Unfolding the mystery behind Instaforex real owners and activities

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And, as demonstrated by the international investigation into the activities of BTC-e and the recent indictment of one of its own operators, Alexander Vinnik (see attached file), this very exchange, whose activities were from the start directed at criminal enterprise, ended up to be the home of MtGox stolen bitcoin...About 5 billion (yes, with a B) dollars worth of bitcoin....

For the ones not remembering the story, MtGox was a Japanese company, initially created by a US citizen as an exchange for playing cards of the (very popular in Japan) card game "Magic Tux" (hence the name), some kind of "Pokemon" style game.
It was a market place allowing users to buy / sell their cards online, and started to accept bitcoin at the time it was still a confidential payment method, worth less than one dollar a piece.

It then was bought by a French expat in Japan, Mark Karpeles, through his Japanese company Tibanne, and soon became the only exchange where bitcoin could be exchanged for cash.

Of course, when the bitcoin started to become more popular, MtGox was, due to its history, the leading exchange worldwide.
And, by late 2011, when it became evident that bitcoin was here to stay, it was the only exchange without ties to the underworld and operating according to KYC/AML standards available on the market. It was also the biggest exchange.

It had obviously one default, in the eye of the Russian controlled forex mafia : it was not controlled by them.

 

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So, it became a target of choice, and, thanks to a series of hacks, the bitcoin held in the custody of MtGox were diverted to BTC-e.

Now, it is publicly known that OK Pay, a Mayzus-related payment processor, was the payment processing of MtGox until may 2013, when it announced it ceased for an undetermined period to provide services to the bitcoin exchanges....except BTC-e, which it was processing and kept processing until the arrest of Alexander Vinnik in 2017, just as it processed, from the beginning to the end of its (quite tumultuous as we will soon see) operations, WEX, an offshoot of BTC-e which had kept on the BTC-e-e business when Vinnik was arrested.

In an interesting recent development, some of the WEX operators were recently arrested in Italy.
What are some of the charges : facilitating ransomware activities of the Iranian citizens behind the nefarious SamSam ransomware....

 

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We had access to information published in a civil Court case between a financial services company and Instaforex (more about that later), in which this financial services company claims having been framed by the Mayzus-related Instaforex, as this company had just stepped-in to provide payment services to MtGox in replacement of OKPay when several Instaforex companies became also its clients, only to initiate after a few weeks what very much looked like a chargeback scam.

As this company was engulfed within issues with its banks due to these chargebacks, it could not process MtGox transactions as scheduled, and, literally the next day, Mayzus-owned Mayzus Financial Services (the new name of OKPay) were stepping in to deliver the services....

 

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So now, it looks like we are facing a completely different story from the one which is been told over and over by Mayzus Financial Services, who, since the FBI made a worldwide series of crackdowns on electronic money and cryptocurrency money laundering behemoths, starting by Liberty Reserve in May 2013, followed by BTC-e and now WEX, has always attempted to distance themselves, though being involved up to their necks in the payment processing and the exchange to fiat money of these platforms, by the same method : a lawsuit against their partners.

 

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Liberty Reserve is arrested by FBI ? Mayzus lodges a criminal claim in Russia, against Instaforex, saying that he has been robbed of the company control, and that subsequently the company went rogue. Follows a heated debate on KROUFR, and a public announcement that Mayzus is dropping his claim and is not to be associated to Instaforex anymore.

Why ? Maybe because Instaforex was very much associated to Liberty Reserve, through the Australian company Technocash....

 

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BTC-e is arrested by FBI ? FBI turns its attention to FXOpen and Mayzus (see attached file) ? Mayzus claims to provide information to the UK FCA (incriminating FXOpen), and lodges a claim in Russia against Vinnik's lawyer who apparently explains, in the Russian side of the investigation against BTC-e, that Mayzus is implicated.

By the way, Mayzus lost this one :

 

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Maybe all of this is to avoid to make forget that Instaforex (controlled by Mayzus) and Mayzus Financial Services / OKPay were the two only places in the world where one could exchange fiat currency against BTC-e codes and vice versa directly, without going through an exchange.

 

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So now, we have established the equation :

Instaforex = Sergey Mayzus (founder and part owner, economic beneficiary) + Ildar Sharipov (part owner, ex "President of the Instaforex Group of Companies", still representative of "Instaforex Group of Companies", economic beneficiary), at least when it comes to going to Court) + Irina Nedachina (owner of companies, still director of at least one company in the "Instaforex Group of Companies", economic beneficiary) + Ekaterina Pobedinskaya (de facto manager of the companies of the "Instaforex Group of Companies", still controls the money flows, still hires lawyers and signs the guilty pleas of Instaforex such as the Consent Order of the US District Court of the District of Columbia in 2011, highly ) + Andrey Abramov (runs the website at least since 2014) + Dmitry Savchenko (part owner, one of the directors of "Fix Trade LLC" officially representing Instaforex in Russia, ex-director of INSTATRADE CORPORATION along with Ildar Sharipov, and current official head of "Instaforex Group of Companies").

Of course there are other key players, both up and down the responsibility ladder, but their names will follow.

 

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Let's add one name to the list right now, because it is quite important.

Let's meet Alexei Skachilov, one of the directors of Instant Trading EU Ltd in Cyprus, a company owner of a financial license limited to the websites forexmart.eu and instaforex.eu (of course, instaforex.com being blacklisted across Europe, it was very complicated for CySec, even if these guys are basically nowadays nothing but a Russian managed stamping machine delivering European financial licenses to shady Russian bucket shops, to close their eyes and include instaforex.com in the license).

Alexei Skachilov is also director of several offshore companies of the"Instaforex Group of Companies" including its flagship, owner of the website instaforex.com and the "Instaforex" brand and logo.

 

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We would have loved to provide you with a nice recent photo of Aleksei Skachilov taken directly from the team presentation page of instaforex.com.

For those who did not get a chance to browse the site before the recent change of PR policy of Instaforex due to regulators scrutiny turning into criminal investigations in multiple countries (more on this soon to come), these guys used to have a dedicated page of their site, filled with dozens of photographs of their team members, from the executives down to the guy opening the door and emptying the trash bin, everyone with a pulse within their organisation was there. It's all gone now, unfortunately for the newcomers to the Instaforex world...

Just like it seems that, since the beginning of this thread, a serious cleanup has been done on the internet, to try to fend off existing and new investigations maybe ?
As one can see now from a Google search on various subjects, such as, for an example, btc-e, a series of posts, links on webpages showing various very compromising practices have disappeared, and the only traces of their nefarious activities remain within the indexed content in the Google engine....