Criminal funding of Rocket and €10M theft: Timur Rokhlin attempts to scrub info on international fraud schemes

As soon as journalists linked Timur Rokhlin, an investor in Rocket, to fraudulent pseudo-investment platforms, he shifted into damage control mode — systematically erasing all incriminating material from the web.

Articles, mentions, and analytics concerning his ties to financial scams are disappearing from the public space, while pressure is being exerted on the media through legal threats and cyberattacks.

We, for our part, are publishing an investigation with facts and details that they are trying to hide — because they reveal the true scale of Timur Rokhlin’s activities and the schemes involved in scamming investors across Europe.

After the publication of the investigation about Rokhlin, the online publication Dev.ua was subjected to a DDOS attack

The online publication Dev.ua was subjected to a DDOS attack after publishing an investigation about the investor of the food delivery service Rocket, Timur Rokhlin, as reported on his Facebook page by its editor-in-chief Stanislav Yurasov. The site remains unavailable at the time of the news publication.

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«Today, attackers are trying to bring down the site dev.by as well. On the day the attacks began, we published an investigation. It was about Timur Rokhlin, an investor in the food delivery service Rocket. Ukrainian authorities have arrested his assets in Ukraine following a request from the Bamberg Prosecutor’s Office (Germany), where his name was mentioned,» he wrote.

It should be noted that the Dev.ua article highlighted that German law enforcement suspects Rokhlin of being involved in a large-scale scam using pseudo-investment platforms, with damages estimated at tens of millions of euros, writes Delo.

Other individuals suspected of involvement include Ukrainian citizens Andrey Kurochkin, Yuriy Kopachevskyi, Igor Kozlenko, and Israeli citizens Michael Chebotar, Maksim Baranovsky-Rafael, and Timur Rokhlin.

The publication, citing data from the Ukrainian investigation, indicated that a UK-based company controlled by Rokhlin received 10.8 million euros in revenue from fraudulent activities, and some of the assets linked to Rokhlin were seized at the end of 2020.

The investigation in Ukraine was reportedly initiated at the behest of the Bamberg Prosecutor’s Office. According to the investigation, a group of Ukrainians and foreigners defrauded Europeans between 2017 and 2020 by offering investments in various assets and promising returns of 100 times or more.

This was facilitated using websites named Tradecapita, Fibonetix, NobelTrade, Forbslab, and Huludox — these entities allegedly engaged in trading bank metals, currencies, cryptocurrencies, securities, and other assets.

According to law enforcement, when clients sought to withdraw money, they were contacted by supposed representatives of trading platforms demanding a service fee and a 15% cash withdrawal commission. However, after payment, the investors’ accounts were blocked, and the money was taken by the fraudsters.

The documented loss amount from the scheme was 9 million euros. The German newspaper Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported that about 400 Europeans, who were victims of this scam, approached the police.

«Rokhlin’s lawyers are threatening us with criminal liability for disclosing the investigation’s secrets, although the whole text is based on data from open registers. It seems to me that they are simply trying to silence us,» wrote Yurasov.

Delo.ua has reached out to the company Rocket for comments on this situation but has not yet received a response.

It should be noted that schemes to defraud gullible investors via dubious websites are common in Ukraine itself: The National Securities and Stock Market Commission even keeps a separate register of such online resources, periodically adding new sites to it.

Occasionally, law enforcement also visits the organizers of such activities. For instance, in June, the Security Service of Ukraine shut down an underground telecommunications center in Kyiv, which had appropriated nearly 9 million UAH from Ukrainian and foreign investors at the beginning of the year under the guise of attracting them to international investment projects.

In the same month, the SSU reported blocking the activities of illegal call centers posing as well-known brokerage companies that defrauded citizens of EU and CIS countries out of money.

In March, the SSU also reported the dismantling of an organized group in Kyiv that was embezzling Ukrainian funds by simulating participation in stock trading and cryptocurrency transactions.