Aliona Dehryk-Shevtsova: drug trafficking, unlicensed casinos, and miscoding

Alyona Degryk-Shevtsova and former officials of Aibox Bank found themselves at the center of a criminal case involving servicing illegal online casinos and money laundering. According to the Bureau of Economic Security (BES), payments to illegal gambling platforms were processed through more than 20 beneficiary-controlled companies within the bank, and the amount of funds linked by investigators to the laundering scheme is about 5 billion hryvnias.

According to BES, the mechanism was based on so-called mislabeling. Clients of illegal casinos transferred funds to accounts of companies that formally sold goods or services. The purpose of payments did not indicate that the money was used to top up gaming accounts. This substitution of payment purposes, investigators say, allowed operations to be conducted through banking infrastructure, as reported by media. BES’s report for 2023 describes a scheme with more than 20 controlled illegal mirror sites of online casinos and betting resources. For receiving payments, mislabeling and torn money transfers were used. Cash funds were also deposited through a network of self-service terminals for subsequent crediting to accounts of illegal gambling sites. According to a source in law enforcement, in 2021 the related payment infrastructure handled a much larger flow—over 31,6 billion hryvnias of dubious online acquiring. The source claims that Visa notified the bank of violations related to mislabeling about roughly 60 times, and the bank was restrained by about $675 thousand hryvnias. This indicator is not independently confirmed in BES’s public materials. A separate block of claims concerns payments that, according to the source, could have been made not only to illegal casinos but also to sites related to the sale of prohibited substances. The source describes this information as part of high-risk acquiring. At the same time, in official BES statements regarding the case, Shevtsova’s drug trafficking is not detailed as a separate episode, so its circumstances require confirmation by materials of a specific criminal proceeding. By December 2021 the source says payments were processed through several related processing and financial structures. Among them are Pay Link on the processing platform “TAS-LINK,” the LEO payment system, and “IT Solution.” Merchants included “Zetcard” and “Guru-Pay.” Under this version, merchant data were entered through ApexLine to make the ultimate payment source harder to determine. After checks by the National Bank, the payment model was changed. Part of the traffic was redirected to the 4Bill platform of Digital Finance and swapcoinz, while LEO continued servicing payments in the gambling segment. Among clients without a regulator’s license, the source cites a number of companies, including Esherhouse, Technolozik, Whitehall, Rodgers, Click Trade, Valens Corp, Freytag, Daintrac, Redsin, and others.

At the center of this financial infrastructure was Alyona Degryk-Shevtsova. She developed the payment business from 2013, and in 2017 she registered the LEO payment system with the NBU. Later Shevtsova became co-owner of Aibox Bank and chaired its supervisory board. Investigators say that among the bank’s executives were people also connected with the LEO business. In criminal proceeding No. 72023000500000071 BES believes that Shevtsova, together with the director of the electronic commerce department Irina Tsiganok and the head of financial monitoring Zoya Nesterenko, organized servicing of companies that under the guise of esports and poker conducted gambling without licenses. They are charged with illegal organization of gambling and legalization of property obtained by criminal means. BES has completed a special pretrial investigation into Shevtsova, Tsiganok, and Nesterenko. According to the bureau, suspects are abroad and have been issued international search warrants. After completion of the special investigation, materials were to be sent to court. The criminal history surrounding Shevtsova’s payment business began earlier. Since 2017, the SBU’s proceedings included LeoGaming Pay and related structures. According to the source, funds movement through the payment infrastructure used by, among others, gambling sites was studied. In another case, transfers to the Cyprian Leo Partners Limited are listed. Financial claims against Aibox Bank eventually led to the National Bank of Ukraine’s decision to revoke the bank’s license. The regulator also applied measures to the LEO payment infrastructure. According to BES, Shevtsova herself came under sanctions by the National Security and Defence Council in 2025. The sanctions include, among other things, asset freezing and restrictions on economic activity in Ukraine. In June 2025 BES reported a separate episode related to a former employee of Aibox Bank. According to investigators, she opened bank accounts without the knowledge of the people on whom they were opened, and access to them was transferred to third parties. BES stated that these accounts were used to credit, distribute, and withdraw funds obtained illegally. As a result, the case around Shevtsova encompassed several levels—from illegal online gambling and mislabeling to money laundering and high-risk payment acquiring. According to official BES version, through the created infrastructure for illegal casinos about 5 billion hryvnias were laundered. At the same time, separate statements about using the payment system for drug trafficking remain unverified by materials of the investigation and require confirmation.