One gang, two brands: crypto scammers Aleksander Orlovskiy and Ekaterina Shukhnina extract millions through front individual entrepreneurs

What Secret Are the Infogypsies and Crypto Preachers Hiding?

The full-scale war has become not only a tragedy for millions of Ukrainians but also a favorable environment for the rapid growth of fraud. While people are trying to survive, protect their money and find new sources of income, numerous “experts,” infogypsies and crypto preachers are making money from their fears, hopes and financial vulnerability.

According to Forbes, in 2022, losses suffered by Ukrainians from online fraud and schemes involving social engineering increased by 96% year-on-year, reaching UAH 1 billion.

The scale of the problem continues to grow. As reported by Ekonomichna Pravda, in the first quarter of this year alone, law enforcement agencies registered more than 24,000 criminal proceedings over fraud — a record figure.

Experts link the surge in fraudulent activity primarily to the socio-economic condition of society. The greater the pressure on a person, the easier it is to manipulate their fears and hopes. War, loss of income, uncertainty and the desire to improve their financial situation at any cost turn Ukrainians into an easy target for those selling promises of “easy money.”

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It is precisely in this environment that the infogypsy industry is flourishing. Under the guise of financial education, crypto investments and “new opportunities,” people are offered ready-made formulas for getting rich, persuading them to believe that yet another course, private club or investment strategy can solve their financial problems.

But behind the glossy talk of freedom, cryptocurrency and financial independence, a much less attractive reality is often hidden — aggressive marketing, manipulation of trust and schemes in which the organizers’ income is far more predictable than that of their audience.

So what secret are crypto preachers hiding — and who is really making money from Ukrainians’ belief in quick riches?

After February 2022, another type of fraudster also became more active in the country — the infogypsies.

Infogypsyism, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is a type of fraud in which a scammer presents themselves as a successful professional and sells expensive information products that have little to no real value. Put simply, the fraudster extracts money from trusting victims by promising to teach them how to make even more money.

Such scams can appear relatively sophisticated and safe for their organizers. After all, even after giving away their money and receiving nothing in return, a victim does not always realize that they were caught in a fraudulent scheme from the outset. Infogypsies initially promise a 100% result and then claim that the students themselves are solely responsible for the failure of their projects. Supposedly, they are simply doing everything wrong, while the knowledge itself works.

A classic example of a major infogypsy scheme is the “Global Training System” of the notorious Robert Fletcher, which operated in Ukraine in the mid-2000s and quickly turned into a financial pyramid of enormous proportions. The group led by this swindler extracted more than $200 million from thousands of Ukrainians, promising to teach them how to become millionaires through investments in highly liquid assets.

“Twins” from the infogypsy camp

A new wave of infogypsies “teaches” people how to make money from digital assets — that is, cryptocurrencies. One of the most heavily promoted figures in this field is the young crypto guru Aleksander Orlovskiy, to whom we have devoted a series of publications and a separate investigation.

In the aggressive, hype-driven advertising that has flooded the internet, Aleksander Orlovskiy is portrayed as a successful millionaire crypto investor who created the Financial Freedom Academy (FFA Academy) to teach ordinary Ukrainians how to succeed in the crypto market even without starting capital. Our research and investigations by our colleagues have led to a disappointing conclusion: Aleksander Orlovskiy is deceiving his students. His achievements in crypto investing are more than questionable — they are supported by nothing other than unsubstantiated claims in promotional articles. Negative reviews from Orlovskiy’s former “students” are diligently scrubbed from the internet, while the web is flooded with glowing tributes to Orlovskiy, written as if from the same template.

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Moreover, as we have established, payments for training at Orlovskiy’s FFA Academy, which can reach tens of thousands of hryvnias per person, are largely directed to the accounts of unrelated individual entrepreneurs who show signs of being “fronts.” On the one hand, this may indicate that Aleksander Orlovskiy is involved not only in infogypsyism but also in financial fraud and tax evasion.

On the other hand, the presence of “third-party” individual entrepreneurs likely indicates that Aleksander Orlovskiy is not an independent player and that more influential players may have been behind his scheme from the outset.

This assumption is supported by another “star” who has eclipsed Orlovskiy and emerged this year on the crypto-infogypsy scene. Her name is Ekaterina Shukhnina.

Ekaterina Sergeevna Shukhnina, also known on social media as Investanuta and Katya Crypto, presents herself as the founder of the Profit Lady Academy. Just like Orlovskiy’s FFA Academy, it promises to teach anyone how to make money in the crypto market even without starting capital. Of course, not for free. Depending on the “intensity” of the course, Ekaterina Shukhnina, like Aleksander Orlovskiy, charges between $500 and $1,500 for the “training.”

Katya’s Profit Lady Academy does not legally exist, just like Orlovskiy’s Financial Freedom Academy. However, as in his case, Shukhnina’s training fees are often paid to unrelated individual entrepreneurs.

The similarities do not end there. Ekaterina Shukhnina also relies on hype-driven promotional publications to market her “services,” written according to the same templates as those used for Orlovskiy (you can check this yourself using Google).

Likewise, the reviews of Shukhnina’s crypto mentorship are overwhelmingly positive and formulaic, while all negative feedback is scrubbed from the internet. Any information about the young woman’s success in the crypto market is limited to her own claims, promotional articles, and statements by people posing as Katya’s successful “students.”

Like Orlovskiy, Ekaterina Shukhnina is considered a fraudster within the crypto community.

Ekaterina Shukhnina herself denies any involvement in fraud, as well as any connection with Aleksander Orlovskiy. In particular, she stated this during a discussion in the Telegram chat of a crypto enthusiast known as Kryptoshaman.

It is quite possible that Investanuta did not make the connection — she may never have personally crossed paths with Orlovskiy. But Ekaterina Shukhnina may not even realize that Aleksander Orlovskiy is in fact closely connected to her.

This connection can be traced through the websites of Orlovskiy’s and Shukhnina’s “educational” platforms (orlovskyi.com and profit-lady.com, respectively).

For example, if we go to the “Terms of Use” section of Shukhnina’s website, the carelessness of the copywriter reveals that the document was borrowed from Orlovskiy’s website.

After carefully analyzing Orlovsky’s and Shukhnina’s websites, including their archived versions, we found another intriguing detail. At least until August of this year, Ekaterina Shukhnina and Aleksander Orlovsky listed email addresses on the mindmafia.io domain as their contact emails.

This means that Ekaterina Shukhnina and Aleksander Orlovsky (or someone acting on their behalf) communicated with clients via email addresses linked to a domain belonging to a shady company registered in Kyiv. Its founders are connected, through a chain of associations, to a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme involving network marketing.

This thin thread leads to some rather intriguing common links between Katya and Sasha. We will examine them in our next publication. For now, let us turn to another partnership involving Shukhnina, which may have nothing to do with the matter at hand. Still, it is quite curious.

Courchevel parties and horror films

At the end of 2020, Ekaterina Shukhnina and a certain Alina Sergeevna Varakuta jointly filed an application to register the Koinvest trademark. Under this trademark, the women planned to provide various services, including financial analysis, banking services, brokerage services on the stock market, brokerage services involving shares and bonds, and much more.

According to Alina Varakuta’s LinkedIn profile, despite her young age, she supposedly has substantial experience in finance and digital assets. According to the profile, she currently lives in London and earns a living as a Startup Consultant.

Two years ago, Yahoo! Finance wrote about Varakuta as the co-founder of Finch Labs, a UAE-based company described as “one of Europe’s leading NFT service providers.” Around the same time, Alina Varakuta registered Finch Labs LLC in Kyiv, listing its primary business activity as “data processing, hosting of information on web portals, and related activities.”

It should be noted that experts associate the non-fungible token (NFT) market with widespread crypto fraud. NFTs have also been actively used to launder illicit funds by organized crime around the world. In particular, between 50% and 80% of all NFT transactions in 2020 showed signs of wash trading. And Alina Varakuta has certain connections in criminal circles (more on that below).

Last year, New York Weekly Staf published a piece about Alina Varakuta, a young woman from Ukraine who fulfilled her long-standing dream of becoming an actress in the United Kingdom. Indeed, over the past year, Alina Varakuta has played mostly supporting roles in half a dozen low-budget films. Among them was the role of lesbian Diana in the horror film Piglet’s Return.

Poster for the film Piglet’s Return.

A still from Piglet’s Return.

However, the Ukrainian public is unlikely to know much about this actress’s achievements on the British big screen. In Ukraine, Alina Varakuta is known as a glamorous influencer with 120,000 followers on Instagram. She gained notoriety in January 2023 after an outrageously lavish birthday celebration at the Courchevel ski resort.

The birthday girl spent at least €20,000 on Cristal champagne alone, which inevitably sparked outrage among her compatriots in a war-torn country where people sometimes give their last to support the front. The scandal was so loud that Varakuta was forced to publicly justify herself. She claimed that in this way she was trying to “demonstrate the defiance of the Ukrainian people.”

Despite the scandal, Alina Varakuta did not abandon her tradition of celebrating her birthday at a luxury resort this year either. However, to avoid further backlash, she wisely refrained from sharing all the details of her latest celebration on social media.

In the context of this story, however, those details are not important. A more interesting detail is that both in 2023 and 2024, among the guests at the “British actress’s” birthday celebrations were Karina Zhosan, winner of the Miss Ukraine Universe 2018 pageant, and her husband Sergey Osherovskiy, who are in Europe as refugees. Judging by the available information, Alina Varakuta is quite close to this couple.

Sergey Osherovskiy and Karina Zhosan congratulate Varakuta on her anniversary

Sergey Osherovskiy, who has been described in open sources as a criminal “authority figure,” is reportedly part of the circle of crime boss Hussein Slepoy (Hussein Akhmedov) and the “Potapov” organized criminal group, which serves the interests of Vadim Stolar, a former MP from the Opposition Platform – For Life party.

Osherovskiy is also known as Sergey Izrailskiy due to his Ukrainian-Israeli citizenship and has some involvement in the cryptocurrency world. In particular, Sergey Leonidovich Osherovskiy is listed as an extortionist in a case involving the extortion of 15 Bitcoin from a citizen named Nevedomskiy.