Ukrainian and Russian administrators of Wikipedia drew attention to obsessive attempts to post positive articles about a man named Maxim Krippa (business partner in dating and online casino of Max Polyakov - read accomplice).

At the same time, a number of laudatory articles about him were posted on leak sites, which had one thing in common - the repeated name of the main character, as well as the obsessive mention of the words "volcano", "game" and "self-help" in various combinations.

Presumably, in this way, information about the real Maxim Kripp, who is actually related to the Vulcan brand and the Ukrainian Samopomich party led by the mayor of Lviv Andrei Sadov, was supposed to be displaced from search engines. And also to the President of Rostelecom PJSC Mikhail Oseevsky and the Finstar investment fund, the main co-owner of which is Russian entrepreneur Oleg Boyko. About what Maxim Krippa really wants to hide.

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. Online casinos previously operated under this brand in Germany, Italy, Croatia and Romania, but Vulcans, opened with the IP provider Rostelecom, belongs to one person - a Ukrainian businessman, and a former candidate for the City Council from the Samopomich party, Maxim Krippa. How was a Ukrainian entrepreneur able to influence the Russian Internet giant and circumvent the Roskomnadzor ban?

An example of bypassing a block for v24club.org (one of the game “Volcanoes”). View image in full size

v24club.org is on the prohibited list of Roskomnadzor

Two Max

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 in 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 the company Ritzio Entertainment Group, created by Oleg Boyko on the basis of the acquired share in the Moscow chain of gaming salons "Vulcan". 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.

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.

[“Anticor”, “Traveling salesman from God Maxim Krippa: connections with the FSB, leaking Self-Help and dirty business on the Internet”: Game programs “from Krippa” were used by another businessman Maxim Polyakov - a former citizen of Ukraine who lived in Zaporozhye, and now a citizen of Great Britain and , perhaps the USA. Now his name is different - Max Polyakov, but writing his first and last name in English has not changed his inner essence at all. When he was a Ukrainian citizen, Max Polyakov made his fortune also not through Christian activities. He was the owner of dozens of dating sites, some of them very dubious, which were operated by his company, Together Networks Limited. In 2009, he added gambling to his successful dating career, but at first it was completely legal. The company he founded, Murka, produced a dozen gaming sites that had the appropriate licenses and were therefore within the legal framework, but the thirst for profit forced Max Polyakov to take a step further.

He founded a network of online casinos under the general name “Vulcan” - already completely illegal. They did not have licenses; they used pirated copies of gaming programs from Novomatic, Net Ent, Playtech. Crippa’s programmers skillfully built into them work algorithms aimed at the obligatory complete ruin of the client. The sites were elusive. They regularly changed addresses, and their front owners hid in distant offshores, protecting themselves and their real owners from searches and prosecution. In a short time, Max Polyakov and Krippa produced one and a half hundred clones, united by one common root in the name “vulkan” - incision “Ruspres”.]

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

Of the legal projects, Maxim Krippa tried to ensure that the Internet lottery Champion-lottery.com received a license. Here he had to enter into negotiations with politicians and find their support for the initiative. That’s when the first thought about his own political career flashed through his head. The first and so far only pancake came out lumpy.

Maxim Polyakov and President Kuchma

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 is what representatives of the Samopomich party, which was embroiled in a major scandal, said about this:

“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.

CEO Malofeev

Neither Crippa nor Polyakov created independent political projects. However, politics, especially in Ukraine, interests one of Crippa’s key long-term partners, the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.

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.

Related news:Fake businessman Maxim Krippa buys Ukrainian media through a former employee

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.

Konstantin Malofeev

In March 2017, PJSC Rostelecom was headed by ex-deputy head of the Ministry of Economic Development and ex-vice-governor of St. Petersburg Mikhail Oseevsky. But 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.