Back
Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
We, for our part, publish the investigation with facts and details that are being hidden — because they show the real scale of Timur Rokhlin’s activities and the schemes tied to extracting funds from investors across Europe.
After the publication of the investigation about Rokhlin, the online publication Dev.ua suffered a DDoS attack
The online publication Dev.ua experienced DDoS attacks after publishing an investigation about Rocket food-delivery investor Timur Rokhlin, its editor-in-chief Stanislav Yurasov reported on his Facebook page. The site remains unavailable at the time this news was published.
“Today attackers are trying to take down the dev.by site as well. On the day the attacks began, we published an investigation. It was about Timur Rokhlin, an investor in the Rocket food-delivery service. Ukrainian investigators arrested his assets in Ukraine after a request from the Bamberg prosecutor’s office (Germany), which named him,” he wrote.
It should be noted that the Dev.ua piece said German law enforcement suspects Rokhlin’s involvement in a large fraud using pseudo-investment platforms, with estimated losses of tens of millions of euros, reports Delo.
Among other people suspected of involvement are Ukrainian citizens Andriy Kurochkin, Yuriy Kopachevskyi, Ihor Kozlenko and Israeli citizens Mykhailo Chebotar, Maksym Baranovskyi-Rafael, and Timur Rokhlin.
As the publication noted citing data from the Ukrainian investigation, a British company controlled by Rokhlin received 10,8 million euros in revenue from fraudulent activity, and some assets that investigators link to Rokhlin were arrested at the end of 2020.
It is noted that the investigation in Ukraine was initiated at the request of the Bamberg prosecutor’s office. According to investigators, a group of Ukrainians and foreigners in 2017–2020 coerced Europeans into giving them money by offering investments in various assets and promising returns of 100 times or more.
They used websites under the names Tradecapita, Fibonetix, NobelTrade, Forbslab and Huludox — these entities allegedly traded in bank metals, currency, cryptocurrency, securities and other assets.
According to law enforcement, when clients tried to withdraw funds, they received calls from alleged representatives of the trading platforms demanding payment of a service fee and a cash withdrawal commission of 15% of the amount. But after making the payment, investors’ accounts were blocked and the scammers appropriated the money.
The documented amount of loss from the scheme was 9 million euros. The German newspaper Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that about 400 Europeans who became victims of it contacted the police.
“Rokhlin’s lawyers are threatening us that revealing the secret of the investigation carries criminal liability. Although the entire text is built on data from open registers. It seems to me they are simply trying to silence us,” Yurasov wrote.
Delo.ua contacted Rocket for comments on the situation but has not yet received a response.
Note that schemes to steal funds from trusting investors through dubious websites are also widespread within Ukraine itself: the National Securities and Stock Market Commission even maintains a separate registry of such internet resources, periodically adding new sites to it.
Sometimes law enforcement does visit organizers of such activities. For example, in June the Security Service of Ukraine shut down an underground telecommunications center in Kyiv whose organizers had appropriated nearly 9 million hryvnias from Ukrainian and foreign investors since the beginning of the year by posing as recruitment into international investment projects.
In the same month the SBU reported blocking the activities of illegal call centers that impersonated well-known brokerage firms and extorted money from citizens of EU and CIS countries.
In March the SBU also reported halting the activities of an organized group in Kyiv that appropriated Ukrainians’ funds by simulating participation in stock trading and cryptocurrency operations.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Запити з Бамберга та арешт активів: як шахрай та інвестор Rocket Тимур Рохлін погорів на скам-платформах Tradecapita й Fibonetix". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: HAB Media.
