his second passport to board a
plane.
Gambaryan knew already that everything about his time in Nigeria was about to
change. He went out into the courtyard and recorded a selfie video to send to
Yuki and his colleagues at Binance, speaking into the camera as he paced.
“I’ve been detained by the Nigerian government for a month. I don’t know what’s
going to happen to me after today,” he said in a quiet, controlled voice. “I’ve done
nothing wrong. I’ve been a cop my whole life. I just ask the Nigerian government
to let me go, and I ask the United States government to assist me. I need your
help, guys. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get out of this without your help. Please
help.”
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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73. Gambaryan's video plea for help, which he shot just after Anjarwalla's escape—and just before he
was taken from the guesthouse and put into solitary confinement.
WHEN THE NIGERIANS learned Anjarwalla was gone, the guards and minders
took away Gambaryan’s phone and frantically searched the house. Then they all
suddenly disappeared, replaced by new faces.
As Gambaryan waited for the crackdown he knew was coming, he persuaded one
of the Nigerians to let him discreetly borrow their phone and went into the
bathroom to call his wife, reaching Yuki in the middle of the night. For the first
time in their 17-year relationship, she says, Gambaryan told her he was scared.
Beginning to cry, she went into the closet to speak to him without waking up their
children. Then Gambaryan abruptly said goodbye—someone was coming.
A military official told Gambaryan to pack his things, that he was being released.
He knew better than to believe it. He packed nonetheless and got into the car
outside, with Ogunjobi waiting in the vehicle. When Gambaryan asked Ogunjobi
where they were going, Gambaryan says, he answered vaguely that maybe he was
going home, but not today—then stared silently at his phone.
The car eventually arrived at the EFCC compound. But instead of parking near its
headquarters, it pulled up to the agency’s detention facility. Gambaryan began to
swear at his captors in outrage, too angry to care any longer about offending
them.
As he was being led into the EFCC’s detention building, he saw a group of his
former minders from the safehouse, now jailed together in one of the cells, under
investigation for allowing Anjarwalla’s escape or even suspected of collaborating
with him. Then he was put into his own cell, in solitary.
It was, as Gambaryan describes it, a box with no windows. Just a shower that
produced cold water with a timed button and, incongruously, a Posturepedic
mattress on the floor. The room’s walls crawled with as many as a half dozen
cockroaches of all sizes. Despite the sweltering Abuja heat, the cell had no air-
conditioning or even ventilation, only what Gambaryan remembers as “the
world’s loudest fan” humming day and night. “I can still hear that goddamn fan,”
he says.
Left alone in that cell, Gambaryan says he disassociated from his body, his
surroundings, his hellish situation. He didn’t think about the roaches. For the first
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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By the next morning, Gambaryan hadn’t eaten in more than 24 hours. Another
detainee gave him some crackers. He soon realized that his survival depended on
Ogunjobi, who would come by his cell every few days to give him food and
sometimes let him use his phone when he was briefly let out of solitary
confinement. Soon, Gambaryan’s old minders began to share with him the meals
brought by their families, and Ogunjobi started coming less frequently—and
sometimes, Gambaryan said, refused to let him use his phone when he did. There
was no trace left of the wide-eyed fan of his work who had picked him up at the
airport. “It was almost like he enjoyed having the power over me,” Gambaryan
says.
The Nigerians who had been his guards just days before now became
Gambaryan’s only friends. He taught one young EFCC staffer the rules of chess,
and they’d play during the short hours before they were locked back into their
cells.
A couple of days after he was put in lockup, Gambaryan’s attorneys visited him
and told him he was now being charged with money laundering on top of the tax
evasion charges he already faced. The new charges carried 20 years in prison.
During his second week at the detention center, Gambaryan’s son turned 5. On
his birthday, Gambaryan was allowed to call his family from an EFCC phone and
smoke a few cigarettes, which were otherwise denied to him. He spoke for 20
minutes with his wife—whom he describes as “crushed” with anxiety—and his
kids. His son still didn’t know why he was gone. Yuki told Gambaryan that he’d
started crying for his father at random times and going into their home office to
sit in his chair. He explained to their daughter that he was still busy working out a
legal issue with the Nigerian government. Gambaryan would later discover that
she had googled his name two weeks into his detention, read the news, and knew
far more than she let on.
Aside from his brief visits with his fellow inmates and two books—a Dan Brown
novel given to him by an EFCC staffer and a Percy Jackson young adult storybook
randomly brought by his lawyers—he had nothing to occupy his mind. He
alternated between cyclically racing through angry curses and accusations
against those who had wronged him, self-recriminations for the decisions that
had led him to this point, and a kind of comatose emptiness.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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74. “It was just torture,” Gambaryan says. “I knew that if I stayed there, I was going to
lose my mind.”
A portrait of Gambaryan's family on his phone. PHOTOGRAPH: PIERA MOORE
AS ALONE AS Gambaryan felt, he hadn’t been forgotten. By the time he was in
the EFCC cell, a loose-knit collection of friends and supporters had mobilized to
answer the call for help in his video plea. Yet for the most part, it soon became
clear the real help he needed to get free wasn’t about to come from the Biden
administration.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 20/44 Within Binance, Gambaryan’s very first text message warning that he was being
detained had set off an immediate, unending whirlwind of daily war-room
meetings, hiring of lawyers and consultants, and phone calls to anyone in
government who might have any influence in Nigeria. Will Frentzen, the Bay
Area–based former US attorney who’d prosecuted many of Gambaryan’s biggest
cases before taking a private-sector job at the law firm Morrison Foerster, took on
Gambaryan’s case as his personal defense attorney. One of Gambaryan’s ex-
Binance colleagues, Patrick Hillman, knew the former Florida congressman
Connie Mack from work they’d done together on crisis response, and knew of
Mack’s experience resolving hostage situations. Mack agreed to lobby his
legislator contacts on Gambaryan’s behalf. Gambaryan’s old colleagues in the FBI,
too, immediately began pressing the bureau to demand Gambaryan’s release.
At higher levels of the executive branch, however, some of Gambaryan’s
supporters say their entreaties for help were met with cautious responses. “State
Department staff, from the first days of Gambaryan’s detention, worked to make
sure he was safe, healthy, and had legal representation, and pushed for his release
soon after he was criminally prosecuted,” according to one senior State official
who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity according to the department’s
policy. But at the same time, the Biden administration initially seemed ambivalent
about Gambaryan, according to half a dozen people involved in the efforts to get
him free. Binance, after all, had just agreed to a massive criminal penalty to the
Justice Department. The administration seemed to have little love for the crypto
industry as a whole, and Binance’s reputation was “toxic,” as one of Gambaryan’s
supporters put it.
“They thought maybe the Nigerians have a case,” says Frentzen. “They weren’t
sure what Tigran had done there. So they all took a step back.”
Gambaryan had also fallen into his Nigerian trap at a particularly dangerous
moment in geopolitics. The US ambassador to Nigeria had retired in 2023, and
the new ambassador wouldn’t officially take up the post until May of 2024.
Meanwhile, Niger and Chad had asked the US to withdraw its troops from both
countries as they tightened their relationship with Russia, leaving Nigeria as a key
US military ally in the region. This made the negotiations to free Gambaryan far
more complex than they might have been with the usual adversaries who
wrongfully detain Americans, like Russia or Iran. “Nigeria was the only game left
in town, and they knew it,” says Frentzen. “So this was bad. In terms of timing,
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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75. Tigran happened to have been one of the unluckiest sons of bitches on the face of
the earth.”
When Gambaryan was being held in the guesthouse, the diplomatic case might
have been clearer that he was a hostage, says Mack, the former congressman
lobbying for his release. But the criminal charges against him complicated the
picture. “The US government fell in line with that narrative,” Mack says. "They
wanted to let the legal process play out."
Frentzen and his more senior colleague at Morrison Foerster, former general
counsel to the office of the director of national intelligence, Robert Litt, says they
began to approach people in the White House to explain to them how flimsy the
criminal case against Gambaryan actually was. In the Nigerian prosecutors’ 300-
plus pages of “evidence” against Gambaryan, only two pages even mentioned
Gambaryan himself: One was an email showing that he worked at Binance.
Another was a scan of his business card.
Still, for months to come, the US government wouldn’t intervene in Gambaryan’s
criminal prosecution. The result, for Frentzen, was an appalling situation: After a
career in the federal service, the former IRS agent responsible for many of the
biggest cryptocurrency criminal busts and seizures in history was left with only
hands-off government support in the midst of what appeared to be, itself, a
crypto shakedown.
“This guy recovered billions of dollars for the US,” Frentzen remembers thinking,
“and we can’t get him out of a hole in Nigeria?”
IN EARLY APRIL, Gambaryan was taken to court for an arraignment hearing.
Wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of dark green pants, he was put on public
display, a personification of the villainous forces destroying the Nigerian
economy. As he sat down in a red-upholstered chair to hear the charges against
him, local and foreign media swarmed, with cameras at times just a few feet from
Gambaryan’s face as he barely concealed his anger and humiliation. “I just felt
like a circus animal,” he says.
In that hearing, a second one a week later, and in an accompanying filing to the
court, prosecutors argued that Gambaryan would jump bail if he were let out of
custody, pointing to Anjarwalla’s escape. They emphasized, strangely, that
Gambaryan had been born in Armenia, though his family had left that country
when he was 9 years old. They claimed, even more bizarrely, that Gambaryan had
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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some sort of body double and escape, which Gambaryan says was an absurd lie.
Prosecutors at one point made explicit that holding Gambaryan was crucial in the
Nigerian government’s leverage against Binance. “The first defendant, Binance, is
operating virtually,” the prosecutor told the judge. “The only thing we have to hold
on to is this defendant.”
The judge declined to rule on Gambaryan’s bail, leaving him in detention. After
two weeks in solitary in the EFCC cell, he was transferred to a real jail: Kuje
Prison.
The guards—and as usual, Ogunjobi—put Gambaryan in a van. Ogunjobi gave him
back his cigarettes, and he smoked for most of the hour-long drive out of central
Abuja, into what looked like a semirural slum on the outskirts of the city. During
the trip, Gambaryan was allowed to call Yuki and Binance executives, some of
whom hadn’t heard from him in weeks.
During that drive to Kuje, a prison known for its abysmal conditions and fellow
inmates that included accused Boko Haram terrorists, Gambaryan says he felt
numb, “disconnected,” resigned to a total lack of control of his fate. “I was just
living one hour, one minute at a time,” he says.
As they arrived and drove through the prison’s gates, Gambaryan got the first
glimpse of its low-slung buildings, painted a pale yellow, many still cratered and
broken from an ISIS attack that had allowed more than 800 inmates to escape
almost two years earlier. Gambaryan’s EFCC minders walked him into the prison
and brought him to the office of the controller, who Gambaryan would later learn
had specific instructions from Ribadu, the national security adviser, to keep him
under close surveillance.
Then he was taken to his cell in a “segregation” wing, set aside for high-risk
prisoners and VIP inmates willing to pay for special treatment. The 6- by 10-foot
room had a toilet, a metal bed frame with what Gambaryan describes as a
“glorified blanket” for a mattress, and a single window with metal bars. Aside
from the bed, this was actually an upgrade from the EFCC dungeon: He had
sunlight and outside air—albeit polluted by a trash fire a couple hundred yards
away—and a view of trees that swarmed with bats every evening.
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76. His first night in the prison, it rained, and a cool breeze came through the
window. “As bad as it was,” Gambaryan says, “I thought I was in heaven.”
Gambaryan soon got to know his neighbors. One was a cousin of Nigeria’s vice
president. Another was an alleged fraudster awaiting extradition to the US for a
$100 million scam. A third was the former Nigerian deputy commissioner of
police, Abba Kyari, under indictment in the US and accused of allegedly receiving
a bribe—though the Nigerians had denied US extradition. Gambaryan came to
believe Kyari’s Nigerian prosecution might have more to do with angering certain
other corrupt officials.
Kyari, Gambaryan says, turned out to have enormous sway in the prison. Other
inmates essentially worked for him. And his wife brought in home-cooked food
for everyone, even the guards. Gambaryan especially liked a certain Northern
Nigerian dumpling Kyari’s wife made, and she would cook extra for him. He in
turn would share the take-out food his lawyers brought him from a fast food
restaurant called Kilimanjaro; Kyari liked its Scotch eggs.
Gambaryan’s neighbors helped him learn the unwritten rules of prison life: how
to get a phone, how to avoid trouble from prison staff and violence from other
inmates. Gambaryan insists he never paid a bribe to the guards—they sometimes
demanded absurd amounts in the tens of thousands of dollars—but his closeness
to Kyari protected him nonetheless. “He was my Red,” Gambaryan says,
comparing Kyari to Morgan Freeman’s character in The Shawshank Redemption.
“He was instrumental to my survival.”
Over the weeks that followed, Gambaryan’s court case continued, and he’d be
periodically driven back to Abuja for hearings in which the judge seemed to side
with prosecutors on every point. He spent his 40th birthday, May 17, in yet
another hearing where his bail was finally denied. That evening, his lawyers
delivered a giant cake, paid for by Binance, to Kuje Prison, which he shared with
his neighbors and the guards.
Every night, Gambaryan would be locked in his cell as early as 7 pm, sometimes
hours earlier than the other inmates, and a guard constantly watched him and
made notes in a notebook about his every move, all on the national security
adviser’s orders. He found that he could do pull-ups on the ledge of an entryway
to the segregation wing’s courtyard to get some exercise. Despite the huge
cockroaches, geckos and even scorpions that crawled around his cell—small
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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to settle into prison life.
Sometimes he’d still wake up from a dream about being on the outside,
remember again that he was in a tiny, squalid cell, and rise from his bed to
anxiously pace the cramped space until the guards let him out around 6 am. But
eventually, Gambaryan says, his dreams, too, were in prison.
Gambaryan in his cell in Kuje Prison, filling out an absentee ballot for the November 2024 election. (He obtained the
mosquito net only after contracting malaria and subsequent bacterial lung infections.) PHOTOGRAPH: COURTESY OF
TIGRAN GAMBARYAN
ONE AFTERNOON IN May, Gambaryan began to feel ill during a meeting with his
lawyers. He went back to his cell, lay down, and then vomited repeatedly for the
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77. rest of the evening. Gambaryan guessed he had food poisoning. A blood test
administered by the guards showed it was malaria. They asked him for cash,
which they used to buy a bag of IV fluids—hung from a nail on the wall of his cell
—and antimalarial injections.
The next morning, Gambaryan had a court hearing. He told the guards he was too
weak to travel, or even to walk. They nonetheless took out his IV and put him in a
car, telling him they were acting on official orders. When Gambaryan arrived at
the court in central Abuja, he managed to slowly climb the long steps to the
courthouse’s door. But as he entered the courtroom, his vision blurred and the
room began to spin. The next thing he knew, he was on one knee. Guards helped
Gambaryan up, and he slumped in his chair as his attorneys requested a court
order for him to be sent to a hospital.
The judge issued the order. But instead of heading straight to a medical facility,
Gambaryan was sent back to Kuje while the court, his attorneys, the prison, the
national security adviser’s office, and the US State Department debated whether
his temporary release represented an escape risk. For 10 days, Gambaryan lay in
his cell, unable to eat or stand. Finally, he was taken to the Turkish-run Nizamiye
hospital in Abuja, where he was given a chest x-ray, briefly examined, prescribed
antibiotics, told he would be fine, and then inexplicably sent back to Kuje.
Gambaryan’s illness was, in reality, worse than ever. One of his friends, Turkish-
Canadian Binance staffer Chagri Poyraz, eventually had to fly to Ankara to inquire
about Gambaryan’s Nizamiye medical records with the Turkish government
before he learned that Gambaryan’s scan had shown multiple serious bacterial
lung infections. Even the judge in the case would demand—months later—that
Kuje’s medical director, Abraham Ehizojie, appear before the court to explain why
he hadn’t obeyed the hospitalization order. Prosecutors pointed to Gambaryan’s
medical records, which stated that he had refused care and asked to be returned
to prison, which Gambaryan vehemently denies.
For days after his return to his Kuje cell, Gambaryan had a 104-degree fever.
During his brief hospital stay, the guards had searched his cell and found his
secret phone, so he remained cut off from all contact for much of that time until
one of his neighbors could get him another. He grew weaker, had trouble
breathing, and his temperature refused to drop. Gambaryan became convinced
he was going to die. At one point, he called Will Frentzen and told him that he
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 26/44 might be on his deathbed. Kuje officials still refused to take him back to a
hospital.
Gambaryan didn’t die. But he spent close to a month in bed before he was able to
stand and eat again. He had lost nearly 30 pounds from when he had first entered
the prison.
One day while he was lying in his cell recovering, the guards told Gambaryan that
he had visitors. Still feeling weak, he walked slowly to an office in the front of the
prison. Inside sat French Hill and Chrissy Houlahan, two US members of
Congress, one from each party. Gambaryan could hardly believe that they were
not a mirage—the first Americans he’d seen in months other than the relatively
low-level State Department officials who would periodically visit him.
For the next 25 minutes, they listened to Gambaryan describe the conditions of
the prison and his close call with malaria and then a chest infection that
developed into pneumonia. Hill remembers that he spoke so softly that the two
legislators had to lean forward to hear him over the noise of a fan in the room.
At times, Gambaryan found his eyes filling with tears as the intensity of his
loneliness and the fear of his near-death experience caught up with him. “He
looked like a sick, frail, emotionally distraught human who needed a hug,” Hill
says. The two lawmakers each gave him one, and they told him they would work
for his release.
Then he was led back to his cell.
THE NEXT DAY, June 20, Hill and Houlahan recorded a video on the tarmac of
the Abuja airport. “We’ve asked for our embassy to advocate for a humanitarian
release of Tigran, because of the horrible conditions in the prison, his innocence,
and his health,” Hill told the camera. “We want him home, and we can let Binance
deal with the Nigerians.”
Connie Mack’s conversations with his old congressional colleagues had taken
root: In a subcommittee hearing on Americans detained abroad, Gambaryan’s
Georgia representative, Rich McCormick, had argued that Gambaryan’s case
should be elevated to that of a hostage held by a foreign government. He had
cited the Levinson Act, a law that requires the US to help wrongfully imprisoned
citizens. “Is United States diplomatic engagement likely necessary to secure the
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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78. release of the detained individual? Absolutely. Abso-frickin-lutely,” McCormick
told the hearing. “This guy deserves better.”
Around the same time, 16 Republican legislators signed a letter demanding the
White House treat Gambaryan’s case as a hostage situation. A few weeks later,
McCormick introduced that same demand as a House resolution. More than a
hundred former agents and prosecutors had already signed another letter asking
for the State Department to step up its efforts.
In June, FBI director Christopher Wray brought up Gambaryan’s case during a visit
to the country to meet with President Tinubu, according to several sources.
Shortly after, Nigeria’s FIRS, its tax authority, dropped the tax evasion charges
against Gambaryan. But the more serious charge of money laundering, brought
by the EFCC, stayed in place, along with the decades of prison time it threatened.
For months, many of Gambaryan’s supporters had hoped that Nigeria would
eventually reach a deal with Binance to end the country’s prosecution. But
Binance’s representatives say that by that point, they couldn’t seem to make an
offer that interested the Nigerians, who now no longer even hinted at a payment.
Every time it felt like they were getting close to an agreement, the requirements
would change, the official would disappear, the deal would fall apart. “It was like
Lucy and the football,” says Deborah Curtis, an attorney for Arnold & Porter and a
former CIA deputy general counsel who was representing Binance.
As the summer wore on, Gambaryan’s supporters began to believe the
negotiations between Nigeria and Binance were at a dead end, that the criminal
case had progressed far enough that Binance alone would never get Gambaryan
free. “It started to become clear,” says Frentzen. “This was going to be a US
government solution—or nothing.”
MEANWHILE, GAMBARYAN’S HEALTH had taken yet another turn for the worse.
All of that time laid out on a metal frame had aggravated an old back injury from
Gambaryan’s time in IRS-CI training more than a decade earlier, leading to what
would later be revealed to be a herniated disc—a rupture in the outer layer of the
tissue between spinal vertebrae, causing the internal part of that cushion to bulge
out, trapping nerves and causing immense, constant pain.
Within a few weeks of recovering from his pneumonia, Gambaryan had almost no
feeling in one of his legs. By July, he was attending his court hearings in a
wheelchair. His trial adjourned for the summer, and Gambaryan spent the next
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 28/44 months partially paralyzed, in unending torment, too depressed and stricken to
even leave his cell in Kuje.
Prison officials finally followed through on the court order to release Gambaryan
from Kuje so he could receive proper care, but instead of bringing him to a
hospital, they transferred him to a National Intelligence Agency medical facility.
He was under constant guard, his feet cuffed, given only painkillers as a
treatment, and—perhaps most disturbing for him—had no access to his
contraband phone, leaving him more isolated than ever. This time, after three
days, he did ask to be returned to Kuje.
By August, Gambaryan was “essentially crippled,” he wrote to me in a text
message. He hadn’t gotten out of bed in weeks, and was taking blood thinners to
prevent clots in his legs from the lack of movement. Every night, he wrote, he
would lie awake until 5 or 6 in the morning, too distracted by pain to even read a
book. Sometimes he would call his family and talk to his daughter as she played a
Japanese role-playing game called Omori on a PC he had built for her until it was
her bedtime in Atlanta. Then, hours later, he’d finally black out.
Even despite the visit from members of Congress and the growing groundswell to
get him released, he seemed to be nearly hopeless, at the nadir of his entire time
in prison.
“I try to put on a face for Yuki and the kids, but it’s bad,” he wrote to me. “I am in a
dark place.”
Days after that text message, a video emerged on X of Gambaryan limping into
court on a borrowed crutch, dragging one foot behind him. In the clip, he begs for
help from a guard in the hallway, who refuses to even give him a hand.
Gambaryan would later tell me that the court staff had been instructed not to give
him any support or let him use a wheelchair, for fear that he’d garner sympathy.
“This is fucked up! Why can’t I use a goddamn wheelchair?” Gambaryan yells in
the video, outraged. “I’m an innocent person.”
“I’m a fucking human,” Gambaryan goes on, his voice almost breaking. He takes a
few labored steps with the crutch, shaking his head in disbelief before leaning
against a wall to recover. “I’m not fucking OK.”
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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79. The video of Gambaryan struggling to walk into court despite a herniated disc and being denied help from a Nigerian guard that
went viral on social media.
IF THAT ORDER not to help Gambaryan as he hobbled into court was meant to
prevent him from gaining public sympathy, it massively backfired. The video of
the courthouse incident went viral and was watched millions of times.
By the fall of 2024, the US government, too, seemed to have finally reached a
consensus that it was time to get Gambaryan home. In September, a bipartisan
markup session in the House Foreign Affairs committee approved the resolution
McCormick had introduced to prioritize his case. “I urge the State Department
and I urge President Biden: Turn up the heat on the government of Nigeria,”
congressman Hill said in that hearing. “Honor the fact that an American citizen
has been snatched by a friendly government and put in prison over something he
had no responsibility for.” Some of Gambaryan’s supporters say they heard that
the new ambassador to Nigeria, too, had begun bringing up Gambaryan’s
situation with Nigerian officials, including President Tinubu, so often that at least
one minister blocked the ambassador on WhatsApp.
At the United Nations General assembly in New York in late September, the US
ambassador to the UN raised Gambaryan’s case in a meeting with the Nigerian
foreign minister, “stressing the need for his immediate release,” according to a
readout of their meeting. At that same time, Binance hired a truck with a digital
billboard to drive around the UN and midtown Manhattan displaying
Gambaryan’s face and messages calling out Nigeria for illegally jailing him.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 30/44 Around the same time, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan had a
phone call with his Nigerian counterpart, Nuhu Ribadu, in which he essentially
asked that Gambaryan be freed, according to multiple sources involved in
pushing for Gambaryan’s release. Perhaps most impactful of all, several
supporters say, they learned that US officials had made clear that Gambaryan’s
case was going to present an obstacle to any meeting between President Biden
and Nigeria’s President Tinubu at the UN General Assembly or elsewhere, a notion
that deeply troubled the Nigerians.
Even as all of those levers of power began to apply pressure, the decision of
whether to free Gambaryan still rested with Nigeria alone. “There was a point in
time where the Nigerians realized this was a really bad idea,” says one of
Gambaryan’s supporters who asked not to be named due to the sensitivities of the
negotiations. “Then it became a matter of whether they would capitulate, or
whether they would stick it out because of their pride—or because they were
beyond the point of no return.”
ONE DAY IN October during the long drive from Kuje to the Abuja court for yet
another hearing—by that time, Gambaryan had lost count of how many it had
been—the car’s driver got a call. He spoke into the phone for a minute, then
turned the car around. Gambaryan was driven back to the prison, taken to the
front office, and told that he was not feeling well enough to go to court. This was a
statement, not a question.
Back in his cell, Gambaryan called Will Frentzen, who told him this could be it:
that the Nigerians might finally be preparing to send him home. After so many
false hopes of release over the past eight months, Gambaryan didn’t allow himself
to believe it.
Several days later, the court held a hearing without him, and the prosecution told
the judge they were dropping all charges against Gambaryan due to his health.
Officials at Kuje spent a day processing the paperwork, then took him out of his
cell, handed him the suitcase he’d brought on his two-day trip to Abuja, and drove
him to the Abuja Continental Hotel, where Binance had booked him a room
guarded by private security, as well as a physician to make a house call and
ensure he was healthy enough to fly. For Gambaryan, it was all so sudden, after so
many months of excruciating stasis, that it was almost too surreal to comprehend.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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80. A day later, on the Abuja airport tarmac, Nigerian officials handed over
Gambaryan’s passport—after briefly quibbling over a $2,000 fine he was told he
owed for overstaying his visa. With State Department staffers helping him,
Gambaryan stepped out of his wheelchair and climbed into a private jet stocked
with medevac equipment. Unbeknownst to Gambaryan, Binance staff had spent
weeks working to charter the flight—Nigerian officials had already once before
told them Gambaryan would be released and then reneged—and even negotiated
for him to fly out of the country over neighboring Niger’s airspace, which the
country’s officials signed off on less than an hour before takeoff.
Left: Gambaryan's view of Nigerian officials on the Abuja airport tarmac after he was released from jail, just before his
plane took off for Rome. Until nearly the last minute, they demanded a $2,000 payment for Gambaryan overstaying his
visa. Right: A selfie Gambaryan took just before his emergency spinal surgery after his return to the US.
PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF TIGRAN GAMBARYAN
Aboard the jet, Gambaryan ate a few bites of the salad in his in-flight meal, fell
asleep sprawled on a couch, and woke up in Rome.
Binance had arranged for a driver and private security to meet him at the airport
in Italy and take him to the airport hotel to spend the night there before his flight
home to Atlanta the next day. While he was in the room, he called Yuki and then
Ogunjobi, his Nigerian erstwhile friend, the one who had persuaded him to come
back to Abuja so many months earlier.
Gambaryan says he wanted to hear Ogunjobi explain himself. On the phone,
Gambaryan remembers, the EFCC official began crying, apologizing repeatedly,
thanking God that Gambaryan had been released.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 32/44 For Gambaryan it was too much to process. He listened quietly without accepting
the apology. In the midst of Ogunjobi’s outpouring, he noticed that an American
friend was calling, a Secret Service agent he’d worked with in the past.
Gambaryan didn’t know it yet, but the agent happened to be in Rome for a
conference with Gambaryan’s old boss, the head of the IRS-CI cybercrime
division, Jarod Koopman, both of whom wanted to bring him beer and pizza at his
hotel.
Gambaryan told Ogunjobi he had to go, and he ended the call.
Awards from Gambaryan's IRS career and a copy of remarks published in the Congressional Record by congressman
Rich McCormick celebrating his return from Nigerian detention. PHOTOGRAPH: PIERA MOORE
ON A COLD and windy December day on Capitol Hill, former federal agents and
prosecutors, State Department officials, and congressional aides mingle in a plush
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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81. room in the Rayburn House Office Building. One by one, members of Congress
come in and shake hands with Tigran Gambaryan, who’s wearing a dark blue suit
and tie, his beard close-trimmed again and head cleanly shaved, limping only
slightly from the emergency surgery on his spine that he underwent a month
earlier in Georgia.
Gambaryan poses for photos and chats with each legislator, aide, and State
Department official long enough to thank them for their role in getting him home.
When French Hill says that it’s good to see him again, Gambaryan quips that he
hopes he smells better than he did during their meeting in Kuje.
The reception is one in a series of VIP welcomes that Gambaryan has received on
his return. At the airport in Georgia, Representative McCormick had come to greet
him, and gave him an American flag that had flown above the Capitol building the
previous day. The White House released a statement noting that President Biden
had called the Nigerian president and “underscored his appreciation for President
Tinubu’s leadership in securing the release on humanitarian grounds of American
citizen and former U.S. law enforcement official Tigran Gambaryan.”
The statement of thanks, I later learned, was part of the deal the US government
struck with Nigeria, which also included aiding in its investigation of Binance—
which is still ongoing. Nigeria continues to prosecute both Binance and
Anjarwalla in absentia. A Binance spokesperson wrote in a statement that the
company is “relieved and grateful” that Gambaryan is home and expressed
thanks to all who worked to secure his release. “We are eager to put this episode
behind us and continue working toward a brighter future for the blockchain
industry in Nigeria and around the world,” the statement adds. “We will continue
to defend ourselves against spurious claims.” Nigerian government officials did
not respond to WIRED's repeated requests for comment on Gambaryan's case.
After the reception, Gambaryan and I get in a cab outside, and I ask him what’s
next for him. He says that he may be getting back into government, if the new
administration will have him—and if Yuki will put up with another move back to
DC. (Crypto news site Coindesk reported last month that he’s been recommended
by cryptocurrency industry insiders with connections to President Trump for roles
as senior as head of crypto assets at the SEC or a high-level position in the FBI’s
cyber division.) Before he considers anything like that, he says vaguely, “I
probably need time to get my head straight.”
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 34/44 Gambaryan (right) with Congressman French Hill at a reception in his honor on Capitol Hill after his return to the US.
I ask him how he feels the experience in Nigeria has changed him. “I guess it did
make me angrier?” he responds in a strangely light tone, as if thinking about the
question himself for the first time. “It made me want to get vengeance against
those that did this.”
Revenge for Gambaryan may be more than a fantasy. He’s pursuing a human
rights lawsuit against the Nigerian government that began during his detention,
and hopes there will be an investigation into the Nigerians who he argues held
him hostage for the better part of a year of his life. At times, he says, he’s even
sent messages to individual officials he holds responsible, telling them, “You’ll see
me again,” that what they did “brought shame on the badge,” that he can forgive
what they did to him, but not what they did to his family.
“Was it stupid for me to do that? Probably,” he tells me in the cab. “I was on the
floor with back pain and just bored.”
As we step out of the car at his hotel in Arlington and Gambaryan lights a
cigarette, I tell him that despite his description of himself as angrier than before
his time in prison, he actually seems calmer and happier to me than in years past
—that when I was covering his serial takedowns of corrupt federal agents, crypto
money launderers, and child abusers, he had always struck me as angry, driven,
relentless in chasing the targets of his investigations.
13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
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82. Gambaryan responds that, if he seems more relaxed now, it’s only because he’s
happy to be home—grateful to see his family and his friends, to be able to walk
again, to not be caught between forces so much larger than himself waging a
conflict that had so little to do with him. To have not died in prison.
As for being driven by anger in the past, Gambaryan disagrees.
“I'm not sure that was anger. That was justice,” he says. “I wanted justice. And I
still do.”
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13.03.2025, 10:01 The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/untold-story-crypto-crimefighters-descent-nigerian-prison-binance/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.… 36/44 BY NOAH SHACHTMANTHE BIG STORYFEB 25, 2025 6:00 AM
This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and
Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called
In the epic US-Russian prisoner swap last summer, Vladimir Putin
brought home an assassin, spies, and another prized ally: the man behind
one of the biggest insider trading cases of all time.
ILLUSTRATION: VARTIKA SHARMA
13.03.2025, 09:47 This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-prisoner-swap-vladislav-klyushin-evan-gershkovich/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.174185… 1/28

83. Listen to this story
00:00 37:28
1x
15 15
VLADISLAV KLYUSHIN WAS having, by any measure, an awful day. The judge in
his case had brushed aside his lawyers’ arguments and his friends’ appeals for
leniency. She handed down a tough sentence: nine more years in US federal
prison, on top of an order to forfeit a fortune, $34 million.
But if Klyushin was upset about the ruling, he didn’t show it. The then 42-year-old
tech executive from Moscow seemed upbeat—quick with a smile on his pinchable
cheeks and unerringly polite, just as he had been during his arrest near a Swiss
ski resort in March 2021, his months of detention in Switzerland, his extradition to
the United States that December, his indictment and trial on hacking and wire
fraud charges, and his swift conviction. Klyushin “had a confidence all along that
eventually the Russians would get him back,” one of his defense attorneys told
me. He seemed certain that his protectors in the Kremlin would spare him from
serving out his full sentence.
There were times when that certainty seemed cocksure. America’s federal prison
system held 35 Russian nationals. Surely not all of them were getting traded back.
His family and friends were distraught. Within less than a year, though, Klyushin
was proven right. On August 1, 2024, he was unshackled and put on a plane back
to Moscow—one of the 24 people involved in the largest, most complex US-
Russian prisoner exchange ever.
You probably heard something about the swap. It’s the one that brought Wall
Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former US Marine Paul Whelan
home to the United States—and sent back to Russia a Kremlin-linked assassin
and a husband-and-wife duo of spies who were so deep undercover that their
kids didn’t learn they were Russian until they got on the plane. In coverage of the
exchange, Klyushin was treated as a footnote. That was a mistake, if an
SAVE
13.03.2025, 09:47 This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-prisoner-swap-vladislav-klyushin-evan-gershkovich/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.174185… 2/28 understandable one. And not just because he was at the center of one of the
bigger insider trading cases of all time.
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The escalating conflict between the US and Russia has played out in all sorts of
ways over the past decade. One American captive was swapped just two weeks
ago; at least 10 more US citizens remain imprisoned in Russia. And now, there’s a
Kremlin-friendly occupant of the Oval Office, one who loves to be seen as
making deals. One is in global financial markets, with America and its allies
walling more and more of Russian industry off from the international economy.
There are always creative individuals who can find cracks in that wall, though,
and Klyushin sure seems to have been one of them. You don’t have to squint too
hard to see his scheme—which ultimately netted $93 million—as a way to bring
capital into Russia, despite the global blockade. The contest has also been evident
on the streets of Moscow, where a secretive Kremlin security force has grabbed
American citizens, who are charged with bogus crimes, and then dangled them in
trades for killers, spies, and associates of the Kremlin. It’s kidnapping, hostage
taking, and it’s effectively all being done on President Vladimir Putin’s orders.
Oftentimes, Americans are taken precisely for their value as assets to be later
exchanged—to get back people like that assassin, or this financial crook,
Klyushin. He wasn’t at the very top of Moscow’s trade list. But Klyushin was much
closer, and more important to the Kremlin, than either side was willing to admit.
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13.03.2025, 09:47 This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-prisoner-swap-vladislav-klyushin-evan-gershkovich/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.174185… 3/28

84. TO THE OUTSIDE world, Klyushin had a rags-to-riches, fairy-tale life, with a
gauzy wedding video to prove it. In a montage later obtained by US prosecutors,
Klyushin dives into a country club pool; his bride-to-be, Zhannetta, sips pink
champagne on an outdoor bed draped with chiffon and roses; he picks her up in a
white Porsche convertible; she’s gorgeous in her backless gown; he’s handsome, if
a little goofy, in his tux and subtle mullet; they dance and laugh and stare
meaningfully at the fireworks punctuating the perfect night. “I do not know a
more decent person than my husband,” Zhannetta later wrote to the judge in his
case.
They had three children, adding to the two Klyushin had from a previous
marriage. By all accounts, he was a doting father, a far cry from his own, a man he
never met, or his stepfather, who was killed during a car robbery when Klyushin
was 14. He emerged from a childhood of poverty to build a number of businesses.
First, he was in construction and marketing; later, he ran an IT company called
M13, which sold media- and internet-monitoring software to Russian government
agencies. Early customers in 2016 included the Ministry of Defense and the office
of the presidential administration, where Putin’s propaganda chief became an
important proponent of M13. The company’s software was used to keep tabs on
hundreds of Telegram channels for a Kremlin worried about the “introduction of
unverified or knowingly false information,” according to one local news report.
Klyushin’s rise was rapid, taking in more than $30 million in government
contracts in a decade. That confounded some of his professional peers. (“The
company and its owner are unknown to most in the IT community,” a respected
Russian business journal noted in 2021.) But it brought him influence and
admirers. He supported the arts and rebuilt the roof of the monastery on
Moscow’s Lubyanka Street, a few blocks down from the headquarters of Russia’s
spy service, the FSB. One friend later hailed Klyushin as an “eco-activist” (for
planting “several spruces in the yard”) and a “pet-lover” (his “favourite pet is a
dog”). “Broad-minded, well-read, educated,” gushed his family friend and tennis
coach. An M13 employee said that a conversation with Klyushin “is like getting a
lesson from a guru.”
Moscow is filled with entrepreneurs who get rich by cozying up to the
government; Klyushin seemed to reach another, higher level. He and M13
allegedly became so close to Moscow’s power brokers that an independent media
outlet suggested he was one of the people behind an anonymous, inside-the-
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allegation and successfully sued the outlet over the insinuation.
Klyushin’s most consequential professional connection was with Ivan Ermakov,
an internationally infamous hacker. It’s unclear when the two men met, but by
April 2018 they were friendly enough to go heli-skiing together. Ermakov, a then
32-year-old with large, youthful brown eyes that made him look a decade
younger, had recently served in Unit 26165 of Russia’s main intelligence
directorate, the GRU. In cybersecurity and political circles, the unit was known as
“Fancy Bear.” It was notorious for hacking into the networks of Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, acts that helped
throw the 2016 US election to Trump. Ermakov conducted some of Fancy Bear’s
break-ins personally, American prosecutors alleged in 2018. This was around
when Ermakov and Klyushin were attending the World Cup together in Sochi.
Ermakov was indicted again that October for a series of Fancy Bear hacks around
the 2016 summer Olympics. Ermakov made it onto an FBI most-wanted list.
Klyushin kept a copy of the FBI poster in his iCloud account.
At the time, Ermakov was obtaining information that would be central to
Klyushin’s next big business venture: making money in the American stock
market. According to encrypted chats later obtained by prosecutors, Klyushin
would soon open a brokerage account through a Danish company, which
Ermakov and an M13 employee appear to have used to make trades in a broad
range of stocks—real-estate firms, natural gas concerns, food service businesses.
At first, the endeavor didn’t go well. The chats show transactions being mistimed,
information about companies miscommunicated, and price movements
misunderstood. “The market behaves strangely,” says Ermakov. “We suck,”
complains one M13 employee. The trades that did succeed, though, tended to
have a common theme: They happened right before the companies released their
regularly scheduled public earnings reports. It was as if Klyushin’s contacts had
access to privileged information.
Which, prosecutors say, they did.
THERE ARE, BROADLY speaking, a few types of insider trading. Some
prosecutors have come to call the more prevalent kind “golfer cases,” along the
lines of an executive at a public company passing confidential information on the
links to a buddy, who then plays the market. It’s illegal but often relatively
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85. constrained: one insider, one company. (Actual golf legend Phil Mickelson paid
back more than $1 million in connection with one such case in 2016.)
A rarer, potentially more destructive kind of insider trading involves finding a
choke point in the flow of financial information and obtaining confidential data
about dozens, hundreds, even thousands of companies at once. That’s what
happened in the early 2010s, when a Ukrainian hacker broke into press release
distributors like PR Newswire and exfiltrated before-it’s-public information on
dozens of different companies. That hack allegedly resulted in around $30 million
in illegal profits. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Klyushin kept a printout
about the PR Newswire hacker in a pink, translucent folder. He—or someone—
snapped a photo of the article next to a bottle of rosé.
Klyushin and Ermakov’s insider trading scheme started, investigators believe, in
early to mid 2018. (The details below were drawn from court records, trial
transcripts, and evidence submitted during a later trial.) That’s when some
awfully strange behavior started occurring in the networks of Donnelley Financial
Solutions—a document management firm that prepares earnings reports for big,
publicly traded companies. On May 9, the account of a longtime Donnelley
employee, Julie Soma, started downloading a flurry of confidential financial
reports that had been prepared for client companies. That was something she’d
“never” do, Soma later testified. The browser and operating system information
associated with her account’s burst of activity also didn’t match her normal
behavior. Plus, all of this was happening late at night, way past the hours Soma
typically worked from her home in Richland, Washington.
Several other accounts also displayed atypical behavior, and at least one
Donnelley-linked laptop, in London, was found to have a suspicious tool on it.
This program, which allowed the computer to be remote-controlled, tried to
collect usernames and passwords inside Donnelley’s networks, then cover its
tracks by deleting the system logs. Finally, the tool attempted to connect the
laptop to a bogus site, “investmentcomp.com”—a classic hacker trick to covertly
collect data from a victim’s system.
In November, a Donnelley competitor was hit too. At Toppan Merrill, investigators
later discovered that a program called DirBuster was making multiple guesses per
second to identify file names and network paths. Other malicious software
echoed what was happening on the Donnelley machines.
13.03.2025, 09:47 This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called | WIRED
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semiconductor manufacturers, roofing suppliers, a firm that makes boats for
wakeboarding. At almost every turn, Mikhail Irzak and Igor Sladkov, two
associates of Ermakov’s from St. Petersburg, bought those same stocks. (Irzak,
Sladkov, and Ermakov were all also indicted.) The volume of their trades often
dwarfed Klyushin’s. When he purchased 1,350 shares of Tesla just ahead of its
earnings report that fall, the St. Petersburg duo bought 16,300. Klyushin netted an
estimated $9,000 from the deal; they got more than $145,000. Prosecutors never
established a direct link between Klyushin and Ermakov’s friends from St.
Petersburg. But one of those buddies had an internal M13 messaging app in his
iCloud account, even though he was never an employee or client of the firm. An
economist for the US Securities and Exchange Commission later put the odds of
the group’s trading patterns being a coincidence at less than one in a trillion.
The scheme attracted more investors. Ermakov and Klyushin shared their tips
with the new clients and took a 60 percent cut of anything those outside investors
made. One newcomer ran an audiovisual and IT company; M13 had recently
pitched it on a whitehat hacker-for-hire package. Two other investors were
described by Klyushin’s attorneys as old friends of his: former mining executive
Aleksandr Borodaev and Boris Varshavskiy, who received the “Gold Badge of
Distinction of Russian Coal” and briefly served as the minister of ecology and
natural resources for a region in southern Siberia. “I did the math for Boris,”
Klyushin texted Ermakov in May 2019. “The profit comes to 198% … Boris earned
$989k on $500k … They don’t even ask why.” (Neither Borodaev nor Varshavskiy
was charged in the US. It was not established at trial that either of them knew
about the insider trading scheme.)
Ermakov responded with a thumbs-up and three laugh-cry emojis. The pair grew
closer—hitting the sauna, going out to dinners with the M13 crew. They texted
about their favorite TV shows. Klyushin was really into Billions, about a hedge
fund manager who made it big off of insider trading.
On July 16, 2019, the Julie Soma account at Donnelley Financial downloaded an
upcoming press release from the sneaker company Skechers. The document—one
of more than 2,000 files illicitly downloaded using Soma’s credentials—showed
that business was booming in the second quarter, well above what the market
was expecting. “We buy SKX today,” wrote Ermakov on the morning of July 18 in
the encrypted chat, referring to Skechers’ symbol on the New York Stock
Exchange. The St. Petersburg pair snatched up 130,000 shares; Klyushin, almost
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86. 50,000; his mining buddies, 77,500. The earnings officially dropped at 4:05 pm
ET that day. SKX shot up from $34 to $39. Klyushin’s crew liquidated almost all of
their positions immediately.
Klyushin was pumped. “So … What did we earn today? Our comrades are
wondering,” he wrote in the encrypted group chat, and he posted photos of
Borodaev and Varshavskiy. Ermakov, who months earlier was fine texting about
the outside investors, was growing wary. He told Klyushin to knock it off. “Vlad,
you are exposing our organization. This is bad,” he wrote. “That’s how they get
you and you end up as a defendant in a court room.”
A MONTH LATER, former US Marine Trevor Reed was taken to jail in Moscow and
sent to a state psychiatric facility. “There’s blood all over the walls where
prisoners had killed themselves or killed other prisoners,” he later told CNN. “The
toilet is just a hole in the floor and there’s, you know, crap everywhere, all over
the floor, on the walls. There’s people in there that walk around, they look like
zombies.”
A similarly nightmarish story had recently unfolded for Paul Whelan, another
former US Marine. He had gone to Russia for the wedding of a buddy when FSB
agents burst into his hotel room and accused him of espionage. He was sent to a
gulag that housed World War II prisoners and was given a job sewing buttons on
winter uniforms. Cold showers were allowed, once a week. Meals consisted of
“bread, tea, and a watery fish soup that seemed better suited as cat food,”
according to The New York Times.
Reed and Whelan were two of four US citizens arrested by Russian authorities
during Trump’s first term, all on what appeared to be the flimsiest of pretenses.
The Kremlin made it clear to the White House that some or all of the Americans
would be let go—if the US government gave up some notorious Russian criminals
in return. Moscow and Washington had been exchanging captured spies for six
decades, off and on. This was something different. This had all the hallmarks of a
ransom operation.
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engaged in awfully strange stock sales—transactions that sure looked like insider
trading. It wasn’t long before the FBI was looped in. Special agent B. J. Kang took
the case. Best known for spearheading the probe that inspired Klyushin’s beloved
show, Billions, Kang was already working on another insider trading investigation
with two prosecutors at the US Attorney’s office in Massachusetts. Since this
seemed like a similar-ish case, he brought them in. Seth Kosto had spent years
trying insider trading and bank fraud cases. Stephen Frank, a former Wall Street
Journal reporter, led the investigation into the “Varsity Blues” college admissions
scandal. Together, the three dug in. Seeing the patterns—multiple trading
accounts making parallel moves, the focus on quarterly earnings—the group
quickly realized they were observing large-scale fraud. “And it was across
industries and different kinds of companies,” Frank tells me. “The immediate
thought we had was, ‘This is likely to be some sort of a hack.’”
After further analysis of the market patterns, it became clear that the illicitly
traded companies had something else in common: Their financial filings were all
published by either Donnelley or Toppan Merrill. When investigators approached
the two companies, executives didn’t believe they’d been hit. The companies
launched internal investigations in which their own employees were scrutinized.
The feds, meanwhile, conducted a series of “pen registers”—which reveal the
connections between accounts, but not their contents—to try to figure out who in
Russia was orchestrating the trades. They zeroed in on the duo from St.
Petersburg. Mikhail Irzak claimed to be a marketer. According to public records,
Igor Sladkov was a rather prolific entrepreneur, with his hand in restaurants,
residential real estate, nonalcoholic beverages, and media buying. The
investigators got a warrant to access Sladkov’s iCloud. Inside the account, they
found a screenshot of a Snap Inc. announcement about upcoming company
earnings—time-stamped from before it was released. It was textbook inside
information. “So: smoking gun,” Frank says. “He was cooked.”
When the feds examined Sladkov’s WhatsApp account, they saw that he had been
communicating constantly with a figure well known to US law enforcement: the
twice-indicted former intelligence officer Ivan Ermakov. “You come across
someone who is alleged to have an immense hacking pedigree,” says Kosto. “All
of a sudden, you have a path to explaining: How has this happened?”
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87. At 7:54 am Eastern time on November 6, 2019, the Julie Soma account at
Donnelley downloaded a copy of Roku’s third-quarter financial results. The
company was going to notably miss its targets. Everyone in M13’s orbit started
shorting their Roku shares or trading other financial instruments based on Roku’s
stock. As soon as the earnings came out, Roku’s price dropped from about $140
per share to less than $120. Klyushin and his investors cleared nearly $9 million in
profits.
Klyushin, though, was getting exhausted. “I am fucking tired rushing all the time.
Need a rest,” he texted Ermakov. He consoled himself in Ermakov’s company—
and a little retail therapy. Klyushin went apartment shopping with Ermakov, and
bought himself a 78-foot, $4 million yacht from a shipyard in Cyprus. “At this
point I want nothing except the boat,” Klyushin texted Ermakov in February 2020.
“My pleasure is the boat and trading.”
“Then you need nothing. Enjoy your life,” Ermakov responded. “I’ve read
somewhere that if you keep buying while you have everything, it means you’re
unhappy.”
Klyushin answered, “Honestly I get a bigger kick when I check apartments for
you, with you, the fact that we can walk home together and have a beer, or play
golf, or simply send everyone to hell, knowing that you are close.”
They didn’t know it at the time, but they had only a few months left together to
trade. By then, Toppan Merrill had introduced two-factor authentication to its
system, effectively locking the hackers out. Donnelley had cut off access to Julie
Soma’s compromised account. Employees at Klyushin and Ermakov’s brokerage
firm were getting suspicious too. In an April Skype call with an executive at
Denmark-based Saxo Bank, Klyushin and another M13 employee asked for more
banking privileges. The Saxo executive politely pushed back—and then asked why
so many of Klyushin’s best trades seemed to happen right around the release of
earnings’ reports.
The M13 employee offered that it was the company’s media-monitoring prowess
that gave them the edge. “It’s, ahem, first mass media. Second social media. And,
uh, third, it’s, ahem, information investment sites,” the employee said.
“We have an application,” Klyushin added, more smoothly, “which we are
planning to launch onto the international market together with Swiss [investors],
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be “open [to] investors from Europe and America.”
If M13 really was developing a specialized program for traders, there’s scant
evidence of it. But the idea of recruiting Western investors to trade on ill-gotten
tips—that part was true. Klyushin and Ermakov were once photographed at a
party with Anselm Schmucki, a Swiss citizen who ran the Russian office of DuLac
Capital, a Zurich-based investment firm. “The goal was to offer this service to
international clients—you know, whoever Anselm worked with,” Max Nemtsev,
one of Klyushin’s lawyers, tells me.
Schmucki declined to comment for this story. His former business partner,
Domino Burki, insists their firm, DuLac, did nothing wrong. As for Schmucki
himself—well, Burki can’t be so sure what went on in Moscow. “I just feel that
Anselm is not a criminal,” he tells me. “He was a wheeler-dealer.” (In 2023, the UK
foreign secretary and the US Treasury Department sanctioned Schmucki, with the
latter claiming he worked with “a company with suspected links to Russian
organized crime and money laundering.” The Treasury Department added,
“Schmucki controls a global network of shell companies”—at least one of which
was based in Edinburgh, Scotland—“and has had close financial relationships
with an individual charged with financial crimes.”)
Klyushin’s photo with Schmucki was just one of the hundreds of thousands of
files that US prosecutors sifted through as investigators obtained warrants for the
iCloud accounts of Ermakov, Klyushin, and the rest of the M13 operation. Other
images grabbed their attention too: the screenshot of Ermakov trading with
Klyushin’s account; the earnings reports, downloaded days before they became
public; the small fleet of Porsche convertibles, like the one he drove in his
wedding video; the encrypted chats that were backed up to Klyushin’s iCloud.
This was enough evidence for an open-and-shut case, from Ermakov’s warning
about ending up in a “court room,” which proved criminal intent, to the specific
dates, times, and prices of the trades made with stolen information. One other
photo stood out: a Russian Medal of Honor, given to Klyushin on June 14, 2020,
and signed by one “V. Putin.”
The day after Klyushin got his medal, Paul Whelan, the former US Marine, found
himself standing in a glass cage in a Moscow City Court, dressed in a blue-gray
sweater. He held up a sign: “Sham trial! Meatball surgery!” referring to the
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88. manufactured espionage charges against him and the emergency hernia
operation he had undergone weeks earlier. He implored then president Trump to
save him. Two men in ski masks, plaid shirts, and holstered pistols stood by his
side while the judge handed down his sentence: 16 years in a gulag turned labor
camp.
A month and a half later, Trevor Reed received his nine-year sentence and was
also sent to a horrific facility. He refused to work. They locked him in solitary
confinement and eventually took away his books. He went on hunger strike. After
that, he told CNN, “I started to get sick. I really at that point was consistently sick
until I left. I started to cough up blood, and I coughed up that blood for a period of
about three and a half months every day, multiple times a day.”
PHOTOGRAPH: US ATTORNEY’S OFFICE VIA AP, FILE
BY THE END of the summer, the M13 crew had stopped trading off of the
Donnelley and Toppan Merrill data, and prosecutors had no way of getting to
them while they were in Russia. The hope was that one of them would decide to
travel to a place where the government was relatively friendly to the US. Whoever
left first—Sladkov, Irzak, Ermakov, Klyushin, you name it—that’s who was getting
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stunning scale. “There was no plan B,” Frank tells me.
Ermakov, already under two US federal indictments, had the good sense to stay in
Russia. Klyushin, on the other hand, really wanted to experience the thrill of heli-
skiing again. And this time, he had to do it in the Alps. This time, he’d take his
wife. They’d celebrate their anniversary.
In the US, prosecutors began preparing their criminal complaint against Klyushin.
The FBI reached out to Swiss authorities. On Sunday, March 21, 2021, Klyushin
and his wife took off from Moscow in a private jet. “You’re literally holding your
breath,” Frank told CNBC. The Klyushins landed about four hours later at Sion
airport, in Switzerland. “He was actually in ski gear, getting off the plane ready to
board a helicopter,” Frank said. “The Swiss agents were waiting for him. They
swooped in.”
This is the point in the story when things get a little murky, a little strange.
Klyushin was taken to a jail in Sion in handcuffs and leg irons, according to the
local press. He was kept in solitary confinement and held without bail. But “he
was not afraid or anything. He was in quite a relaxed mood,” says Oliver Ciric, the
Swiss lawyer who quickly signed on to Klyushin’s case. Ciric—a multilingual
expert on Russian responses to Western sanctions, and, improbably, an honorary
consul of the Republic of Vanuatu—told the press that his client was arrested only
after he refused advances by British and American intelligence operatives, first in
a bar in the south of France and later in Edinburgh, Scotland. The implication was
that these alleged spies were trying to pump Klyushin for information about his
Kremlin contacts—or recruit him as an agent. It wasn’t a crazy claim, given
Klyushin’s proximity to the Putin administration. But Ciric had no evidence to
back it up.
On April 7, the Kremlin asked the Swiss to extradite Klyushin back to Moscow. The
man was a wanted criminal, the Russians claimed, accused of wide-scale
financial fraud. That was odd, given how much the Kremlin was paying Klyushin’s
company. Stranger still was Klyushin’s willingness to go along with the extradition
request, since he’d presumably have to face the infamously brutal Russian justice
system. The American government asked for Klyushin to be sent to the US 12 days
later. That request was granted in late June. Everyone involved agreed that the
process was unusually quick—high-profile extradition cases can drag on for
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89. years. “It’s completely out of the standard procedures,” Ciric says. “This is
something that we attribute to the pressures, political pressures.”
In June of that year, at a lakeside villa near Geneva, Putin and US president Joe
Biden discussed a potential prisoner swap. It was a topic long under discussion,
through a number of channels—formal exchanges by diplomats, less formal
discussions by a shifting network of outside lawyers and advocates. No
agreements were reached that day. But the two countries opened up a new
channel, this one between the CIA and its Kremlin counterparts.
After a series of appeals, Klyushin was sent to the US in December and held at
Plymouth County jail. A trial date was set for about a year later. For a case of this
complexity, that, too, was awfully quick. In part, that’s because of an agreement
between the Justice Department, Klyushin’s defense lawyers, and the presiding
judge, Patti Saris.
Each side, for their own reasons, wanted to downplay Klyushin’s contacts in
Russian government and society. Saris, for her part, was worried that too much
talk about these connections could be prejudicial to the jury. The prosecutors,
according to Frank, wanted to “focus on the actual facts of the insider trading.”
Klyushin’s American lawyers, meanwhile, did a 180 on the earlier defense of him,
never mentioning the supposed approaches by Western intelligence or why those
spy agencies might be interested in their client.
So the trial never detailed who Klyushin’s investors were—folks like Aleksandr
Borodaev and Boris Varshavskiy, the guy who won the Russian gold medal for
mining. Nor did the trial lay out how many Russians benefited from the scheme. It
neglected to mention that when Klyushin shared photographs with Ermakov in
August 2019 of a safe filled with $3 million in $100 bills, that safe was located
inside the Russian Ministry of Defense.
The trial was over in 16 days. Klyushin was found guilty on all charges. Not that he
seemed to care.
IN 2022, THE American and Russian governments swapped two sets of prisoners.
They traded Konstantin Yaro-shenko, a Russian drug smuggler, for Trevor Reed,
and they swapped Viktor Bout, the weapons trader known as the “Merchant of
Death,” for the American basketball player Brittney Griner.
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Yaroshenko had agreed to smuggle 8,800 pounds of cocaine. Griner, on the other
hand, had been held for the better part of a year for possession of less than a gram
of hash oil. Reed was falsely accused of hitting a Russian cop one time. Of course,
everyone was happy to see wrongly detained American civilians let go. But what
message did it send to Putin, that he could trade Bout’s freedom for Griner’s?
Yaroshenko’s for Reed’s? Doug London, a 34-year veteran of the CIA, says that
while the trade was politically popular, it may not have been in the US’s long-
term interest. “Russia was emboldened by this,” he tells me. “They’re just going to
take more hostages, and they’re just going to arrest more people.”
Klyushin was convicted on Valentine’s Day, 2023. About six weeks later, on March
29, Russian authorities effectively kidnapped Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street
Journal reporter, and accused him of being a spy. A worldwide outcry ensued. So
did talks to make a trade that could bring him home.
Depending on whom you believe, Klyushin was frequently discussed as the
negotiators met along their various tracks—or he wasn’t mentioned at all. The
Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich was deeply involved, or had nothing
whatsoever to do with any talks. The State Department was stitching an
international coalition to free the next set of Western prisoners, or was spinning
its wheels on the margins. The CIA was leading the talks on the American side, or,
as one of 10 sources put it, merely “delivering the mail” for the Biden White
House, which was calling all the shots. Making matters even more complex: Many
of the 24 people who were eventually freed in August’s massive prisoner
exchange had their own advocates, all trying to negotiate with governments and
with one another. One American prisoner even had two sets of representatives,
each of which shit-talked the other to me.
The CIA and the White House declined to comment on the record for this story.
The State Department—whose top official for hostage affairs is so far from
camera-shy that he once starred on a reality show—declined, as well. But after
speaking to my sources and reading through the various official leaks, a few
common threads emerged. Putin’s top priority, by far, was to get back another
one of his killers: a hit man named Vadim Krasikov, who was serving a life
sentence for carrying out an assassination in Berlin. (According to Gershkovich,
Putin’s Department for Counterintelligence Operations deliberately “used” him
and Whelan as trade bait to secure the release of Krasikov.) The Germans were
open to it, if some high-profile Russian dissidents were freed. The Russians would
13.03.2025, 09:47 This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-prisoner-swap-vladislav-klyushin-evan-gershkovich/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.17418… 17/28

90. agree to that if more of their operatives were released, like that deep-undercover
couple in Slovenia—and Klyushin.
It’s not hard to see why; Klyushin was a key contractor for Putin’s propaganda
chief, so valued he got a medal from the Russian president himself. Additional
hints of Klyushin’s value emerged in the months following his conviction, if you
knew where to look. Klyushin’s friends Borodaev and Varshavskiy, the mining
types, were put on the US sanctions list as part of the effort to “curtail Russia’s
ability to exploit the international financial system.” Then there’s the broad array
of unnamed Russian nationals who benefited from the M13 operation, and the
mysterious Russian government official whose safe Klyushin filled up with $100
bills. Take a half-step back, and it’s plain that M13’s hack-and-trade effort was
part of an attempt to fund Moscow’s economy through the back door, despite
every US effort to shut it.
On July 31, 2024, an official Kremlin news service reported that Klyushin had
suddenly gone missing from a US prison database, along with three other Russian
nationals. Two of the Russians—a hacker and an electronics smuggler—were soon
back behind bars. Klyushin and two others were loaded on a plane by men in
baseball hats and balaclavas and were flown first to Ankara, then to Moscow.
Meanwhile, Whelan, Gershkovich, and the other prisoners held in Russia were
met in a tearful, triumphant scene at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland by family,
colleagues, Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris. “I had on clothes that I had
worn in 2018 when I’d been arrested. You know, they hadn’t been washed. They
were too big for me,” Whelan told CBS.
“I waved at people that were waving at me, and then I gave the president a salute
as the commander in chief.” Whelan continued. “I thanked him for getting us
home.”
Watching from afar, Frank admitted to feeling just the tiniest bit conflicted amid
the rapture of seeing Whelan and Gershkovich, the best-known of the freed
American prisoners, back on US soil. “I was a reporter, and to have a fellow
reporter held hostage like that, it’s pretty horrendous. And so I think we were
thrilled to have a role in creating the opportunity for him to come home. On the
flip side of that, it’s a guy who’s actually a criminal”—Klyushin—“going free to get
people out who are completely innocent. I think we were gratified that he spent
three years in jail at least before he went back,” says Frank, who recently joined a
13.03.2025, 09:47 This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-prisoner-swap-vladislav-klyushin-evan-gershkovich/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.17418… 18/28 business litigation firm. “But yeah, there’s obviously a little bit of a mix of
emotion.”
In the images of his arrival at Vnukovo Airport, in Moscow, the man Frank chased
for the better part of three years looks exhausted, with deep circles under his eyes
and his brown hair largely turned to gray. His 5 o’clock shadow is now well past
7:30. Wearing an open-collared khaki shirt and matching pants, Vladislav
Klyushin descends the stairs stiffly. He waits for the undercover couple and their
kids to receive flower bouquets. Then Klyushin shakes the hand of Vladimir Putin,
who gives him a one-armed embrace.
Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at
[email protected].
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13.03.2025, 09:47 This Russian Tech Bro Helped Steal $93 Million and Landed in US Prison. Then Putin Called | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-prisoner-swap-vladislav-klyushin-evan-gershkovich/?_sp=75a38fbe-e8ce-4337-9494-d5457044f413.17418… 19/28

91. Криптокоролева: самая разыскиваемая аферистка в мире
https://www.bbc.com/russian/articles/c70qr4jeypzo
31 января 2025
Документальный фильм Би-би-си
Ружа Игнатова, известная как «Пропавшая криптокоролева», попала в список десяти
самых разыскиваемых ФБР преступников после того, как обманула инвесторов на 4,5
миллиарда долларов, а затем исчезла. Би-би-си расследует ее тесные связи с
предполагаемым боссом болгарской мафии и утверждения о том, что она была
жестоко убита. Сбежала ли пропавшая криптокоролева с деньгами, или же стала
мишенью тех самых людей, которые должны были ее защищать?


https://youtu.be/cA8ioxfpaDQ
"Криптокоролева: самая разыскиваемая аферистка
в мире | Документальный фильм Би-би-си"
Дата: 16 мая 2024 г. Источник: Документальный фильм Би-би-си "Криптокоролева: самая
разыскиваемая аферистка в мире" (на основе представленных текстовых выдержек).

Настоящий документ представляет собой брифинг, основанный на текстовых выдержках из
документального фильма Би-би-си, посвященного Руже Игнатовой, известной как
"Криптокоролева". Она является уроженкой Болгарии и находится в списке десяти самых
разыскиваемых преступников ФБР. Игнатова обвиняется в руководстве крупнейшей в
истории финансовой пирамидой, связанной с созданием фальшивой криптовалюты
OneCoin, и присвоении миллиардов долларов на протяжении пяти лет. Документальный
фильм исследует не только финансовые махинации, но и возможную причастность
Игнатовой к организованной преступности, а также обстоятельства ее таинственного
исчезновения в 2017 году.

​​Масштаб аферы OneCoin:
​​Ружа Игнатова создала криптовалюту OneCoin, которая оказалась финансовой
пирамидой, привлекавшей средства новых вкладчиков для выплаты прибыли
старым.
​​Компания привлекла свыше 3 миллионов вкладчиков по всему миру, обещая
высокую доходность.
​​Презентации OneCoin отличались масштабностью и роскошью, создавая иллюзию
легитимности и успеха ("их презентация на стадионе ум стала для меня апогеем
все эти Ferrari Lamborghini дорогие час я словно пол в Голливуд как сон").
​​По оценкам следствия, Ружа Игнатова и управляющие OneCoin похитили у
вкладчиков около 4,5 миллиардов долларов США ("Руже Игнатова и управляющий
Украли у вкладчиков 4,5 миллиарда долларов США").
​​Многие вкладчики потеряли все свои сбережения, оказались в долгах и испытали
разочарование и унижение ("я потерял все деньги К тому же мне пришлось
занимать деньги у кредитных компаний и банков разочарован остон и унижен").
​​Личность Ружи Игнатовой:
​​Игнатова обладала харизмой, страстью и амбициями, умело играя роль успешного
и гениального руководителя ("Ружа была Страстной и а мбициозной и мечтала
разбогатеть и у неё прекрасно получалось играть роль успешной и гениальной
руководительницы криптовалюты").
​​Она создавала образ образованной и влиятельной женщины, подчеркивая свои
ученые степени и связи ("Гляньте на моё резюме Я окончила Оксфорд у меня
докторская степень По международному праву Она всегда была на высоте самый
умный человек в любом месте где бы она не появлялась"). ​​Игнатова вела роскошный образ жизни, владела частными самолетами,
особняками и яхтами, что поддерживалось сложной финансовой сетью ("частные
самолёты особняки как минимум ри за многие миллионы долларов вба рнии мы
слышали о квартирах набитых наличными в Гонконге и Таиланде она владела
яхтой за несколько миллионов долларов").
​​Со временем у Ружи развилась паранойя, особенно после ареста ее любовника
Гилберта Армента и появления информации о слежке со стороны властей США ("на
тот момент было понятно что у ружи развелась Паранойя и не без основания").
​​Схема мошенничества и отмывание денег:
​​OneCoin действовала по принципу классической финансовой пирамиды ("Уловка по
сути они действовали по старой доброй схеме пирамиды причём Довольно простой
получать деньги от Новых вкладчиков и выплачивать небольшую прибыль старым
вкладчиком"). ​​Для отмывания похищенных средств использовались сложные схемы с участием
компаний-пустышек и переводов крупных сумм ("Проблема ружи в том что получая
миллионы и даже миллиарды евро ей надо их как-то отмывать ей нужно превратить
их в средства которые можно использовать и которые нельзя связать с так у неё
появились изощрённые схемы отмывания денег полученных от вкладчиков One
Coin").
​​Бойфренд Ружи, Гилберт Армент, был привлечен к схемам отмывания денег ("Ружа
привлекла своего бойфренда Гилберта Армен к отмыванию денег O ne Coin").
​​Расследование и преследование:
​​Делом OneCoin и Ружи Игнатовой занимались ФБР и налоговое управление США с
2016 года ("ФБР и следователи из налогового управления США открыли дело в
2016 году").
​​Следователи столкнулись со сложностями в расследовании из-за международного
характера аферы и связей Игнатовой ("это безусловно самое увлекательное дело
за всю мою двадцатилетняя интересные личности обманываю людей направо и
налево как им это сошло с рук ФБР Нам очень помогло"). ​​После исчезновения Ружи более 100 человек были арестованы по подозрению в
махинациях, включая Гилберта Армента и бывшего осведомителя Фрэнка
Шнайдера ("с момента исчезновения ружи более 100 человек были арестованы по
подозрению в махинациях как и гибер арта многим выдвинуты обвинения в
финансовых преступлениях бывший осведомитель ружи Фрэнк Шнайдер обвинён в
мошенничестве и отмывании денег и ожидает экстрадиции в США").
​​ФБР объявило награду в 100 000 долларов за информацию, ведущую к аресту
Ружи Игнатовой ("мы объявляем награду суммой в 100.000 долларов за
информацию ведущую к её аресту").
​​Связи с организованной преступностью:
​​Появились свидетельства о связях Ружи Игнатовой с организованными
преступными группами, в том числе с болгарским наркобароном по прозвищу Таки
(Христофорос Аманатидис) ("именно Фрэнк подтвердил что Ружа была тесно
связана с организованными преступными группами"). ​​Руже угрожали физической расправой со стороны этих преступных элементов,
возможно, с целью вымогательства ("это случилось в Дубае ей угрожали угрожали
расправиться с ней или по крайней мере навредить физически").

92. ​​Фрэнк Шнайдер сообщил, что Таки обеспечивал безопасность Ружи, за что она
могла платить до 100 000 евро в месяц ("ФБР считает что крупный наркоторговец
также отвечал за безопасность ружи мы думаем что им был именно таки нам
сказали что за её физическую безопасность отвечает крупный наркоторговец он
был телохранителем нет её охранниками были его люди Почему разыскиваемый
крупный наркоторговец обеспечивал безопасность женщине из Болгарии я
предоставляю тебе защиту А ты для меня И что она платила таки до 100.000 евро в
месяц за свою защиту").
​​Существуют предположения о финансовой связи между Ружей и семьей Таки
("документы европола и имущественный кадастр Болгарии также указывают на
финансовую связь между ружей и семьёй таки Ружа проводит очень мутную сделку
с партнёром таки покупает у него участок земли за бесценок который потом он
продаёт обратно руже за миллионы долларов").
​​Исчезновение Ружи Игнатовой:
​​Последний раз Ружу видели 25 октября 2017 года при посадке на рейс в Афины из
Софии ("последний раз ружу видели во время посадки на очень ранний рейс рай в
аэропорту Софии вместе с телохранителем она вылетела в Афины").
​​После прибытия в Афины она отправила телохранителя обратно и
предположительно встретилась с тремя мужчинами, после чего ее больше никто не
видел ("вышла из самолёта отправила охранника обратно в Болгарию а сама
осталась там в Греции её встретили трое крупных мужчин и посадили на заднее
сиденье Porsche С тех пор её больше никто не видел").
​​Существует несколько версий ее исчезновения: бегство от властей, сокрытие от
вкладчиков или насильственное исчезновение, связанное с ее связями с
криминальным миром.
​​Одна из версий, основанная на показаниях информатора Кура, предполагает, что
Ружа Игнатова была убита по приказу Таки на яхте у берегов Греции, а ее тело
расчленено и сброшено в море ("в документе сказано что таки приказал убить ружу
ружу убили на яхте у берегов Греции и её тело расчленили и сбросили в море"). ​​После исчезновения Ружи и публикации свидетельств о возможной причастности
Таки к ее убийству, ряд лиц, связанных с этим делом, подверглись нападениям или
исчезли ("кура был жестоко Убит в его дом в кейптауне вломились и казнили его
вместе с супругой и наёмными работниками некоторых людей пришлось устранить
потому что они знали слишком много атаки это была своего рода публичная казнь
больше похожая на предостережение").
​​Текущий статус расследования:
​​Несмотря на активные поиски, местонахождение Ружи Игнатовой остается
неизвестным ("Никто не знает где она в этом и загвоздка").
​​Тело Ружи так и не было найдено ("тело та к и не было найдено").
​​Полиция Болгарии заявляет о недостатке доказательств для предъявления
обвинений Таки в убийстве Ружи Игнатовой ("таки не был арестован по обвинению
в заказном убийстве ружи игнатовой полиция Болгарии заявляет что им не хватает
доказательств"). ​​Некоторые следователи полагают, что Ружа Игнатова мертва, учитывая ее связи с
опасными людьми и обстоятельства ее исчезновения ("Я полагаю что её уже нет в
живых очень трудно исчезнуть бесследно на столько лет").
Ключевые цитаты:
​​"Ружа руководила самой крупной финансовой пирамидой в истории она создала
фальшивую криптовалюту One Coin и присвоила себе миллиарды долларов."
​​"Наша валюта станет главной в мире мы станем великими и впишем наше имя в
историю." (Ружа Игнатова на одном из мероприятий OneCoin)
​​"Я с самого начала понял что это была Афера. Если обратить внимание куда шли
все деньги то сразу Ясно в её карман частные самолёты особняки как минимум ри
за многие миллионы долларов." (Следователь)
​​"Если и Есть тот кому известно что стало с ружей то это Фрэнк Шнайдер."
​​"Согласно документам европола полученным BBC в 2017 году полиция дети стран
вела расследование о махинациях One Coin."
​​"Между нами нет больше доверия ты лгал мне без зазрения совести в стольких
случаях." (Разговор Ружи Игнатовой с Гилбертом Арментом)
​​"Ружу убили на яхте у берегов Греции и её тело расчленили и сбросили в море."
(Секретный полицейский отчет, переданный Кура)
​​"таки - это босс всех боссов он Глава мафии так и достаточно влиятельная фигура
чтобы сделать так чтобы кто-то исчез." (Источник Димитра Стоянова)
​​"Неужели причиной тому лишь финансовая Афера или причина в её связях с
людьми из криминального мира с верхушкой мировой организованной преступности
к которой она была причастна?" (Вопрос, поднимаемый в фильме)

История Ружи Игнатовой представляет собой беспрецедентный случай в мире
финансовых мошенничеств, осложненный возможными связями с организованной
преступностью и таинственным исчезновением. Документальный фильм Би-би-си
поднимает важные вопросы не только о механизмах работы финансовой пирамиды
OneCoin и ее последствиях для миллионов инвесторов, но и о безопасности лиц,
обладающих большим объемом компрометирующей информации о криминальных
структурах. Отсутствие тела Ружи Игнатовой и продолжающееся молчание ключевых
фигур, вероятно, навсегда оставят некоторые аспекты этой истории нераскрытыми.
Представленные выдержки из документального фильма BBC "Криптокоролева" посвящены
истории Ружи Игнатовой, основательницы финансовой пирамиды OneCoin, которая
обманным путем присвоила миллиарды долларов у инвесторов по всему миру.
Расследование BBC раскрывает детали ее аферы, связи с организованной преступностью,
в частности с болгарским наркобароном Таки, и загадочное исчезновение в 2017 году. В
материале приводятся свидетельства приближенных к Игнатовой лиц, следователей,
журналистов и пострадавших вкладчиков. Поднимаются вопросы о причастности
криминальных структур к ее исчезновению или возможной гибели, а также о судьбе
похищенных средств.

Вопросы и ответы о деле Ружи Игнатовой и OneCoin:
1. В чем суть аферы OneCoin и кто такая Ружа Игнатова?
Ружа Игнатова, уроженка Болгарии, создала и возглавила финансовую пирамиду под
названием OneCoin, которая выдавалась за криптовалюту. На протяжении примерно пяти
лет она привлекала инвесторов по всему миру, обещая им высокую прибыль от вложений в
OneCoin. Однако OneCoin не была настоящей криптовалютой и не имела реальной
ценности. По сути, схема OneCoin работала по принципу Понци, выплачивая прибыль
старым инвесторам за счет средств новых. Ружа Игнатова и ее сообщники присвоили себе
около 4,5 миллиардов долларов США, принадлежавших инвесторам. В настоящее время
Ружа Игнатова входит в топ-10 самых разыскиваемых преступников ФБР.
2. Как Руже Игнатовой удалось привлечь такое большое количество инвесторов?
Ружа Игнатова умело создавала образ успешной и авторитетной руководительницы. Она
обладала харизмой, хорошо говорила, представлялась как доктор юридических наук,
выпускница Оксфорда, и подчеркивала свое "видение" будущего финансовой системы, в

93. котором OneCoin должна была стать ведущей криптовалютой. Масштабные презентации,
проходившие на стадионах с участием дорогих автомобилей и прочей атрибутики роскоши,
создавали иллюзию успеха и богатства. Инвесторов привлекали обещания удвоения монет
и возможности быстро разбогатеть на фоне ажиотажа вокруг криптовалют. Многие видели
в OneCoin шанс выбраться из финансовых трудностей.
3. Какую роль в деятельности OneCoin сыграла Великобритания?
Великобритания сыграла значительную роль в функционировании схемы OneCoin. Именно
в Великобритании находились юристы и PR-специалисты, которые обеспечивали
легальное прикрытие деятельности компании. В Лондоне располагался семейный офис
Ружи Игнатовой, через который осуществлялись ее личные финансовые операции. Кроме
того, британские компании и частные лица также инвестировали в OneCoin, а некоторые из
них оказались связаны с организованной преступностью и использовались для перевода
крупных денежных средств, в том числе из России и Украины.
4. Каким образом Ружа Игнатова скрывала и отмывала похищенные средства?
Ружа Игнатова использовала сложную сеть подставных компаний для перевода и
отмывания миллиардов долларов, полученных от инвесторов OneCoin. Эти средства
направлялись на покупку частных самолетов, особняков, яхт и другие предметы роскоши.
Для отмывания денег она привлекала своего бойфренда Гилберта Армена. Кроме того,
существуют свидетельства о квартирах, набитых наличными, в Гонконге и Таиланде. Ружа
Игнатова искала способы легализовать незаконно полученные средства и превратить их в
активы, которые нельзя было бы отследить.
5. Каковы связи Ружи Игнатовой с организованной преступностью?
Связи Ружи Игнатовой с организованной преступностью были глубже, чем просто
финансовая афера. По словам источников, она была тесно связана с известным
болгарским криминальным авторитетом Христофоросом Аманатидисом по прозвищу Таки,
которого называют "болгарским кокаиновым королем". Таки, предположительно,
обеспечивал ее безопасность и, возможно, помогал в отмывании денег. Также есть
информация о том, что Руже угрожали представители криминального мира, вымогая у нее
крупные суммы денег. Один из таких случаев связывают с британским гангстером Гри
Мёрфи.
6. Что известно об исчезновении Ружи Игнатовой?
Ружа Игнатова исчезла 25 октября 2017 года, вскоре после того, как стало известно, что
власти США следят за ней, а ее бойфренд Гилберт Армен сотрудничает со следствием.
Последний раз ее видели в аэропорту Софии, откуда она вылетела в Афины. Там ее
встретили трое мужчин, и с тех пор ее местонахождение неизвестно. Существует
несколько версий ее исчезновения: от бегства и скрытия от властей до возможной смерти.
Одна из версий, основанная на показаниях информатора Куры, гласит, что Таки приказал
убить Ружу, так как она знала слишком много о его делах.
7. Какова роль Христофороса Аманатидиса (Таки) в этой истории?
Христофорос Аманатидис (Таки) является ключевой, хотя и таинственной фигурой в деле
Ружи Игнатовой. По свидетельствам источников, он был очень близок с ней, возможно,
даже отцом ее дочери. Таки, как предполагается, обеспечивал безопасность Ружи, а его
люди были ее телохранителями. Существуют финансовые связи между Ружей и семьей
Таки. Информатор Кура утверждал, что Таки приказал убить Ружу. После публикации этих
свидетельств информаторы, связанные с делом, стали подвергаться угрозам и
нападениям, что указывает на влияние и опасность Таки.
8. Каков текущий статус расследования и где может находиться Ружа Игнатова?
Несмотря на многолетнее расследование ФБР и других правоохранительных органов,
местонахождение Ружи Игнатовой остается неизвестным. Она включена в список десяти
самых разыскиваемых преступников ФБР, и за информацию, ведущую к ее аресту, объявлена награда в 100 тысяч долларов. Были получены многочисленные сообщения о
ее предполагаемом местонахождении, но ни одно из них не подтвердилось. Существует
две основные версии: либо она скрывается, возможно, с измененной внешностью и
документами, либо она мертва. Учитывая ее связи с криминальным миром и
последовавшие за ее исчезновением загадочные смерти, версия о ее гибели
представляется все более вероятной. Похищенные миллиарды долларов так и не были
найдены.

Квиз (короткие ответы):
​​Схема OneCoin представляла собой классическую финансовую пирамиду: деньги
новых вкладчиков использовались для выплаты небольшой прибыли старым, при
этом большая часть средств присваивалась организаторами во главе с Ружей
Игнатовой. Сама криптовалюта OneCoin была фиктивной и не имела реальной
ценности.
​​Ружа Игнатова обладала харизмой, амбициозностью и умением убедительно играть
роль успешного и гениального руководителя. Ее образование (Оксфорд, докторская
степень) и уверенная манера поведения создавали образ надежного лидера.
​​Великобритания сыграла значительную роль, так как именно оттуда были
привлечены юристы и специалисты по связям с общественностью, которые
обеспечивали функционирование схемы OneCoin. Личный офис Ружи также
находился в Лондоне. ​​Таки, известный как "болгарский кокаиновый король", предположительно был тесно
связан с Ружей Игнатовой. Существует версия, что он обеспечивал ее безопасность
в обмен на финансовые выгоды или помощь в отмывании денег, а также мог быть
отцом ее дочери. ​​Свидетельства о шантаже со стороны криминальных элементов, угрозы
физической расправы, показания о тесной связи с Таки и последующие загадочные
убийства людей, связанных с делом OneCoin, указывают на причастность
организованной преступности к ее исчезновению. ​​Следствие выявило сложные схемы отмывания миллиардов долларов, полученных
от вкладчиков OneCoin. Деньги переводились через компании-пустышки и
инвестировались в недвижимость и другие активы. В отмывании средств был
замешан, в частности, бойфренд Ружи Гилберт Армен. ​​Разговор Гилберта Армена с Ружей Игнатовой в октябре 2017 года, в котором он
обмолвился о своем сотрудничестве с американскими властями, мог стать
ключевым моментом, после которого Ружа внезапно исчезла, разорвав все
контакты. ​​Существует несколько версий: Ружа скрывается от властей и обманутых
вкладчиков, она была убита по приказу Таки или другими криминальными
элементами, которым она могла угрожать или стать обузой.
​​Многие сообщники Ружи Игнатовой были арестованы и обвинены в финансовых
преступлениях. Некоторые свидетели и лица, обладавшие информацией о ее
деятельности, погибли при подозрительных обстоятельствах.
​​ФБР объявило Ружу Игнатову в международный розыск и включило ее в список
десяти самых разыскиваемых преступников мира, предлагая вознаграждение за
информацию о ее местонахождении. Поиск продолжается, несмотря на отсутствие
достоверных сведений о ее судьбе. ​​
Глоссарий ключевых терминов:

94. ​​Криптовалюта: Цифровая или виртуальная валюта, использующая криптографию
для обеспечения безопасности транзакций и контроля за созданием новых единиц.
В контексте OneCoin – фиктивная валюта, не имевшая реальной ценности.
​​Финансовая пирамида: Мошенническая схема, в которой доход первым
участникам выплачивается за счет средств новых вкладчиков, а не от реальной
экономической деятельности.
​​Отмывание денег: Процесс легализации доходов, полученных незаконным путем,
с целью скрыть их происхождение.
​​Организованная преступность: Группа лиц, объединившихся для совершения
незаконной деятельности, часто характеризующаяся иерархической структурой и
использованием насилия или угроз.
​​Шантаж: Вымогательство денег или других ценностей под угрозой разглашения
компрометирующей информации или совершения действий, наносящих вред.
​​Европол: Европейское полицейское управление, занимающееся борьбой с
международной преступностью.
​​Интерпол: Международная организация уголовной полиции, способствующая
сотрудничеству правоохранительных органов разных стран.
​​ФБР (Федеральное бюро расследований): Федеральное правоохранительное
ведомство США, занимающееся расследованием преступлений на федеральном
уровне.
​​Осведомитель: Лицо, предоставляющее конфиденциальную информацию
правоохранительным органам или другим заинтересованным сторонам.
​​Экстрадиция: Выдача одним государством другому лица, обвиняемого или
осужденного в совершении преступления.


Подробная хронология основных событий:
​​Начало 2014 года: Ружа Игнатова запускает криптовалюту OneCoin, обещая
инвесторам огромную прибыль и позиционируя ее как «убийцу биткойна».
Начинается активная маркетинговая кампания и привлечение инвесторов по всему
миру. ​​2014-2016 годы: OneCoin набирает популярность, привлекая более 3 миллионов
вкладчиков по всему миру. Ружа Игнатова проводит масштабные мероприятия, на
которых выступает с амбициозными заявлениями о будущем OneCoin.
​​Февраль 2016 года: Один из источников впервые встречает Ружу Игнатову в
Лондоне и описывает ее как потрясающе успешную и очаровательную женщину. Он
начинает руководить ее семейным офисом и заниматься личными вкладами.
​​2016 год: ФБР и налоговое управление США открывают дело в отношении OneCoin
и Ружи Игнатовой по подозрению в мошенничестве и создании финансовой
пирамиды.
​​2016-2017 годы: Расследование BBC начинает изучать деятельность OneCoin и
Ружи Игнатовой. Следователи выявляют признаки мошенничества и отслеживают
миллиарды долларов, переводимые через подставные компании.
​​2017 год: Власти США арестовывают Гилберта Армена, бойфренда Ружи
Игнатовой, по обвинению в отмывании денег OneCoin.
​​2017 год: Ружа Игнатова, опасаясь слежки и сотрудничества Гилберта с властями,
начинает следить за ним, устанавливая прослушку в квартире над ним. Гилберт, в
свою очередь, сотрудничает с ФБР и записывает разговоры с Ружей.
​​Октябрь 2017 года: В телефонном разговоре с Гилбертом Арменом Ружа Игнатова
проявляет паранойю и обвиняет его во лжи. Гилберт случайно упоминает, что работает на американцев. После этого разговора Ружа внезапно прекращает
общение и исчезает.
​​25 октября 2017 года: Последний раз Ружу Игнатову видят в аэропорту Софии,
откуда она вылетает в Афины. По прибытии она отправляет своего телохранителя
обратно и встречается с тремя неизвестными мужчинами, после чего ее больше
никто не видел. ​​После октября 2017 года: Многочисленные попытки найти Ружу Игнатову
оказываются безуспешными. Ее адвокаты нанимают частного детектива, но ее след
теряется.
​​После исчезновения Ружи Игнатовой: Более 100 человек были арестованы по
подозрению в причастности к махинациям OneCoin, включая Гилберта Армена и
Фрэнка Шнайдера.
​​2017-2024 годы: Расследование BBC продолжает собирать информацию об
исчезновении Ружи Игнатовой и ее связях с организованной преступностью.
​​2018 год (предположительно): Димитр Стоянов, журналист, расследующий связи
Ружи с криминальным миром, вынужден скрываться из-за угроз.
​​Показания Куры: Информатор по имени Кура сообщает, что подслушал разговор
Таки, в котором тот говорил о Руже: «Не волнуйся, она уже почти мертва». Кура
утверждает, что получил полицейский отчет, в котором говорилось, что Таки
приказал убить Ружу на яхте, расчленить ее тело и выбросить в море. ​​Серия убийств: Происходит серия загадочных убийств людей, связанных с Ружей
Игнатовой или имеющих информацию о ней, включая Куру, Димитра Аро и других
криминальных авторитетов. Гри Мёрфи попадает в аварию на квадроцикле и
погибает. Фрэнк Шнайдер и некий «мистер Решало» исчезают. ​​2022 год: ФБР добавляет Ружу Игнатову в список десяти самых разыскиваемых
преступников и объявляет награду в 100 000 долларов за информацию, ведущую к
ее аресту.
​​Продолжение расследования (2024 год): Несмотря на усилия
правоохранительных органов, местонахождение Ружи Игнатовой остается
неизвестным. Рассматриваются версии о ее смерти, возможно, по приказу Таки
из-за ее связей с преступным миром и знания слишком большого количества
информации. Большая часть недвижимости Ружи теперь принадлежит людям,
связанным с Таки.

Каст персонажей и краткие биографии:
​​Ружа Игнатова (Ruzha Ignatova): Уроженка Болгарии, основательница и
руководительница криптовалюты OneCoin. Обвиняется ФБР в организации
крупнейшей в истории финансовой пирамиды, присвоении около 4,5 миллиардов
долларов. Находится в розыске с октября 2017 года. Известна своим
харизматичным образом, докторской степенью по международному праву и
связями с влиятельными лицами и преступным миром.
​​Гилберт Армен (Gilbert Armenta): Бойфренд Ружи Игнатовой. Обвинялся в
отмывании денег OneCoin. Был арестован в 2017 году и впоследствии сотрудничал
с ФБР, записывая разговоры с Ружей.
​​Фрэнк Шнайдер (Frank Schneider): Бывший шпион, владелец частного
детективного агентства в Люксембурге. Работал на Ружу Игнатову в качестве
советника по безопасности и разведке. После исчезновения Ружи был обвинен в
мошенничестве и отмывании денег и ожидает экстрадиции в США. Исчез незадолго
после разговора с BBC.

95. ​​Роберт Бёрн (Robert Bearne) и Джейми Бартлетт (Jamie Bartlett): Журналисты
BBC, ведущие расследование дела OneCoin и исчезновения Ружи Игнатовой.
​​Следователь (следователи ФБР и налогового управления США):
Представители правоохранительных органов США, ведущие расследование в
отношении OneCoin и Ружи Игнатовой с 2016 года.
​​Источник BBC (сотрудник семейного офиса Ружи): Человек, работавший на
Ружу Игнатову в Лондоне, занимался ее личными финансами. Предоставил BBC
информацию о ее образе жизни и деловых отношениях.
​​Гри Мёрфи (Gary Murphy): Скандально известный британский гангстер из
Ливерпуля. По данным расследования BBC, участвовал в попытке вымогательства
денег у Ружи Игнатовой, а позже у Кристофера Гамильтона. Погиб в результате
несчастного случая на квадроцикле. ​​Кристофер Гамильтон (Christopher Hamilton): Британский бизнесмен,
проживающий в США. Обвинялся в отмывании 100 миллионов долларов для
бойфренда Ружи Игнатовой и в краже денег. Получал угрозы от людей, связанных с
Гри Мёрфи. ​​Таки (упоминается как "болгарский кокаиновый король", предположительно
Христофорос Аманатидис (Hristoforos Amanatidis)): Крупная фигура в
болгарской организованной преступности, подозревается в наркоторговле и других
тяжких преступлениях, хотя обвинения ему так и не были предъявлены. По
свидетельствам источников и журналистов, имел тесные связи с Ружей Игнатовой и
мог обеспечивать ее безопасность. Подозревается в причастности к ее
исчезновению и возможной смерти.
​​Димитр Стоянов (Dimitar Stoyanov): Болгарский журналист-расследователь,
изучавший связи Ружи Игнатовой с подпольным миром. Сотрудничает с BBC в
расследовании. Из-за своей деятельности подвергался угрозам и был вынужден
покидать Болгарию. ​​Кура: Информатор, утверждавший, что располагает информацией об исчезновении
Ружи Игнатовой и о причастности к этому Таки. Был жестоко убит в своем доме в
Южной Африке.
​​Димитр Аро: Информатор, давший показания ЦРУ о том, что Таки заказал
убийство Ружи Игнатовой. Был убит в своем доме в Южной Африке.
​​Иван Христанов (Ivan Hristanov): Расследовал обвинения в адрес преступной
сети Таки, которую, предположительно, покрывали коррумпированные чиновники.
Опасался за свою безопасность после того, как выступил против Таки.
​​Мистер Решало: Еще один осведомитель Ружи Игнатовой, который пропал без
следа вскоре после исчезновения Фрэнка Шнайдера.
Расследование дела OneCoin и исчезновения Ружи Игнатовой остается незавершенным, и
многие детали остаются невыясненными.