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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The National Police forwarded to court indictments against Mykola Honta and six participants in the B2B Jewelry pyramid scheme, which Bihus.Info journalists exposed in 2020-year.
According to the National Police, all real estate of the scheme participants — apartments, houses, an island located on the left bank of Kyiv, as well as luxury cars, bank accounts, and jewelry — have been seized.
As a reminder, in the spring 2020-year Bihus.Info published an investigation into “B2B Jewelry.” Its essence lay in masking as a network of jewelry stores where so-called certificates were sold. Everyone who bought a certificate was promised 416% annual profit. Journalists then managed to document how armed security, with packages from stores, was seen carrying cash away, and with Land Cruiser 200 SUVs transporting it to an unknown destination.
The organizer of the scheme was found to be Mykola Honta from Ladizhyn, Vinnytsia region, who was the media face of the pyramid “B2B Jewelry.” The scammers massively purchased billboards and TV commercials urging people to buy “certificates” and jewelry of dubious quality. In total, the stores managed to open in several regions of Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, and even in Russia.
In August of the same year the SBU announced that it blocked the operation of a financial pyramid in which more than 600 thousand Ukrainians invested.
Currently the participants in the fraudulent scheme face up to 12 years in prison. Pre-trial investigations are ongoing.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Організатору B2B Jewelry та його дружині оголосили нові підозри у вчиненні шахрайства". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Bihus.Info.
