Cards, routes and two tickers: how not to get your grandmother’s card blocked in P2P arbitrage

Some call crypto arbitrage a scam that, for some reason, still hasn’t been banned; others see it as a window of opportunity—not as fast or as easy as it looks.

ForkLog does not hand out labels, but it does think it important to hear every voice in the market. So read our interview with Nikita—the founder of «Питупи» and a seasoned master of “forks”.

“They put you down as ‘temshchiki’”

ForkLog: What, in your view, is the main thing people don’t understand about P2P arbitrage?

Nikita: People most often confuse trading and arbitrage, because both involve buying and selling cryptocurrencies. But in arbitrage, unlike trading, we don’t wait for the price to move; we lock in the spread at a given moment. Broadly, you find two venues quoting different prices for the same asset and earn on that difference then and there.

ForkLog: What did you do before getting into crypto arbitrage?

Nikita: I was in a related field—sports-betting arbitrage, what people colloquially call “forks”, a way to profit from differences in bookmakers’ odds. So when I moved into crypto, the principles of arbitrage were already familiar. I was drawn by the bigger market, greater liquidity, and the fact that arbitrage was then in wild hype—you could buy dollars cheaply on the Moscow Exchange, swap them abroad for USDT and sell in Russia.

ForkLog: Do you remember your first successful case?

Nikita: Yes. An acquaintance messaged me about an interesting angle. The idea was that you could send rubles from a QIWI wallet to Kazakhstan via the CONTACT payment system, convert them to USDT in Kazakhstan, and sell those in Russia. In minimal time you could make 2–3% on your starting capital. It was sweet and short-lived: the route worked for a couple of days, and then I switched to a Turkey route via “Zolotaya Korona”.

ForkLog: Speaking of “angles”. Many people associate arbitrageurs with temshchiki—alongside marketplace hustlers and other lovers of easy money from Instagram. Why the reputation?

Nikita: That stereotype comes from the fact that crypto arbitrage sits in a grey zone here, and people in it can’t say they operate in a clear legal framework. Because arbitrage isn’t legalised, there’s no standard way to run the business or pay taxes, so many work off the books. And you get written off as temshchiki because you can’t explain your status to people.

ForkLog: You said the Kazakhstan route lasted two days. Is that a typical pace of change?

Nikita: The arbitrage market is extremely dynamic. You can’t do something once and expect it to work for years. To keep earning, you have to keep changing—what makes money now may be irrelevant in a month.

ForkLog: Has dealing with the state become harder since you started?

Nikita: We don’t deal with the state, but working with banks gets harder every month. They don’t want arbitrageurs as clients and do their best to shed them. Arbitrageurs look for new cards, but banks have learned to spot them much faster than a year ago. Working with cards has become far more difficult. That doesn’t mean the field itself is worse—it’s another shift that makes our job a bit harder (or a lot harder, depending on your resources).

But the activity will keep going: an arbitrageur provides the market with a crypto-exchange service, and that will always be needed. Some want to buy bitcoin; others need to move funds abroad.

ForkLog: You’re talking about Russia. What about elsewhere? Is it the same everywhere?

Nikita: Markets differ. It depends heavily on the state’s approach to regulation and on the banks. In China you can’t exchange crypto at all—it’s illegal. That doesn’t mean people don’t do it, but they take on risk. In Russia, anything to do with exchange is a grey zone. As for banks: there are countries like Thailand where you don’t need to keep hunting for new cards—banks are more accommodating.

“He just vanished”

ForkLog: In the post-Soviet space, which jurisdiction would you recommend if not Russia?

Nikita: As far as I know from people in the field, exchange operations are very developed in Kyrgyzstan—you can get a government licence and operate fully within the law. I haven’t tracked other countries, so I can’t say more.

ForkLog: Do crypto market cycles affect earnings? Is it easier to make money in a bull or a bear market?

Nikita: I wouldn’t say cycles affect us much. In a bull market, people buy more; activity and volumes rise. But in a bear market there are still plenty of potential clients—not everyone buys crypto for profit. Crypto is actively used in various export‑related business processes. For many, it’s the only way to transfer large sums abroad.

ForkLog: Tell us a cautionary tale about a failure.

Nikita: There are many. I’ll tell two that are fairly basic for business. In one case, my employee was doing an exchange during his shift. A client was selling crypto for rubles. We were expecting a transaction for, say, 18,582 USDT, but he sent 18.582 instead. The employee got the notification but didn’t spot the trick and sent the scammer the full amount in rubles. We were short $18,000.

The second story is also common. Someone—usually introduced through acquaintances—offers to let us use their bank card for work. We pay either a commission or a fixed sum, but the person didn’t come to earn 15,000 rubles. When the card accumulates a substantial balance, he withdraws the money and disappears. The biggest amount we’ve lost that way was more than 1.5 million rubles. We usually make sure such volumes don’t sit on cards because the scheme is widespread, but this time we slipped. We couldn’t agree a return or find the person—he just vanished.

ForkLog: How do you protect both yourself and the person providing the card?

Nikita: There’s no standard scheme; everyone comes up with their own. We sign an agency agreement with anyone who gives us a card to use. In theory it should protect both us and the person. The contract states that they have nothing to do with transactions on the card. Of course, it’s not a standard template—we wrote the wording ourselves—and if something happens, a court could challenge its validity. That hasn’t happened to us, but the risk exists. As for our protection, even if we win in court there’s a 99% chance the defendant won’t repay us, because the money is usually stolen not from a good life, and there’s nothing left.

ForkLog: You mentioned an employee’s mistake, meaning you’re no longer working alone. How did you know it was time to scale?

Nikita: Pretty quickly. As soon as I figured out how it all works, I realised that the bigger our turnover, the faster we’d earn. There were no constraints arguing against it.

ForkLog: That brings management onto your plate. And, by your account, there’s little you can do about a disloyal employee who leaves with the till.

Nikita: Yes, risks rise: a person can make a mistake, fall for a scam, or become a scammer. But essentially it’s the only way to scale. You can’t hire someone off the street, and it’s hard to formalise employment. So we recruit among acquaintances and friends of friends.

ForkLog: Can you say you’ve learned not to lose money?

Nikita: I’d say our team’s risks are controllable and accounted for in our model, but we can’t claim there are no losses. There will be losses from errors and fraud. The arbitrageur’s task is to minimise risks. Our team has come a long way there.

ForkLog: What advice would you give your beginner self?

Nikita: First, focus on arbitrage and don’t spread yourself across other ventures and mini‑projects. I underrated the field’s potential at the time. Second, focus on security and risk neutralisation, not on profit and volume. We’d have scaled faster and avoided unnecessary drawdowns.

ForkLog: What pairs and platforms would you recommend to someone who wants to try this?

Nikita: The core is USDT; that’s where liquidity is biggest. Second is bitcoin. Third is Ethereum. Ninety‑nine percent of our swaps are in those three, and when choosing a pair we primarily look at turnover per unit of time. Platform choice also comes down to liquidity. If there are no users on a good, proven platform, we just waste time. I’d suggest Bybit, HTX, Telegram Wallet—but practice teaches all.

ForkLog: What starting capital do you need?

Nikita: Ideally from 200,000 rubles. With less it’s harder to cover costs and make money. With 300,000 rubles and a 5/2 schedule, you can earn around 60,000–120,000. Average returns are 20–40% of capital. You can try with any amount, but for full‑fledged earnings, 200,000 is the minimum in my view.

ForkLog: When does an arbitrageur start thinking about a drop? When do your own cards stop being enough?

Nikita: Your own cards get blocked quickly, and not all banks are suitable. Card lifetimes are up to two weeks, or even less. So after that, as a rule, friends, relatives, acquaintances and so on get involved.

“It’s better to consult lawyers”

ForkLog: What professional tools do P2P practitioners have?

Nikita: There are no shared public tools everyone uses. Services are either private or home‑built for specific needs. So the two main tools are exchanges and cards.

ForkLog: How do you learn without wrecking things—and without accidentally getting your grandmother’s pension card blocked?

Nikita: There’s a lot of information about crypto arbitrage. You don’t need to buy special courses; there are YouTube videos, for example on my channel. There are various Telegram channels such as ours—entirely free information with all the necessary basics. And then, of course, practice. We have no secret schemes or routes.

ForkLog: What transaction volume is optimal for a beginner so their cards last longer?

Nikita: There are two opposite strategies. First, push through the maximum volume in the shortest time before the bank wises up and blocks you. The rule there is simple: the more, the better. The card’s life cycle is six to 72 hours. Second, do a small number of low‑value transactions so the bank suspects nothing. There are no universal metrics; you derive them yourself for your strategy and bank. And you can turn, say, 100,000 in different ways—one transaction or a hundred at a thousand rubles each. That also shapes your strategy. If we average everything as much as possible, a basic guideline is: three incoming and three outgoing transactions, and 60,000 rubles per day on inflows and outflows.

ForkLog: How should a beginner minimise risks, and who are the main enemies?

Nikita: There are two main risks in arbitrage: being scammed during a platform trade, and being scammed by the person who provided a card. You need to work on both. With scammers, be attentive, don’t rush, and learn the common schemes. Never take cards from people off the street. Choosing partners wisely will save your money. And it’s best to draw up a short agreement for card transfer to have some legal protection.

ForkLog: How should you register so the tax office doesn’t come knocking—and how do you protect yourself from potential state prosecution?

Nikita: Unfortunately, there’s no unified way to pay taxes; there’s no OKVED for this activity either, so I won’t offer advice. You can declare yourself self‑employed or open a sole proprietorship under a similar activity—everything is individual. It’s better to consult lawyers, preferably several.

ForkLog: What shape will arbitrage be in three to five years’ time?

Nikita: Arbitrage isn’t going anywhere, but it all depends on what the state does. Either cryptocurrencies are legalised and we operate under a licence, or we stay in the grey zone. I don’t believe exchange will be banned outright, because under sanctions the business world needs crypto. As for trends, the main one now is an arbitrage format where we don’t use our own bank cards and simply match buyer and seller.

ForkLog: Won’t growing popularity just increase competition and shrink spreads?

Nikita: That happens constantly, but market shifts routinely eject huge numbers of people who fail to adapt.

ForkLog: What format of legalisation would you prefer?

Nikita: I think a crypto licence where a person follows certain rules in their line of work and, in return, gets legalisation and protection from the state and banks.

ForkLog: Wouldn’t that push arbitrage under existing banks?

Nikita: Legalisation will certainly attract big players and make this market interesting to existing banks, which will start exchanging crypto as well as fiat. But as with traditional currency exchange: besides banks, there are simple exchange kiosks with better rates. Big players will bake in higher fees and margins, and we’ll compete on something else. In any case, legalisation is great.

ForkLog: Won’t robots replace arbitrageurs?

Nikita: Full automation is impossible in today’s market so long as you need to keep switching cards and resolving disputes. Some exchange‑related processes can be optimised—not fully, but almost. Even partial automation is very hard, so you can’t write a script once and forget it. Everything changes constantly and the software needs updating.

ForkLog: How does a beginner avoid a scam?

Nikita: Any scam rests on two things: inattention and greed. We’ve covered inattention—don’t rush, check everything; there’s enough time. As for greed, as soon as you see elevated returns and off‑market offers—cheap cards or something else—that’s a reason to be wary. There are no routes that are several times more profitable than classic setups. Or rather, there are—but they end quickly, and no one will tell you about them.

ForkLog: Should you join closed groups?

Nikita: If they ask you for anything to get in—run. Or if they promise to tell you something under a veil of secrecy and exclusivity—that’s always a scam. There’s nothing secret; all the information is in the public domain.