Recently, Wikipedia editors have drawn attention to intrusive attempts to post positive articles about a man named Maxim Krippa, who is Max Polyakov's dating and online casino business partner.
At the same time, dozens of commissioned articles about Maksym Krippa were posted on various “sinks.” All of them had one thing in common: the main character’s last name, repeated many times, as well as the obsessive mention of the words “volcano,” “game,” and “self-help” in various combinations.
According to media experts, this is how search engines are replacing information about the real Maksym Krippa, who is actually related to the Vulcan brand and the Ukrainian Samopomich party. As well as to the president of Rostelecom PJSC Mikhail Oseevsky and the Finstar investment fund, the main co-owner of which is Russian businessman Oleg Boyko.
About what Maxim Krippa really wants to hide
In Russia, as in Ukraine, online gambling is officially prohibited. But some providers treat this ban selectively. One of them is Rostelecom. The provider provides access to the gambling sites Vulkan, CasinoX and Joycasino, banned by Roskomnadzor. True, not to all of them. Online casinos in Germany, Italy, Croatia and Romania previously operated under this brand, but Vulkan, opened from the IP of the provider Rostelecom, belongs to one person - a Ukrainian businessman and former candidate for the Kyiv City Council from the Samopomich party, Maxim Kripp.
But how was a Ukrainian entrepreneur able to influence the Russian Internet giant and circumvent the Roskomnadzor ban?
PHOTO: An example of bypassing the block for v24club.org (one of the gaming “Volcanoes”).
PHOTO: v24club.org is on the banned list of Roskomnadzor
Two Maxes
Maxim Krippa has been involved in the gambling business in Ukraine for a long time, and IT companies EvoPlay and Clone Fish are associated with him. Krippa's partner in the gambling business is an American businessman with Ukrainian roots, Max Polyakov, who made a fortune on dating and erotic web chats in Dnipro and Zaporizhia.
In the early 2010s, Polyakov and Krippa decided to expand their gambling assets and opened a joint online casino business. The joint company's office was located in the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv.
The most successful acquisition of the Krippa-Polyakov group was the Vulkan and Vulkan slot machine brands. EvoPlay received exclusive rights to use the product under these names from Ritzio Entertainment Group, created by Oleg Boyko on the basis of the acquired share in the Moscow chain of gaming salons “Vulkan”. EvoPlay successfully closed all online casinos that previously operated under the Vulkan label.
When EvoPlay dealt with the last competitors operating under the “Vulcan” brand, Krippa and Polyakov began to develop their own gambling resources under this name.
New “Volcanoes” have started to appear in droves. Every day, dozens of similar gambling resources with identical design and game sets are launched. Most of them have software products from EvoPlay.
The brand owners themselves stamp sites in huge volumes without indicating the owners and registration data. Thus, businessmen got the opportunity to make money in markets where online gambling is prohibited. Neither Krippa nor Polyakov risk 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 templates.
["Antikor", "Traveling Salesman from God Maksym Krippa: Connections with the FSB, the collapse of Samopomich and Dirty Business on the Internet":
Another businessman, Maksym Polyakov, used the game programs “from Krippa” – a former citizen of Ukraine who lived in Zaporizhia, and now a citizen of Great Britain and, possibly, the USA. Now his name is different – Max Polyakov, but the spelling of his name and surname in English did not change his inner essence.
A citizen of Ukraine, Max Polyakov also made his fortune through non-Christian activities. He was the owner of dozens of dating sites, some of which were very dubious, operated by his company Together Networks Limited.
In 2009, he added gambling to his successful dating business, but at first it was completely legal. The company he founded, Murka, launched about a dozen gaming sites that had the appropriate licenses and were therefore legal, 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 had no licenses, they used pirated copies of Novomatic, Net Ent, Playtech gaming software.
Krippa's programmers skillfully built into them algorithms aimed at the obligatory complete ruin of the client. The sites were elusive. They regularly changed addresses, and their fake owners hid in distant offshores, protecting themselves and the real owners from searches and prosecutions. In a short time, Max Polyakov and Krippa spawned one and a half hundred clones, united by one common root in the name "vulkan" - a cut-off of "Ruspress".]
Having experienced success with Vulcans, Krippa and Polyakov expanded their activities, 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 moment of the final battle”. However, not only Batman. Aggressive advertising led to the appearance of many memes on the Internet, which further contributed to the development of Krippa and Polyakov’s gambling resources.
Fake “Self-Help” List
Of the legal projects, Maksym Krippa tried to get a license for the online lottery Champion-lottery.com. 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 Krippa and President Kuchma
Brovary businessman Maksym Krippa ran for Kyiv City Council from the Samopomich party. He lost the election, but managed to make a good profit by creating an alternative party list and starting to “sell” seats on this list.
Dozens of Ukrainian businessmen were lured into the “divorce.” When the scam was exposed and the smell of something rotten spread, Krippa left for Russia and went into hiding 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 Maksym Krippa was selling seats in the next elections on behalf of the Samopomich association. The most surprising thing in this story is the complete lack of adequacy of people who managed to pay “contributions” 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 trying unsuccessfully to contact the former member of our political force, M. Krippa.”
How the scandal and the fraud case were hushed up remains a mystery. But soon after that, Krippa returned to Ukraine and continues to gamble and buy up valuable assets without hindrance. Although Maksym Krippa has repeatedly been a defendant in criminal cases related to the gambling business, he has always come out on top.
It is possible that Maxim Krippa and Max Polyakov worked on other political projects, and not only in Ukraine. This is evidenced by the impunity of IT businessmen and the huge opportunities that, despite legislative prohibitions, became available to the tandem in the field of online gambling in Ukraine, Russia and other countries.
CEO Malofeeva
Neither Krippa nor Polyakov have created independent political projects. However, politics, especially in Ukraine, interests one of Krippa's key long-term partners, Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev.
For a long time, Maxim Krippa worked for Malofeev as a manager and promoted his projects in Ukraine. It was Malofeev who helped his CEO partially circumvent gambling bans in the Russian Federation. The online casino of Maxim Krippa and his namesake Polyakov are blocked by Roskomnadzor, but are freely accessible by Rostelecom. It is 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 in the company - he owned 7.22% of Rostelecom's shares. The oligarch managed to put his manager, Alexander Provotorov, at the head of the company. Through him, Malofeev could make any changes to the list of sites blocked by the provider. It was then that Vulkan, 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.
In March 2017, PJSC Rostelecom was headed by the former Deputy Head of the Ministry of Economic Development and former 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 provider Rostelecom indicates that cooperation with the Russian oligarch continues successfully.
Read about how Russian Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev tried to get permission to create his own political party in the Russian Federation through Maksym Krippa's connections in Ukraine in the journalistic investigation: A gift to Putin for the anniversary of "SVO": Russian oligarch Malofeev buys out Forbes Ukraine
