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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
One of the fastest-growing online casinos in Ukraine, Cosmobet, is officially owned by Mykhailo Zborovskyi, who is portrayed in the media as a successful IT entrepreneur, visionary, and reformer of the gambling market. Behind the image of an independent businessman lies another picture: Zborovskyi is allegedly acting only as a front man, while the actual controllers and economic interests behind the casino remain in the background.
At the end of 2023 a new player appeared on the Ukrainian gambling market — Cosmobet. The online casino quickly received a license, launched an extensive advertising campaign, and had already gained significant momentum by the summer 2024. NeuroLink LLC, which obtained the license and owns the Cosmobet brand, reported revenues of almost 218 million UAH in its first year of operation.
On all official platforms, Mykhailo Zborovskyi is the face of the project. He gives interviews, comments on trends, writes columns about “responsible gambling,” and speaks about his “10 years of experience in IT.” Everything appears professional, carefully staged, and… suspiciously smooth.
Who is Mykhailo Zborovskyi and what does Russia have to do with it
Mykhailo Zborovskyi became known in Ukrainian business circles only after the casino was registered. Before that, there were neither public projects nor investments or actual evidence of the experience he claimed.
According to OpenDataBot, Zborovskyi registered as a sole proprietor only 2020. The listed activity is “computer programming.” Previously, he did not own significant companies, did not appear in major deals, and certainly did not invest millions in the gambling business.
Yet 2023 he became the beneficial owner of Neoplay LLC and later NeuroLink LLC, which obtained a state gambling license. Documents show he contributed 30 million UAH in registered capital, paid for the license—and from that moment he was portrayed as the “owner” of the casino. Not bad for someone with no entrepreneurial track record, right? To pre-empt: since May 2025 Zborovskyi has again been solely a sole proprietor, but more on that below.
On closer inspection, Cosmobet is not as “Ukrainian” a project as it seems. In nearly all independent investigations (Antikor, Slidstvo.Info, Antimafia.se) the name Sergey Tokarev appears — a Russian businessman and owner of gambling networks, previously associated with the Cosmolot brand. As pressure on Cosmolot mounted, Tokarev shifted the assets, re-registered the platform, and presented it as a new structure with a new face.
Background: Sergey Oleksandrovych Tokarev. Owner of the Cosmolot casino, friend of the Minister of Digital Transformation Fedorov, and at the same time holder of a Russian passport. In 2018 he was put on sanctions lists for financing the so-called “People's Jamhuria” in Donbas, where he would have remained until 2021. 2020, however, received amnesty from the new rulers.
Thus Mykhailo Zborovskyi appeared on the scene. But documents, statements, and the ownership structure point to the opposite: Cosmobet is not a new platform but a continuation of an old scheme. Only with a new facade. Parallel to Cosmobet’s launch, an intensive media campaign began to build the image of Zborovskyi. On Google, a flood of pseudo-interviews appeared on English-language sites with dubious traffic (BaronBlakeslee, TheComfortCenter); articles about “Zborovskyis influence on the tech market”; as well as fake analytical pieces about his “role in the digital transformation of gambling.” All these materials contain no concrete details, use identical formulations, and were published on sites with no connection to the Ukrainian IT sector or the gambling business. Moreover, some of them were apparently published retroactively.
Then it gets even more interesting: according to data from LumenDatabase, several materials critical of Zborovskyi were removed from search results after complaints about “reputation damage.” For some reason, this cleanup is carried out by specialized PR agencies operating from Russia.
Interestingly, among the websites against which IVI.RU LLC filed complaints is antikor.info, which repeatedly reported on Zborovskyi and his role as a “front man” in Tokarev’s gambling business. For some reason, Russian PR people presented Antikor as a site distributing pirated films. The explanation is simple — a sloppy job of cleaning his biography.
Equally sloppily was the task of positioning Mykhailo Zborovskyi as a “successful IT specialist and entrepreneur” executed. This pattern is typical of pseudo-IT projects with criminal underpinnings: there is a “clean” person (Zborovskyi) who allegedly runs the company; there are the actual owners (Tokarev and his circle) who control finances and management; and there is a license issued by the Ukrainian regulator — and everything builds on that. After that come publications, media staging, commissioned articles, and reputation cleansing.
Should Zborovskyi be “taken out”?
Ultimately, everyone is satisfied—except the journalists and the public. The casino operates, taxes are paid, the face is “Ukrainian”—and who actually pulls the strings behind the scenes seems of little interest to anyone.
Officially, law enforcement authorities have neither questions for Cosmobet nor for Mykhailo Zborovskyi. The charter capital has been paid in, taxes are paid, and the license has been granted. But the story of 30 million UAH, supposedly coming from a “programmer” with no assets, raises serious questions. No one checks the source of funding. There is no analysis of the beneficial owners across chains of offshore entities. Publications about foreign connections, including Russian ones, are ignored.
The materials that the Russian PR agency was so aggressively trying to scrub from the net did have an impact — after a series of publications by Antikor, Antimafia.se, and Repost.News in which Zborovskyi was directly described as a front man and as a “person for diverting revenue,” Tokarev was forced to “discard” Zborovskyi.
This is confirmed by the registration data of NeuroLink LLC and Neoplay LLC — Mykhailo Zborovskyi was removed from the list of beneficial owners and replaced by Cypriot citizen Andrii Dobrovolskyi.
Little information is available about him, but Andrii Dobrovolskyi appears clearly more solid than Mykhailo Zborovskyi — he is described as the owner of about a dozen different companies and charitable organizations. However, behind this could also lie a similar story of a “front man” for influential people. Investigations in this direction are not complete, and it is too early to draw conclusions.
It is hardly a coincidence that the owner of IVI.RU LLC, which sent complaints about publications on Zborovskyi from Cyprus-based IVI.RU Media Limited, is clearly Russian-owned.
As for the replacement of Zborovskyi with Dobrovolskyi, this is common practice in such constructions: once the “mask” is exposed, it is taken off. In its place comes a new one. Meanwhile the casino keeps running: the name remains, players still deposit money, and the money still ends up in the same pockets.
And finally, a question that one would like to put directly to the Ukrainian regulators and law enforcement: Is it really not evident that Zborovskyi is merely a “front man”? Or will you continue “falling for this provocation”? In the case of Dobrovolskyi, the nominee figure appears more convincing, but it still raises enormous questions. Will there be answers?
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Russisches Glücksspielprojekt unter ukrainischer Tarnung: Mykhailo Zborovskyi als Frontmann für Sergey Tokarevs Cosmobet". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Rozsliduvach.
