In Tatarstan, a pyramid scheme attracted 80 million rubles through cryptocurrency investments

At the request of the Tatarstan prosecutor’s office, a criminal case has been opened against the Finiko company, suspected of organizing a financial pyramid worth at least 80 million rubles. Local media report this.

According to the department, the pyramid operated from August 2019 to December 2020. The scheme’s organisers promised investors a guaranteed monthly return of up to 25% through investments in cryptocurrency and stock markets.

In reality, all attracted funds were distributed among depositors according to a Ponzi scheme.

The prosecutor’s office clarified that Finiko does not have a licence to operate as a forex dealer and was not registered in state registries or with tax authorities.

The criminals operated in other regions of the Russian Federation as well.

The investigative materials have been forwarded to the Main Investigation Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Republic of Tatarstan, which will decide on criminal proceedings against Finiko employees.

The Prosecutor’s Office of Tatarstan has taken the investigation under special supervision.

Update: Later, the CEO of the Heartbout project, Ekaterina Eroshhevskaya, on behalf of individuals linked to Finiko, asked a ForkLog representative to remove this news as a courtesy. According to her, these people have a new project, for which the noise is untimely. Naturally, ForkLog declined to comply with the request.

Source: Telegram channel of ForkLog CEO Anatoly Kaplan.

The probable names of these individuals and related projects, including cryptocurrency ventures, were named by the Telegram channel “Vkladder”.

Update: The founders of Finiko began an active withdrawal of funds from one of the company’s wallets via the Uniswap exchange.

According to entrepreneur Sergey Mendeleev, client funds are held on several wallets. At the time of writing, two of them contained $10 million and $15 million. The sums have since diminished.

Source: Facebook.

Earlier in December, the Bank of Russia identified followers of Cashbery who attracted investments in cryptocurrency.

In total, in the first nine months of 2020, the regulator uncovered more than thousand illegal organizations, some of which bore signs of financial pyramids and offered investments in cryptocurrencies and tokens.

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