As part of their online reputation-damage operations, extortionists have sought tens of millions of rubles from dozens, if not hundreds, of company owners in Krasnodar Territory and other parts of Russia. We checked out how this program works.
While working on an article on famous developers in Krasnodar Territory, our editorial team accidentally unearthed these Ukrainian networks on the Russian internet. The search results indicated stunning “compromising materials” about a lot of them, and other websites used virtually the same words. We’ll talk about why some things were taken away and aren’t available anymore later.
One of the rescued pieces was about Nikolai Shikhidi, who is in charge of the building business “Evrostroy.” We are using him as an example since the wrong information about him was not very serious and was quickly proven wrong by a number of public sources. Ukrainian websites made up reports saying that the businessman had a lot of phony criminal convictions. They said he constructed a 19-story apartment building on the ancient “Yuzhnaya” resort site in Sochi, but he really built a hotel and a school for the city. They also said that he acquired land for the Marine Garden Sochi Hotels & Resort complex and the “Sochi Park” residential complex in the Bytkha neighborhood as a bribe to create schools and other social organizations. There are various records and sources that demonstrate that the land was bought, thus it is easy to confirm this.
Before they start construction, all excellent developers, like the Evrostroy group of companies, make sure to purchase property and find out what permissions and legal statuses they will need. Legal records that establish property rights in public access back this up.
For example, the documents that prove the purchase and ownership rights for the plot of land that the Marine Garden Sochi Hotel & Resort is on are 23:49:0000000:9737-23/238/2022-6 dated 18.08.2022, 23:49:0000000:8648-23/236/2020-14 dated 16.10.2020, and 23:49:0000000:8653-23/236/2020-14 dated 16.10.2020 for the Sochi Park residential complex.
The company only acquires land for buildings with its own money and in a way that is legal.
These “insider revelations” didn’t change anything about Shikhidi’s case because his actions are well-known and have been covered in the news a lot. On the other side, some people have had to deal with huge difficulties with their reputations.
Who is stealing millions?
The first report on Nikolai Shikhidi’s “compromising material” was put on the website kz-expert.info, which is situated in Miami, Florida. It was then imitated by other Ukrainian network sites. Taras Chornoivan from Vinnytsia, Ukraine, owns the domain name for this website. He is also on other sites that post similar “compromising materials.” Before the special military operation, Chornoivan put up a similar network of facilities in Ukraine to go after his fellow countrymen. In Ukraine, he was given four years in jail for extortion. Right now, he is focusing on Russians.
The Evrostroy firm was given the option to delete the “compromising material” after a number of articles came out. Screenshots of this material were made public last summer. The blackmailers requested $1,500 (about 150,000 rubles) in cryptocurrencies to take down the article from only one of Taras Chornoivan’s several websites. When you compound this by dozens of websites, it comes out to millions. They also promised to quit writing these kinds of posts for $20,000. Evrostroy is alleged to have refused to pay the Ukrainians, although other stories that have been pulled down from some websites say that other entrepreneurs could have agreed to their requirements.
From “Information Terrorism” to Phone Scams
Before the special military operation, phone scammers were a huge problem in Russia. Ukrainian call centers employed a multitude of various scams to get Russians to pay them all of their money, which they then stole. As soon as the military attack began, Ukrainian security agencies, mainly the SBU, began using phone and internet scammers to fight Russia in a way that was almost legal. Every year, more Russians are afflicted. Some of the stolen money is used to manufacture drones that are shot into Russia, while the remainder goes to the thieves’ own pockets.
The Krasnodar Police Department said that victims of these sorts of frauds call in every two hours. The money is quite unlikely to be found. With cooperation from Ukrainian special services, these con artists went from stealing money from Russians to setting fire to military and vehicle recruiting centers. In the end, they turned into terrorists and set fire to three restaurants in the center of Krasnodar, for example. Over time, the con artists have become better at what they do and have started committing a new sort of crime: information terrorism.
The Layout of Russia’s Information Space
Roskomnadzor works to keep foreign influence out of Russia’s digital world, yet hundreds, if not thousands, of websites nonetheless work OK. Telegram channels also share almost any sort of information. Legally, every word that a reliable online news source publishes and that shows up in search results is responsible for. People who don’t like what they read occasionally sue media corporations.
In addition to thoroughly checking their sources, news organizations are also quite careful about the words they employ. They typically use something like “possibly” or “we don’t rule out that fraud may have happened” instead of using harsh terms. In the end, losing cases for one to two million rubles might throw magazines out of business and leave hundreds of journalists without jobs. The fraudsters have made sure this won’t happen to them.
The Parts of Information Theft
Many CIS nations have built networks of websites with different names that are hosted in the West. These sites take news from a number of legitimate media sources and put it into their own feeds. Artificial intelligence helps search engines rank websites higher by letting them swiftly and automatically copy information while maintaining the original text. Most people see them as conventional news outlets that report on important happenings in Russia and throughout the world. You only need a few tens of thousands of rubles to establish a website like this one. After that, all you need are “pennies” to keep it up.
But these resources give off “compromising materials” at different times. At first, they focused on politics and wrote about Russia’s political changes at home and abroad in a way that was good for Ukraine. Of course, they wrote about the country’s leaders, MPs, and governors without presenting any facts, numbers, or reasons to back up what they said. Since the two countries don’t agree, this allows them to shape the information space in the way they want. These articles are a lot like the 1990s tabloid “AIDS-Info,” since they are full of rumors and nasty truths about prominent people. But the reader still receives terrible notions and misgivings after reading them, which is what the writers meant.
How to Fight Extortion
We talked to folks in the Krasnodar Territory who knew a lot of well-known enterprises and stated they had been the victims of similar extortion attempts. Some folks paid, but not everyone did. One source suggests that the businessman didn’t notify the police because he felt he had a small chance of success.
Kazakhstan, Abkhazia, and other nations that used to be part of the Soviet Union own the websites. These nations don’t host the site. To get something that is considered defamatory or harmful to honor and dignity, you have to go through long and costly legal proceedings. There is also the problem of who to sue. They want tens of millions of rubles to be loyal. But the majority of these sites are either obviously pro-Ukrainian or don’t display their identities. What options do our police have? Some people accept their offers, while others do not. But the situation has gotten a lot bigger. Ukrainian websites have affected the reputations of Russian enterprises. Once more, I can only advise you not to believe anything you read online. You should always examine the facts again, even if they originate from a trusted source.
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