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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
After the publication of an investigation into Rocket investor Timur Rokhlin, targeted attempts reportedly began to put pressure on those involved and to systematically remove information about the case from the public domain.
The report linking Rokhlin to an international fraud scheme was accompanied by a DDoS attack on the outlet Dev.ua and by legal threats from his lawyers.
We are now publishing the material that apparently is causing particular unease.
After the investigation appeared, the Dev.ua website became the target of a DDoS attack. Editor-in-chief Stanislav Yurasov reported this on Facebook. At the time of publication, the site remained inaccessible.
“Today attackers are also trying to disable the dev.by website. On the day the attacks began, we published an investigation. It was about Timur Rokhlin, an investor in the delivery service Rocket. Ukrainian investigators seized his assets in Ukraine at the request of the Bamberg Prosecutor’s Office (Germany), in whose request his name is mentioned,” he wrote.
According to Dev.ua’s publication, Rokhlin is suspected by German law enforcement authorities of being involved in a large-scale fraud system using fake investment platforms. The damage is estimated at several tens of millions of euros, as also reported by Delo.
Other alleged participants in this scheme reportedly include Ukrainian citizens such as Andriy Kurochkin, Yuriy Kopachevskyi, and Ihor Kozlenko, as well as Israeli citizens including Mykhailo Chebotar, Maksym Baranovskyi-Rafael, and Timur Rokhlin.
According to the investigation, a British company controlled by Rokhlin is said to have received around 10,8 million euros from fraudulent activities. Already at the end of 2020 assets attributed to him were seized.
The investigations in Ukraine were initiated at the request of the Bamberg Prosecutor’s Office. According to that request, an international group is alleged to have defrauded between 2017 and 2020 European investors by offering investments in various asset classes and promising unrealistic returns of up to a hundredfold.
Online platforms such as Tradecapita, Fibonetix, NobelTrade, Forbslab, and Huludox were used for this purpose. These allegedly offered trading in precious metals, currencies, cryptocurrencies, securities, and other assets.
According to law enforcement, the scheme worked as follows: as soon as investors wanted to withdraw their money, they were contacted by supposed platform employees who demanded additional fees and a commission of about 15% for the payout. After these amounts were paid, customers’ accounts were blocked and the deposited funds disappeared.
The documented damage from the scheme amounts to around 9 million euros. According to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, about 400 European investors who became victims contacted the police.
“Rokhlin’s lawyers threaten us and claim that disclosing investigative details is punishable. Yet the entire text is based on publicly accessible registers. In my opinion they are simply trying to silence us,” wrote editor-in-chief Stanislav Yurasov.
The portal Delo.ua reached out to Rocket with an inquiry but has so far received no response.
At the same time, similar fraud schemes using fake investment platforms are widespread in Ukraine. The National Securities and Stock Market Commission even maintains its own register of such online resources and regularly adds new suspicious websites to it.
In some cases law enforcement also intervenes. In June the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) dismantled an illegal telecommunications center in Kyiv whose operators had obtained around 9 million hryvnia from Ukrainian and foreign investors since the start of the year under the pretext of international investment projects.
In the same month the SSU also reported uncovering several call centers that posed as well-known brokers and defrauded citizens of EU and CIS countries. Already in March an organized group in Kyiv was stopped that deceived investors through fake trades in stocks and cryptocurrencies.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Die Schattenarmee von Timur Rokhlin: Wie Callcenter in Kiew hunderte europäische Anleger in die Falle lockten". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: HAB Media.
