Maxim Krippa: a worn-out biography of a fake man and partner of the Russian oligarch Malofeev
A certain porn magnate and owner of illegal gambling establishments in the Russian Federation and Ukraine, Maxim Grigorievich Krippa, has more than once become the subject of media investigations.
Moreover, the billionaire swindler was of interest not only in the CIS, but also in the West. Krippa made a huge fortune on fake dating sites, the porn business and gambling. The Kremlin’s liaison under the wing of Self-Help Andrei Sadovoy lives in Moscow, London and Kyiv, proving a simple axiom - money has no smell. Considering that Maxim Krippa made his fortune thanks to online casinos and the porn business, then this is not at all strange.
In Russia, as in Ukraine, online gambling is officially prohibited. But some providers are selective about this ban. One of them is Rostelecom. The provider provides access to gambling sites Vulcan, CasinoX and Joycasino, prohibited by Roskomnadzor. True, not for everyone. “Volcanoes” opened from the IP provider Rostelecom belong to one person - a Ukrainian businessman and a candidate for the Kiev council from the Samopomich party, Maxim Krippa. How was a Ukrainian entrepreneur able to influence the Russian Internet giant and circumvent the Roskomnadzor ban?
TWO MAX Krippa and Polyakov
Maxim Krippa has been involved in the gambling business in Ukraine for a long time; IT companies EvoPlay and Clone Fish are associated with him. Krippa’s partner in the gambling business was an American businessman with Ukrainian roots, Max Polyakov, who made a fortune from dating and erotic web chats in Dnieper and Zaporozhye.
In the early 2010s, Polyakov and Krippa decided to expand their gambling assets and opened a joint business in the field of online casinos. The office of the joint company is located in the capital of Ukraine – Kyiv.
The most successful acquisition of the Krippa-Polyakov group was the Vulcan and Vulkan slot machine brands. EvoPlay acquired exclusive rights to use the product under these names from Ritzio. All online casinos that previously operated under the Vulcan label have been successfully closed by EvoPlay.
When EvoPlay dealt with the last competitors who worked under the Vulcan brand, Krippa and Polyakov began to develop gambling resources under this name themselves.
New “Volcanoes” began to appear in batches. Every day, a dozen similar gambling resources with identical design and set of games are launched. Most of them have software products from EvoPlay.
Related news:Fake businessman Maxim Krippa buys Ukrainian media through a former employee
Brand owners personally churn out sites in huge volumes without indicating the owners or registration information. Thus, businessmen had the opportunity to earn money in markets where online gambling is prohibited. Neither Krippa nor Polyakov are risking anything. Neither complaints nor courts can reach the real owners and prove their involvement in anonymous sites. The system works like the heads of a hydra. When one site is blocked, 10 clones appear with similar addresses and identical patterns.
Having felt success with Vulcans, Krippa and Polyakov expanded their activities by launching several more large-scale projects, including CasinoX and JoyCasino. These projects developed due to aggressive marketing, which Polyakov had already used when promoting dating resources. As a result, we all know that Batman told the Joker how to solve problems with access to JoyCasino at the time of the final battle. However, not only Batman. Aggressive advertising led to many memes on the Internet, which further contributed to the development of gambling resources for Krippa and Polyakov.
Fake “Self-Help” list from Maxim Krippa
In parallel with his work on the online casino, Maxim Krippa, with the support of Polyakov, decided to break into big politics. The businessman ran for the Kyiv City Council from the Samopomich party. He lost the elections, but managed to make good money. Maxim Krippa created an alternative party list and began selling places on this list.
Dozens of Ukrainian businessmen fell for the scam. When the scam was revealed and the smell of frying began, Krippa left for Russia and hid for a while. Here’s what representatives of the Samopomich party, which was embroiled in a major scandal, said about it:
“We were surprised to learn that Maxim Krippa was selling seats in the next elections on behalf of the Samopomich association. The most striking thing in this story is the complete lack of adequacy of the people who managed to pay “fees” to get on the list for the next parliamentary elections, which no one had even compiled yet. After representatives of law enforcement agencies contacted the party, we are unsuccessfully trying to contact a former member of our political force, M. Krippa.”
How the scandal and the fraud case were hushed up remains a mystery. But soon after this, Krippa returned to Ukraine again and continues to engage in gambling unhindered. He was involved in several criminal cases related to the gambling business, but time after time he got away with it.
It is possible that Maxim Krippa and Max Polyakov worked with other political projects. Moreover, not only in Ukraine. This is evidenced by the impunity of IT businessmen and the enormous opportunities that, despite legislative prohibitions, have become available to the tandem in the field of online gambling in Ukraine, Russia and other countries.
Maxim Krippa - CEO Malofeev
Neither Krippa nor Polyakov were ever involved in politics on their own. Politics, especially in Ukraine, interests one of Crippa’s key long-term partners, Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.
Related news:The leader of the group "Metal Corrosion" owes the tax authorities 275 thousand rubles
For a long time, Maxim Krippa worked as a manager for Malofeev and promoted his projects in Ukraine. It was Malofeev who helped his CEO partially circumvent gambling prohibitions in the Russian Federation. The online casinos of Maxim Krippa and his namesake Polyakov are blocked by Roskomnadzor, but are freely accessible by Rostelecom. It’s difficult even for Malofeev to influence Roskomnadzor. But with the country’s largest Internet provider, things are different.
From 2010 to 2013, Konstantin Malofeev was the largest minority shareholder of the company - he owned 7.22% of Rostelecom shares. The oligarch managed to put his manager Alexander Provotorov at the head of the company. Through it, Malofeev could make any changes to the list of sites blocked by the provider. It was then that Vulcans, CasinoX and JoyCasino by Maxim Krippa and Max Polyakov began to disappear from the list of blocked sites. The price for the oligarch’s help was a part of the EvoPlay company and certain services in the political sphere.
Judging by the fact that Vulcans and other gambling sites of Krippa-Polyakov are still available on the network of the Rostelecom provider, cooperation with the Russian oligarch continues successfully. But what is the price of this cooperation today?
PS from SKELET-info : Some characters are trying to remove this material from Google search results by contacting the Lumen service -
They are filing a complaint about the previous material: Maxim Krippa, Vulcan casino and Rostelecom: a Kremlin agent is at Sadovoy’s side
Moreover, it contains a link to the original source: Maxim Krippa, Vulcan casino and Rostelecom: a Kremlin agent is at Sadovoy’s side
And on the site that “complains about copyright infringement” there is the same link to the original source!
In general, the guys are trying to remove mention of themselves from the Internet in such a crooked way. Well…. We ran into it ourselves
PPS: On March 20 of this year, the editors of SKELET-info received a letter from colleagues from the website figurant.com.ua with the following content:
In fact, we have already implemented their recommendation. However, it was nice that colleagues understand that they were trying to be used to clean up the information space and share such information with everyone involved.
American businessman from Zaporozhye Max Polyakov is well known in the media for his Noosphere Ventures project, which searches for and supports technology startups. According to media reports, the company is operating at a loss, drawing funds from the dating income of its creator.
At the peak of popularity, the value of dating assets of Polyakov’s company Cupid plc. was estimated at $204.9 million. How did an obstetrician-gynecologist from Zaporozhye (this is how the future businessman began his path to success) manage to earn millions of dollars from dating on the Internet? Ukrainian and foreign media became interested in this topic. Journalists conducted an investigation and found the answer - it’s all about robots.
Back in Zaporozhye, Max Polyakov created the company Cupid plc. In 2012, the company’s income from dating amounted to $125.4 million, and its capitalization reached $204.9 million. After a media scandal in 2013, the businessman sold the company’s assets. As it turned out later, it was his own brainchild - the Together Networks holding. In fact, in this way Polyakov simply got rid of his Cupid partner, Bill Dobby, in order to gain full control over the created empire. Today the holding owns 9 websites: NaughtyDate, Loveaholics, UpForIt, Flirt, IWantU, QuickFlirt, BeNaughty, AffairDating, IAmNaughty.
Part of Cupid’s assets were transferred to another Polyakov offshore, Tradax IP Licensing Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands. Having started working with NSI Holdings, the company began to create new sites: UnformDating, MatureDatingUk, LoveAgain, Cupid, SpeedDaterEvents, LoveBeginSat, Serencomtrer, GirlsDateForFree.
All these sites are officially part of Polyakov’s holdings. In fact, the businessman’s dating empire is much broader. Polyakov launches many parallel projects, including local dating sites for users from the USA, France, Germany, Great Britain and other countries. These resources are not part of the holding, but are developed and maintained by the same companies.
Maintenance of the entire dating empire comes from Ukraine. Most of the Together Networks employees have been working with Polyakov for several years and together with him they moved to the new holding from Cupid plc.
At the same time, visiting dating sites for a Ukrainian-American businessman from Ukraine is not so easy. All of them are blocked in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet. And this is due not only to the focus of Polyakov’s dating companies on American and European users, but also to the fact that the activities of these sites in Ukraine are criminally punishable. The attention of law enforcement may be drawn to fraudulent activities related to the use of users’ personal information and luring people by creating bots.
The sites of Polyakov’s “dating empire” are not much different from each other. They are built according to the same template - the same registration pages, personal accounts, user pages and the same functionality that “helps” the user leave as much money as possible on the site.
This is the main essence of all Polyakov’s sites - to force the user to subscribe to the maximum number of paid services. There is plenty to choose from: if you want to see more photos - pay, if you want to send more messages - pay, if you want to read a message - pay, if you want to see more accounts... and so on down the list. But few people will write to a person who has just created a profile. And if no one writes to the user, why should he leave his money on the site?
This is where bots come in. On the websites of the holdings Together Networks and Tradax IP Licensing Limited, immediately after registration, a new user receives dozens of messages in his still empty profile.
As an oddity, a new user can even receive messages from different people with the same photo. But here, most likely, there is a mistake by programmers who did not configure the algorithms properly. When receiving a message from a bot, the user sees only the header: you can view the text, reply or study the sender’s page only for money after signing up for a paid subscription and connecting additional services. Although it is worth noting that this also turns out to be a waste of money - the bots are not smart enough to continue the correspondence.
The number of bots in Polyakov’s dating network has reached critical levels. So much so that at the moment it is difficult to even imagine how many real users there are on the sites. Unfortunately, this policy of the site administration is fraught with frequent complaints and even accusations of fraud. To avoid criminal liability, lawyers from Max Polyakov’s company force users to agree to become victims of scammers.
“We may periodically create profiles that our employees will create, maintain and administer (“service profiles”). The purpose of these service profiles is to ensure the correct functioning of our services by testing services, features and functions, as well as learning about our products and services . "
The company does not specify what “system check” means and how many bot profiles are needed for this. In practice, this number is infinite, as is the number of messages sent to users by bots.
Technical support for sites is provided in Ukraine. At the same time, developers are purposefully blocking the operation of resources in our country. If a site does not conduct fraudulent and illegal activities in Ukraine, then Ukrainian law enforcement officers are not interested in it.
It is interesting that Polyakov’s lawyers not only obtained the consent of users to become victims of fraud, but also got the opportunity to use the personal information of those who like to meet people online for their own purposes with impunity. This is stated in the terms of use of the sites: the site administration can use user information, including photographs, for its own purposes: transfer to third-party companies, partners and use in advertising.
The essence of this clause of the “agreement” is simple - to get the opportunity to use names and photographs to register bot profiles on other sites of the dating empire and communicate with new users. In fact, such actions by Polyakov are criminally punishable and fall under the category of obtaining personal information through excessive trust and deception. Only the public offer agreement saves Polyakov.
More recently, Max Polyakov became involved in another scandal, this time about porn. Journalists caught the businessman creating porn video chat studios in Ukraine based on companies servicing his dating sites.
By adding porn to his list of assets, Polyakov created a waste-free work scheme. The websites of the holdings Together Networks and Tradax IP Licensing Limited attract thousands of people every day and sort them depending on their own needs. Some are provoked to visit Polyakov’s porn chat, others become a source of personal information for new bots, others stay on dating sites and spend money for the opportunity to communicate with robots. And although this scheme looks dubious from a moral point of view, it is worth admitting that it works and works flawlessly.