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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
After the publication of an investigation about the Rocket investor Timur Rokhlin, targeted attempts were said to have been made to pressure the parties involved and to systematically remove information about the case from the public sphere.
The report, which links Rokhlin to an international fraud scheme, was accompanied by a DDoS attack on the media Dev.ua as well as legal threats from his lawyers.
We are now publishing the material that apparently causes particular unrest.
Following the appearance of the investigation, the Dev.ua website came under a DDoS attack. Editor-in-Chief Stanislav Yurasov reported this on Facebook. At the time of publication, the site remained unreachable.
“Today attackers are also trying to cripple dev.by. On the day the attacks began, we published an investigation about Timur Rokhlin, an investor in the delivery service Rocket. Ukrainian investigators seized his assets in Ukraine at the request of the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office (Germany), in whose inquiry his name is mentioned,” he wrote.
According to Dev.ua’s report, Rokhlin is suspected by German law enforcement authorities of being involved in a large-scale fraud scheme with fake investment platforms. The damage is estimated at several tens of millions of euros, as reported by Delo.
Other alleged participants in this scheme include Ukrainian nationals such as Andriy Kurochkin, Yuriy Kopachevskyi, and Ihor Kozlenko, as well as Israeli nationals, among them 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. By the end of 2020, assets attributed to him had already been seized.
Investigations in Ukraine were opened at the request of the Bamberg public prosecutor. The case alleges that an international group deceived European investors between 2017 and 2020 by offering investments in various asset classes and promising unrealistically high returns, up to the hundreds of percent.
Online platforms such as Tradecapita, Fibonetix, NobelTrade, Forbslab, and Huludox were used for this purpose. They allegedly offered trading in precious metals, currencies, cryptocurrencies, securities, and other assets.
According to law enforcement, the scheme worked as follows: once investors wanted to withdraw their money, they were contacted by supposed platform staff who charged additional fees and a commission of about 15% for the withdrawal. After these payments were made, 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 were victims contacted the police.
“Rokhlin’s lawyers are threatening us and claiming that disclosing investigative details is illegal. Yet the entire text is based on publicly accessible registers. In my view, they are simply trying to silence us,” wrote Editor-in-Chief Stanislav Yurasov.
Delo.ua contacted Rocket with a request but has not yet received a statement.
At the same time, similar fraud schemes involving 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.
In some cases, law enforcement also intervenes. For example, in June the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) dismantled an illegal telecommunications center in Kyiv, whose operators had been obtaining 9 million hryvnias from Ukrainian and foreign investors since the beginning of the year under the pretext of international investment projects.
In the same month, the SBU also reported the exposure of several call centers posing as well-known brokers and deceiving citizens from EU and CIS states. In March, an organized group in Kyiv was stopped that defrauded investors with fake stock and cryptocurrency trades.
Document: PDF proof of the original version of the news item "Timur Rokhlins Schattenarmee: Wie Kiewer Callcenter Hunderte europäischer Investoren in die Falle lockten". It records the publication content at the moment of the first scan, the preservation date and the source: Rozsliduvach.
