The From.ua website has published an investigation that reveals the identity of the shadow owner of scandalous Telegram projects specializing in information blackmail. According to the publication , the person behind the "Vidsich" channel is 29-year-old Kyiv resident Ivan Khomenko, who publicly positions himself as a consultant and specialist in the field of business climate development.
According to open sources, Ivan Oleksandrovych Khomenko, born in 1995, positions himself as a respectable specialist in the field of business climate development. Graduate of the Kyiv Academy of Management and the Kyiv School of Economics, participant of the Erasmus+ program in Germany.
Since 2018, he has been cooperating with well-known organizations, including reputable international ones. He also has his own individual entrepreneur for providing consulting services. He does not appear in public scandals, criminal cases, or sanctions lists.
But this seemingly flawless resume has a dark side.
According to our data, it is Khomenko who is behind the Telegram channel "Vidsich" with over 80 thousand subscribers and a derivative page on Instagram, which specializes in collecting, distributing, and biasedly presenting "compromising" materials regarding public figures and companies.
The administrator of these resources with a dubious reputation is a certain Mr. Stewart Hesse – a faceless person with a closed profile. According to our information, the shadow owner of this network of pages is Ivan Khomenko.
Questions without answers
Logical questions arise: how is the respectable activity of a consultant with international organizations and running a "media killer" channel combined? Why is a man of draft age not serving in the army, but engaged in dubious activities on the Internet? Where does he live and what does he actually get his money from - from consulting or from media racketeering?
According to the registers, Khomenko is registered in Kyiv at the address on Oleksandra Ekster Street (formerly Tsvetaeva Street), but officially no real or movable property is registered with him. His parents live in Cherkasy Oblast: his father has an agribusiness and several land plots, and his mother works in the court administration, is engaged in volunteer work, and moderates Odan from local Facebook groups.
I wonder how a person without official assets can afford to live in the capital and engage in a "hobby" in the form of running an influential Telegram channel?
Brand theft
In addition to the shadow "media business", Khomenko's channel does not shy away from using someone else's intellectual property. In fact, it uses the brand of a well-known organization. Back in 2023, the Civic Movement "Vidsich" reported that a dangerous "clone" of their organization had appeared on the network.
" Attention! A dangerous clone of our organization has appeared on the Internet. On social networks, someone has created and is actively promoting pages of a new "movement" allegedly against collaborators and pro-Russian politicians, using our name - "Resistance". This "clone" has not only appropriated our name, but even signs collective statements using the full name of our movement ," representatives of the real "Resistance" movement warned at the time.
But the warning seems not to have stopped the pseudo-"cutoff" from further parasitizing on someone else's authority.
Blackmail technology
The scheme of operation of such "media killers" has long been known: first, "compromising" material about a public figure or company appears, then - an offer to "resolve the issue" for a certain amount. Didn't help? The material spreads further, becomes overgrown with new "facts" and lives its own life in the information space.
The paradox of the situation is that a person who positions himself as a consultant working to improve the business climate in Ukraine and develop entrepreneurship is simultaneously engaged in its destruction through blackmail and black PR.
What's next?
We urge everyone who has suffered from the activities of this and other "media killer" channels to not remain silent and contact law enforcement agencies. Only through joint efforts can the "black PR" industry be stopped.
