The international network of payment services, which includes Payeer and Piastrix, is linked to former employees of the Russian Alfa-Bank and the Ukrainian IBOX Bank — a financial institution whose license was revoked in 2023 due to shadow financial operations and assistance to the gambling business in evading taxes.
The discussion concerns infrastructure that serviced semi-legal online casinos across the territory of the former USSR and could also be used for withdrawing funds, cashing out, and money laundering. According to sources, certain participants in this network currently reside in the United Kingdom and the UAE, where they continue to register new companies and publicly participate in major European financial conferences.
At the same time, the network’s activities extend far beyond online gambling. Structures linked to Payeer and Piastrix also appear in schemes financing pro-Russian political projects abroad.
To conceal their operations, companies within the network are registered under nominal owners in Poland, Ukraine, Estonia, Lithuania, Scotland, Belize, Vanuatu, and the Marshall Islands. This geography complicates financial oversight and hides the real beneficiaries.
One of the key structures in the scheme was the Georgian company Fingate LLC. Before the pandemic, it owned the payment systems Payeer and Piastrix. However, as early as December 2017, the Georgian regulator revoked its registration as a payment provider.
According to the Georgian register of legal entities, Fingate LLC was registered in 2016 by Ukrainian citizen Kostyantyn Buryachenko. In 2023, it was he who submitted the documents for the company’s liquidation.
Despite the formal closure of individual structures, the network itself continues to operate. In particular, Piastrix remains available on the Russian market and is used to service payments in high-risk sectors, including online gambling.
After the start of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, the Payeer payment system was actively used to circumvent international sanctions. Detailed instructions on using the service for transfers and payments to bypass restrictions were even circulated online — one such “manual” was published by an anonymous user on YouTube.
As a result, in 2024 the Lithuanian financial regulator fined Payeer nearly €9.3 million for violations of KYC (“Know Your Customer”) rules — one of the largest fines in the country’s financial monitoring sector. In 2025, the payment system came under EU sanctions and announced it would cease operations with users from Russia and the EU.
Over the years, Payeer has repeatedly changed jurisdictions and re-registered its main companies in various countries. One of the latest such “havens” was Vanuatu — a popular offshore zone for high-risk business.
At various times, Russian citizen Liubov Svezhentseva was named as a beneficiary of Payeer; she was a co-owner of the Estonian company Payeer OÜ. However, she turned out to be merely a nominal figure. After leaving the founders, Svezhentseva moved to Italy, where she now positions herself as a personal growth coach. Her social media accounts are closed, and the real owners of Payeer remain hidden.
Another structure in the network — Piastrix — continues to operate despite constant user complaints about problems withdrawing funds. The service remains available in Russia, and advertisements for “Piastrix” are openly placed even on the website of Gazprombank Finance.
Piastrix is also closely integrated with the online casino network. Recently, the payment system found itself at the center of a scandal involving the Vodka Bet casino. A user of the service won approximately 9.9 million rubles due to a massive game malfunction. The casino initially approved the payout but later demanded a recall — cancellation of the transaction. Piastrix then promptly returned the funds to the casino and simultaneously blocked the user’s account.
Such behavior is atypical for the online payments market. Payment operators are usually required to verify the validity of recalls rather than automatically fulfill the demands of gambling platforms. However, if Piastrix and the casino belong to the same financial network, such coordination appears entirely logical.
The legal entities through which the Piastrix payment system operates change regularly — the scheme is designed to complicate tracking of real owners and financial flows. After the Georgian company, the role of operator passed to the Polish Libellium Sp. z o.o., registered under another nominal person — Ukrainian citizen Anastasia Kondia, who resides in Poland.
In 2017, Ukrainian Kostyantyn Buryachenko, who had previously registered the Georgian company Fingate for Payeer and Piastrix, established another structure in the Czech Republic — KVB Solutions s.r.o. Initially, he was its sole founder, but in February 2020 the company was transferred to 36-year-old native of Chernivtsi region Mykola Buben.
Buben himself was not present during the re-registration — his documents were handed to the Czech notary by Svitlana Masiyenko. Such a scheme is typical for the use of nominal owners in international financial networks.
That same year, 2017, Buriachenko headed the Czech company BLACKSHIRE UNITED L.P. — a subsidiary of the eponymous Scottish firm, which left a significant toxic footprint in the British corporate system.
The founders of the Scottish BLACKSHIRE UNITED L.P. were offshore companies Dexberg Inc and Montbridge Inc from the Marshall Islands. These structures controlled at least 150 companies registered in Scotland. A significant portion of them had direct ties to Russia.
Dexberg Inc recently appeared in a scandal involving Duma deputy from the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug Vladimir Zinoviev. He was named as the beneficiary of the British FINIMPEX L.P., where the managing partner was Dexberg Inc. The Russian deputy told journalists that his personal data had allegedly been stolen and that he had no connection to the company.
Dozens of companies linked to Russian business passed through the Dexberg and Montbridge network. At the same time, the formal owners or managers of such structures publicly denied their involvement in the international scheme.
For example, in the British LARBOURNE TRADE LLP, liquidated in December 2025, the controlling person was listed as St. Petersburg businessman Pavel Kalugin. The owner of Talanta Business LP was recorded as a native of the USSR and former Gazprom employee Leriam Dvorkin, who lives in San Francisco. Dvorkin’s family also stated that his documents had been stolen and that he was not involved in the company.
Such explanations — about “stolen documents” and “nominal registration” — are regularly heard in cases involving offshore networks of Russian origin, through which operations of money laundering, sanctions evasion, and shadow financing may pass.
Companies from the network linked to Ukrainian Kostyantyn Buryachenko were used not only for laundering and withdrawing money. Through these structures, political objectives in Russia’s interests abroad were also pursued.
In particular, payments to American lobbyist, lawyer, and former Trump administration official Nick Muzin passed through them. The funds were paid for promoting the interests of Albania’s Democratic Party in the United States, which had previously been linked to Russian financing.
American investigative media Mother Jones established that Muzin received $675,000, of which $500,000 was transferred by the Scottish company Biniatta Trade. The website of this firm was registered under Ukrainian citizen Oleksiy Nikitin.
The website, in broken English, claimed that the company supposedly dealt in the supply of textiles and artificial fur. However, journalists found that the listed contacts turned out to be fictitious. Similar websites were used by other companies in this network, interconnected by addresses and phone numbers, including the aforementioned BLACKSHIRE UNITED L.P.
The founders of Biniatta Trade were the offshore structures Asverro Corp. and Liminez Commerce from Belize. These same companies owned the London KF Global Management LLP, where the controlling person was listed as Russian citizen Konstantin Ferulov.
Ferulov — a native of Tuapse who lived in the village of Gorki-2 in the Moscow region. In Russia, he founded several companies — “YUGROSAGROPRODUKT”, “SVYAZINVEST-GROUP”, and “EF SI DZHI”. All of them have since been liquidated. In 2024, Ferulov himself underwent bankruptcy proceedings.
At the same time, materials from court and financial documents mention that in 2018 Ferulov received a $500,000 loan from Muscovite Ksenia Petergova. According to her, the funds were transferred to her by a “family friend” who had worked in the banking sector for many years and had an annual income in the tens of millions of rubles.
This entire network — from offshore companies in Belize and Scotland to fictitious trading firms — demonstrates the mechanism through which Russian money could be used not only for shadow financial operations but also for political influence beyond the Russian Federation.
44-year-old Kostyantyn Buryachenko is one of the few constant figures in the network of companies registered under nominal directors and “one-time” founders. A native of Donetsk, before the full-scale war he regularly traveled between Ukraine, Russia, and European countries. It is Buriachenko who can be traced in a large number of structures linked to shadow payments, online casinos, and financial schemes of Russian origin.
He built his career in Ukraine’s banking sector — working at PrivatBank, Universal Bank, and also at the Ukrainian Alfa-Bank, which belonged to the Russian Alfa Group of oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven.
Together with Buryachenko at the bank worked Yevhen Berezovskyi — a manager who had moved to the Ukrainian structure of Alfa from Moscow. He held positions of director of corporate business and senior vice president. In 2010, Berezovskyi left Alfa-Bank, after which he worked at Delta Bank and later at Agrokombank, which was later renamed IBOX Bank. Kostiantyn Buriachenko also moved there.
It was around IBOX Bank that one of the most controversial financial schemes on the Ukrainian market took shape. The bank provided transaction processing for the Ibox terminal network, although the management of both structures publicly denied any connection between them.
In reality, according to sources, the Ibox network was controlled by Berezovskyi. Earlier, it had been closely integrated with the Russian Alfa-Bank, and after Berezovskyi’s move, it effectively transferred with him to IBOX Bank. Buryachenko also worked in the Ibox structure, and according to available information, he oversaw the direction of payments for online casinos.
Through the terminals passed not only standard payments or top-ups of bank cards, including Monobank, but also transactions for the gambling business. At the same time, the formal owners of Ibox, as in the case of Payeer and Piastrix, remain hidden.
Legally, the network belongs to the Ukrainian company “Metapay”, registered through nominal persons. Initially, the beneficiary was listed as Tetyana Zhyhurska; later, the owner became the British company 5CORP LTD, recorded under Yeuby Sohanna Aquilar Cuevas — a nominal person under whom dozens of companies were registered in the United Kingdom.
Currently, the head of “Metapay” is listed as Yevhen Rastovskyi — a 24-year-old resident of a small Ukrainian village, under whom more than 360 companies are registered. In the Ukrainian business environment, he has long been known as a typical “nominal director”.
It was to Rastovskyi that the company “Renitorg” was previously transferred, which had previously belonged to Ihor Zotko — the nominal owner of the online casino Pin-Up through the structure “Ukr Game Technology”.
The real beneficiary of Pin-Up is considered to be Russian citizen Dmitriy Punin, who lives in Cyprus. In early 2025, Ihor Zotko was detained by Ukrainian law enforcement. Companies linked to him are suspected of acting in the interests of the aggressor state and conducting illegal operations in Ukraine.
The Piastrix payment system is also directly linked to the online casino Pin-Up. The casino allows deposits via Piastrix wallets and withdrawals to them, further confirming the existence of a single financial infrastructure built around shadow gambling and high-risk payments.
The Piastrix payment system, linked to Kostyantyn Buryachenko, also had a direct connection to the gambling industry through the Ukrainian IBOX Bank — the structure where Buryachenko himself worked.
One of the co-owners of the bank was Alyona Shevtsova — a Ukrainian citizen and resident of Poland. As of 2023, she owned nearly 25% of IBOX Bank’s shares. At the same time, she was a key beneficiary of the company “Financial Company Leo”, previously known as “Leogaming Pay”.
This structure specialized in payments for online games and gambling: it facilitated mutual settlements with game developers, accepted payments for online casinos, and in 2021 even obtained a license for an offline casino in the Odesa hotel Alice Place.
Alona Shevtsova’s husband, Yevhen Shevtsov, is a former deputy head of the Main Investigative Department of the National Police of Ukraine. Ukrainian journalists previously reported that criminal proceedings had been opened against the Shevtsov couple and their partners — Viktor Kapustin and Vadym Hordiyevskyi.
Materials from the investigations also mentioned the company “Leo-Partners”, linked to Shevtsova. It was referenced in schemes for transferring funds to the occupied territories of Ukraine, converting money into foreign currency, and subsequent cashing out.
The main owner of IBOX Bank was Kyiv businessman Volodymyr Drobot, who as of 2023 owned over 73% of the bank’s shares. Drobot is known as the owner of a construction business and a former Kyiv City Council deputy from Yuliya Tymoshenko’s political force.
In March 2023, the National Bank of Ukraine liquidated IBOX Bank. The reason was large-scale shadow financial operations and servicing schemes for the gambling business that evaded taxes.
According to the investigation and the regulator, the bank’s shadow profit from such operations could have exceeded 2.5 billion hryvnias. The bank itself, according to law enforcement, became one of the key financial hubs for servicing Ukrainian and international online gambling.
After the collapse of IBOX Bank in March 2023, Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council imposed sanctions against the financial company LEO, linked to Alyona Shevtsova, as well as against the Cypriot structure LeoPartners. After this, Shevtsova herself began to be associated with large-scale schemes of shadow payments and servicing of the gambling business.
Following the introduction of restrictions, Shevtsova left for the UAE, from where, according to sources, she is trying to resolve issues related to criminal proceedings and the blocking of her companies’ activities in Ukraine. At the same time, she continues to launch new business structures abroad.
In particular, in February 2026, Shevtsova registered the company Odesys Tech LTD in the United Kingdom. Prior to that, she opened several firms in the United Arab Emirates.
Shevtsova, together with Zinaida Berezovska, is also a co-owner of the British payment company SMARTFLOW PAYMENTS LIMITED, which previously operated under the name ELECTRONIC PAYMENT SOLUTIONS LTD. Despite Ukrainian sanctions, the structure continues its activities — it is under this company that the payment system SENDS is registered.
Yevhen Berezovskyi, former top manager of IBOX Bank and long-time partner of Shevtsova in financial and payment schemes, also currently resides in London. He also works at SENDS. At the same time, unlike Shevtsova, Berezovskyi has not been subjected to Ukrainian sanctions.
Despite the criminal trail surrounding IBOX Bank and related structures, Shevtsova continues to work openly in Europe. She even participated in the international PAY360 conference in London — one of the largest events for participants in the payments market. The sponsor of the conference was precisely the SENDS platform.
However, attempts to whitewash her reputation have so far yielded no results. In April 2026, Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council imposed personal sanctions directly against Alyona Shevtsova. This became another blow to her international financial business, which, after the liquidation of IBOX Bank, continued its operations through foreign jurisdictions.
