How Tokarev ran an illegal but very profitable business in Russia
Tokarev accused of financing terrorism in Donbas
How Cosmolot and Sergey Tokarev are connected to online casinos today
“Patriot of Ukraine” Sergei Tokarev with a Russian passport
Russians regularly try to enter the Ukrainian gambling market. Both before and after its legalization, the Ukrainian Internet is full of Russian online casinos, which, on the one hand, earn huge profits, and on the other hand, gain access to the personal data of Ukrainians. The Ukrainian mass media time and again do not have time to track how one by one companies with a Russian footprint are trying to obtain licenses for bookmaking activities or the operation of online casinos in Ukraine. And they get it.
This was the case with the Russian bookmaker 1xBet, to which the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries issued licenses already after the start of the full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine, and left it. Russia to Ukraine, and imposed sanctions on March 10, 2023 for his connection with Russian business.
However, one Russian managed to remain unnoticed by the Ukrainian authorities and law enforcement agencies all this time and successfully develop his gambling business under the Cosmolot brand in our country. What's more, 40-year-old citizen of the Russian Federation Serhii Tokarev successfully mimicked a "successful Ukrainian IT businessman" who is being shaken by the Ukrainian government. Osint Global tells how he managed it in a detailed investigation.
How Tokarev ran an illegal but very profitable business in Russia
Serhiy Tokarev, who was born in Moscow and graduated from the Moscow University of Humanities, together with his friend Rustam Gilfanov, founded the Globo-Tech (Playson) company in the Russian Federation in 2001, which produced software for online casinos and gaming machines (slots). The business model was as follows: they copied games from well-known foreign manufacturers, in particular Novomatic and NetEnt, and sold them as their own product.
Later, Tokarev and Gilfanov decided to go into the gaming business themselves and launched a number of online casinos Va-Bank, Vulkan Deluxe, BestVulkan, BestForPlay and Geiminator. After seeing how easy it was to make money, they created an affiliate program first known as GGS Affiliates and later renamed Lucky Partners. It allowed any webmaster to open and operate his own illegal online web casino using pirated software provided by Tokarev and Gilfanov.
Offshore registration and the absence of the need to adhere to license agreements and pay for the use of a pirated product enabled the brands included in Lucky Partners to demonstrate tremendous growth rates, and Tokarev and Gilfanov to occupy a significant share of the shadow Russian online gambling market. Thousands of sites were created, through which huge amounts of money passed every day.
Observing the growth of profits, the company began to think about cleaning up its reputation. Without stopping their pirate activities, Serhiy Tokarev and Rustam Gilfanov decided to launch several legal businesses at the same time. As a result, such relatively "white" brands as Joy Casino, Casino-X and Pokerdom appeared on the market. This time, the brands used legal content from Microgaming, NetEnt and other providers (including the "legal" part of Playson), and were managed by Darklace Ltd, a Cyprus-registered company with a Curacao license of Pomadorro N.V.
Despite the official ban on gambling activities in the Russian Federation, Tokarev and Gilfanov managed to circumvent the Roskomnadzor ban by regularly creating "mirrors" of their sites (a common practice for the black gambling market). At the same time, Rostelecom provider provided active assistance to gambling sites Vulkan, CasinoX and Joycasino, banned by Roskomnadzor. From 2010 to 2013, the minority shareholder of the provider was the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who, according to the media, provided users with access to the sites of Tokarev and Gilfanov. In exchange for what - it is unknown.
In 2012, Serhiy Tokarev decided to move to Kyiv, where he continued to develop his shady gaming projects. The office of the Lucky Labs IT company in Kyiv at 3 Krakivska Street was officially involved in the classical development of business software. But unofficially, the work of illegal Russian online casino sites in Ukraine was actively administered here, which, despite the risks associated with the legal ban, brought huge revenues. Probably, it was they who helped Tokarev "fend off" the attention of law enforcement officers to his activities, and later also from sanctions.
Tokarev accused of financing terrorism in Donbas
Initially, in October 2015, tax authorities became interested in Tokarev's activities. They raided the Lucky Labs office in a tax evasion case. In 2016, the SBU was already interested in the company's activities, which resulted in another search in the case of the organization of an illegal online gambling business and… financing of terrorism "DPR" and LPR". According to the decision of the Shevchenkiv District Court of Kyiv dated April 21, 2017, since the beginning of 2014, a group of companies that worked under the brand name "Lucky-Labs" in the office on ul. Krakivska, 3, namely "Aity Research" LLC, "Soft Solutions" LLC, "Cloud Team" LLC, "Klock Support" LLC, "Online Developments" LLC, "Digital Production" LLC, "Aity Company" LLC, " Ayt; M Aity Company LLC, Clock Support LLC, Online Developments LLC, and Digital Production LLC provided technological support for online casinos in Ukraine on casino-x sites. com, pokerdom.com, joycasino.com, slotobar.com, va-bank.net vulkandeluxe.com and azartplay.co.
"Acting in a prior conspiracy with unidentified participants of the terrorist organizations "DPR" and "LPR", these companies established a mechanism for financial support for the activities of the specified illegal terrorist organizations, by transferring particularly large amounts of money to the territories of Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts and AR Crimea, which are not controlled by Ukraine , under the guise of online casino winnings, using electronic money tools - payment systems "Sberbankonline", "Promsvyazbank", WebMoney, monetaru, "Alfa-Click", "Interkasa", "QIWI", "Yandex money", "Ukash ", offshore companies and a number of fictitious business entities that pay payments to the budgets of the so-called "DPR" and "LPR", - the court ruling states.
The story was quite noisy at the time, but, as often happens, the criminal proceedings eventually managed to be "shut up" by convicting an undercover person for possession of weapons found during searches. However, this still did not save Serhiy Tokarev from being included in the sanctions list of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine in the same year 2016: a number of restrictions were imposed on Tokarev, including the blocking of all assets.
The reason for this, in addition to financing terrorists in Donbas, was, as RBC-Ukraine writes, Tokarev's support for the "Anti-Maidan" in 2014, as well as his regular visits to the annexed Crimea, bypassing the established order of doing this through Ukrainian crossing points - Tokarev regularly flew by plane from Russian Federation to Crimea.
Moreover, in 2018, information was "leaked" on the Internet that Serhii Tokarev and his partner Rustam Gilfanov sponsored the creation and acted as producers of the documentary film "Militia", which glorifies the fighters of the "DPR" and "LPR".
Russian citizen Tokarev's friendship with Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov
However, in May 2020, despite all this, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy by his decree lifted the sanctions against the citizen of the Russian Federation Serhii Tokarev. A month before that, as indicated in Tokarev's Instagram, he was a member of the jury of the competition for business support projects during the coronavirus pandemic, organized by the Ministry of Digital Transformation, and announced that he had contributed UAH 1 million to the prize fund. Even then, Minister Mykhailo Fedorov saw nothing wrong with taking money from a Russian still under sanctions.
Not only Mykhailo Fedorov, but also, presumably, Rostislav Shurma, deputy head of the Office of the President Andriy Yermak, could help him with the president's signature on the lifting of sanctions from Tokarev. Tokarev's mobile number in the GetContact application, which shows how a person is signed in the phone books of subscribers, is tagged "Sergiy from Rostislav OP". Another connection that may have helped Tokarev to gain leniency from the Ukrainian authorities is the lawyer Ivan Lyshchyna, who in 2015 was a representative of Serhiy Tokarev's company Phoenix Holdings ltd, and then, from 2016 to 2021, was the government commissioner for rights person in the European Court, and since 2021 he is an adviser to the Minister of Justice of Ukraine.
After the lifting of sanctions, the Russian Tokarev began to be actively whitewashed in the Ukrainian information space: now he is presented in the media in the role of a legal IT businessman, philanthropist, investor and… a patriot of Ukraine.
After the scandal with "L/DPR", Lucky Labs gradually closed down its activities: many companies were liquidated, some were renamed, and the office at Krakivska 3 now houses the communication hub "Economica" and the editorial office of the Delo.ua publication, recently bought by one of Tokarev's former partners on the Russian casino "Vulkan" by Maxim Krippa, which is reported in the Osint Global investigation.
Having closed the "old" history, Tokarev created a new IT company ReFace, founded the investment fund Roosh, and then the IT university SET University. And already in this role, he became an investor in the state project of the Ministry of Digital Transformation "Diya City", which, apparently, secured the favor and support of Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov. So strong that for the sake of Tokarev Fedorov went against his own words and principles. Declaring that residents of the special tax regime for Diya City IT companies cannot be companies related to Russian business or whose owners are citizens of the Russian Federation, for some reason he made an exception specifically for Serhiy Tokarev.
So, in 2023, in an interview with Mykhailo Fedorov, journalist Sonya Koshkina asked him a direct question - what is the investment fund "Roosh" doing in "Diya City", the owner of which is a citizen of the Russian Federation Serhiy Tokarev. "This is a local island of the Russian world, why is it here?" asked the journalist.
However, Fedorov did not even pretend that he was not aware of this with the promise to "figure it out", as officials often do in such awkward situations, but, on the contrary, began to defend Tokarev.
"As for this particular person, I know that he launched a university in Ukraine and many other projects, and as far as I know, he has been seeking Ukrainian citizenship for over 1.5 years," he answered, surprising the journalist. - There are actually many such people (Russians who are trying to get a Ukrainian passport) who have chosen Ukraine as the country in which they want to live, but it is very important here that these people do not work for our enemy before that."
And this is precisely where the big problems are. And it is unlikely that Fedorov is not aware of them.
How Cosmolot and Sergey Tokarev are connected to online casinos today
For the public today, Serhii Tokarev is a successful IT businessman who participates in various conferences, launches a breakthrough mobile application based on artificial intelligence, and a modern university for IT professionals. However, Tokarev's main project in Ukraine today remains the same super-profitable gaming business: not publicly, but in the shadows, Tokarev is developing the Cosmolot online casino.
Officially, the Cosmolot brand, which for a long time before the legalization of gambling in Ukraine, carried out its activities illegally, today operates under a KRAIL license dated February 8, 2021 on behalf of Spaceix LLC, registered just in May 2020, when President Zelenskyi lifted sanctions against Serhii Tokarev . Oksana Illicheva is listed as the director of "Spaceix" LLC in the state register of legal entities, and Ukrainian Serhiy Potapov and Arnulf Damerau, a Briton of German origin, are the final beneficiaries.
Of course, the Russian Sergey Tokarev is not among the founders of "Spaceix" LLC - it would be foolish to "shine" a citizen of the Russian Federation in a project that so desperately positions itself as perhaps the most patriotic business in Ukraine. However, although Tokarev's connection with "Kosmolot" is hidden in every way (and, characteristically, no one denies it, despite numerous publications about it in the mass media), it is possible to find it.
Before receiving a license for Spaceix LLC, the online casino network "Kosmolot" operated illegally for many years, and its work was organized by two companies - LLC "Lotto-Plus" and LLC "Kosmolot", connected to each other through the Seychelles offshore LAKI482 LTD, which acts as a beneficiary in both firms. The connection of "Lotto-Plus" LLC with "Kosmolot" can also be traced through a series of documents in the Unified Register of Court Decisions, when the courts considered the materials of the proceedings regarding the illegal activities of the organization of gambling games. These decisions state that the online casino "Kosmolot" used the CL Loto software complex.
It was to the domain of this software complex lottery-cloud.com, which is the technical domain of the "Kosmolot" network, according to IT.happens, that traffic was directed from the domains of Serhiy Tokarev's already known Lucky Labs. And serving these domains by placing their advertising banners on the sites of Kinogo, HDRezka, Zaycev, Runetki, Dojki and others, was the Adwise Agency of Kirill Sigida - a partner of Serhiy Tokarev and one of the heads of Lucky Labs.
By the way, the Adwise Agency of Sighida also served the domains of the Parimatch network under sanction today, which were hosted on the same server as "Kosmolot". Another partner of Tokarev from the Roosh investment fund, Serhiy Kartashov, through the Cypriot company WePlay Media Holding Limited, was the owner of Pokermatch.YUA LLC, a part of the Parimatch holding, which indicates that behind the Russian gambling business in Ukraine, however different it may be was called, there are actually the same persons, and Serhii Tokarev is one of the key ones among them.
When the Ukrainian government decided to legalize gambling, Spacesix LLC was created under Serhiy Potapov and Arnulf Damerau, and Cosmolot LLC transferred the rights to the Cosmolot trademark to this new and "pure" Spacesix LLC. Serhii Tokarev, as a citizen of the Russian Federation, could no longer "shine" in the legal "Kosmolot", however, he continues to be the real owner of "Kosmolot", no matter how he tried to hide it with the help of the introduction in 2023 into the business of foreign investor Arnulf Damerau, who is now being tried to make the "face" of "Kosmolot" - Tokarev leads Damerau to answer all the questions of law enforcement agencies or the Ukrainian public. Like, what a Russian trail, we have a British investor who repeatedly talks about how important it is for him to build a transparent and honest business in Ukraine.
But all this, as well as the news about the drones supplied by the company "Kosmolot" for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, is for the public. At the same time, Serhiy Tokarev continues to do what he does best - earn excess profits from illegal online casinos.
In May 2023, the Bureau of Economic Security opened criminal proceedings N72023000500000026 for the organization of gambling without a license with the prior collusion of officials of Spaceix LLC, which owns the Cosmolot network. The law enforcement officers established that in addition to the official site "Kosmolot", for which a license was obtained, "Spaceix" LLC administers many illegal casino sites under the same "Kosmolot" brand, for the operation of which the company does not pay taxes and fees to the state budget. With this in mind, on October 27, 2023, detectives together with the SBU conducted a search at the Kosmolot office at 8 Sikorskyi Street in Kyiv.
Moreover, in the actions of the officials of "Spaceix" LLC, BEB detectives saw an attempt to legalize money obtained through criminal means: "Spaceix" took more than 5 million euros abroad between September 2021 and February 2022: the company transferred 2.76 million euros to the address of the British KYCAID LIMITED for the use of software that "Spacex" did not use, and another 2.6 million euros to the address of the British Splash Technology Ltd., which, according to the British registers, was liquidated back in 2014. In this way, the BEB sees non-payment of income tax in the amount of 30 million 279 thousand hryvnias by the officials of "Kosmolot".
In addition, from June 12, 2023, another criminal proceeding is being investigated under part 3 of Article 212 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, within which it was established that the owners and officials of a number of enterprises, including Spaceix LLC, Finkit LLC, Gamedev LLC and others, by prior conspiracy, organized the illegal activities of a number of controlled legal entities and individuals, aimed at providing tax evasion services in particularly large amounts to the organizers of illegal gambling games on the Internet.
Apparently, this is why Russian citizen Serhii Tokarev, as his friend Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said about him, "chose Ukraine as the country in which he wants to live." However, did he choose it?
“Patriot of Ukraine” Sergei Tokarev with a Russian passport
On August 24, 2022, on the Independence Day of Ukraine, Serhii Tokarev, a citizen of the aggressor country, published a post congratulating Ukrainians on his Instagram page. "Happy Independence Day, the bravest and freest of people," he wrote. In the post, he also talked about the "Independence March" project organized by his company "ReFace" together with the presidential media project United24. "Thanks to artificial intelligence, you can walk through the streets of temporarily occupied cities - Donetsk, Kherson, Simferopol, and show that they are not alone in this struggle," Tokarev wrote. And on February 24, 2023, the anniversary of the Russian attack on Ukraine, Tokarev thanked the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, on his page.
At the same time, the "patriot of Ukraine" Serhii Tokarev continues to carry the passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation to this day and, apparently, is not going to give it up. According to data from Russian registers, Tokarev S.A. has a valid passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation, series 4516, number 642315, issued on July 4, 2016 by the UFMS of the Russian Federation in the city of Moscow, in the Lomonosovsky district.
In addition, he has two valid biometric international passports of a citizen of the Russian Federation: the first series 76 #5446171 issued on September 8, 2021, valid until September 8, 2031, and the second series 75 #3463670, issued July 19, 2016, valid until July 19, 2026 year
In the Russian Federation, Serhiy Tokarev is still registered in the city of Volokolamsk, Moscow region, at the address Nosovo, 21. As of January 30, 2024, he has a valid identification number, which is confirmed by an extract from the Unified State Register of Taxpayers of the Russian Federation.
According to an investigation by RBC-Ukraine, starting in 2016, Tokarev flew to Moscow 172 times, and from there regularly flew to Simferopol, bypassing the Ukrainian border.
Tokarev has at least three apartments in the Russian Federation: two in the city of Izhevsk and one in the Udmurt region. In September 2021, he bought a parking space in Moscow at 19 Krasnogvardiysky Proyezd 1 in the Oko II business center (ownership registration number 77:01:0004042:11541-77/051/2021-3). That is, until the full-scale war, already being an IT businessman close to the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, he regularly came home to Moscow and clearly had vital interests there. He sold this car space only in March 2023. For this agreement, he issued a power of attorney, in which he indicated the data of his Russian foreign passport.
Today, Serhiy Tokarev owns two cars in the Russian Federation: a 2005 Lexus GX 470, registration number У029МТ150, and a 2013 Range Rover, registration number А976ВР777. He sold another 2016 Audi RS6 Avant with a capacity of 605 horsepower with the number А028МО99 on February 8, 2013, a year after the beginning of the full-scale war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
Here you should pay attention to the registration number of the last car. His AMO series belongs to the government numbers in the Russian Federation and is deciphered as the Administration of Moscow, and also belongs mainly to the employees of the city hall of the Russian capital. This does not seem surprising in the context that, according to the media, Tokarev's father Oleksandr Tokarev is far from "not the last person" in the Russian Federation. He is a member of the board of the Interstate Union of Hero Cities. This body was founded in 2004 with the aim of integrating Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and unrecognized Abkhazia on the basis of "victory", patriotic education and other pro-Russian narratives. This organization is headed by Pavel Borodin - the same one who is called the person who, together with Anatoly Chubais, brought Vladimir Putin to power in the "FBC" investigations of Alexei Navalny about Putin's palace.
In general, it turns out to be very revealing: a citizen of the Russian Federation, whose father is close to the top of the Kremlin, is in close relations with representatives of the Ukrainian authorities, provides support to Ukraine, invests in Ukrainian state projects, and in his homeland, where he is imprisoned for posting on the Internet with the call " no war", - no reaction. It seems that both the Kremlin and the Office of the President of Ukraine are quite satisfied with the Russian's stormy activity in Ukraine.