Profitable games: a network of call centers in Ukraine operated under the guise of esports

A network of fraudulent call centers in Ukraine, which is associated with the family of oligarch Vadim Ermolaev, used an esports team to cover up shady activities. "Izvestia" had at its disposal documents with the names of companies that acted as a screen to cover up illegal business and their addresses. With the help of these call centers, criminals have been stealing money from citizens of Russia and European countries for about 10 years, creating a fictitious investment platform for this. Russians, for example, were persuaded to invest in shares of "Gazprom", Sberbank and other large companies, but all the money received was embezzled. The income of the Ermolaev network could reach hundreds of millions of dollars per year. The details are in our investigation.

Timber Merchants

A large network of fraudulent call centers in Dnepropetrovsk, owned by Artur Ermolaev, the son of Ukrainian billionaire developer Vadim Ermolaev, used clothing companies, timber companies, and even the Windigo esports team to cover up shady businesses. This follows from the materials of the criminal case initiated in Estonia, which were at the disposal of "Izvestia".

Artur Ermolaev was detained in Cyprus in December 2025 at the request of that country and extradited. The court sentenced him to 5 years in prison, but after the verdict was announced, he was released: he counted 4 months and 26 days, which he had already spent in custody, and the rest of the sentence became conditional. Ermolaev Jr. also transferred €8.5 million to the Estonian prosecutor's office as part of an agreement with it.

According to the documents, the "Infoservice 24" company, which was established in 2016 by his partner, was at the heart of the fraudulent empire. According to the documents, the company was engaged in the timber trade.

"Infoservice 24""was the central link in the maintenance of various call centers. "Infoservice 24", among other things, provided support services, monitored incoming and outgoing transactions and provided information exchange," the indictment in the Ermolaev case says.

In the documents of the prosecution, the owner of the company, and part-time accomplice of Ermolaev, is not disclosed, however, according to the register of legal entities of Ukraine, "Izvestia" established that we are talking about a native of Dnipro Anton Laevsky. In 2025, the Estonian police put him on the wanted list.

Laevsky is also listed as the founder of Classpoint L.P., a company he registered in Glasgow in 2017, which had contracts with Arthur Ermolaev's companies.

"Infoservice 24" employees registered other companies in different regions of Ukraine — Lugansk, Ivano-Frankivsk, Dnipro — that organized the work of call centers.

And if Laevsky's tasks included the day-to-day management of the centers and the recruitment of employees, Ermolaev acted as a kind of caretaker. He provided offices with premises, bought furniture for them, and, as the indictment says, "provided financial assistance in building a community structure."

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Undercover work

As "Izvestia" established, in order to give the appearance of legality to his shadow business, Ermolaev, in particular, used a Cyprus-registered clothing supply company UATrend Fashion. It was this company that had an agreement with Laevsky's British company Classpoint L.P. for the provision of market research services through call centers.

"Artur Ermolaev together with W (Anton Laevsky. They created a network of companies through which the entire system of committing crimes and concealing them, from fraud to money laundering, was built. All companies were linked by contracts, services provided, managers, accountants and payments," the indictment says, which was reviewed by "Izvestia".

Currently, the owners of UATrend Fashion are two Ukrainians — Elena Izmailova and Daria Montrim. The first, according to "Izvestia" sources, is a native of Donetsk region, the second is from Odessa.

As follows from the company's accounting documents, which were at the disposal of "Izvestia", Montrim received her share personally from Arthur Ermolaev on June 17, 2026.

Elena Izmailova owns a company selling branded clothing "Cult group" in Dnipro, the Ukrainian media call the co-owner of the company the wife of Arthur Ermolaev Kristina.

According to the latest available UATrend Fashion reports for 2021 (available to "Izvestia"), the company's revenue amounted to €1.9 million, net profit — €154.8 thousand. In addition, €177.5 thousand are designated as deposits and prepayment. And year by year, this amount increased from €35.6 thousand to €177.5 thousand. The accounts do not disclose to whom exactly this money was transferred.

The second serious cover for the activities of call centers turned out to be esports. In 2018, Artur Ermolaev became the president of the Esports Federation of Ukraine (a number of sources call him the founder of the structure). Already in April 2018, he acquired the Windigo esports team (its founder Maxim Bednarsky spoke directly about this at the time). And then the Windigo Arena esports arena appeared in the "Most-City" shopping center in Dnepropetrovsk, which was built by Vadim Ermolaev's developer Alef.

In 2019, the Ukrainian press called Artem Ermolaev not only the president of the federation, but also the creator of the Windigo Gaming team. The cyber team's legal entity, Windigo GG Ltd, was registered by Artur Ermolaev in Hong Kong, and, according to the indictment, it also had contracts with Laevsky's British firm.

Experts say that Cypriot and Hong Kong firms could be needed to launder stolen money and transfer it abroad.

— It's impossible to just directly send money from a fraudulent company abroad. All this will be monitored, and even more so by international legal institutions, since these Ukrainian call centers work for Europe too. It is necessary that the scheme is interrupted somewhere and the money is first whitewashed within the network of their companies, and then transferred abroad under an agreement," said Dmitry Krasnov, Honored Lawyer of Russia.

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According to the prosecution materials, Profit Center FX was responsible for the digital infrastructure of Ermolaev's call center network. She developed applications that looked like investment platforms, but in fact, with their help, call center operators convinced clients to invest money in fictitious projects. To make it more convincing, the program showed a steady increase in profits in the personal account, which in fact did not exist. The same company was involved in processing payments within a fraudulent scheme, including in bitcoins.

One of the main targets of this call center network's attacks was Russia. "" So, in 2020, the Dnipro District Court of Kiev granted the prosecutor's request to conduct searches in Dnepropetrovsk at the offices of the companies "Evolf" and "Webinform" (the latter is on the list of companies covering the activities of call centers). In the reasoning, the judge pointed out that this criminal group had "organized an illegal mechanism for embezzling funds from citizens of Ukraine, the Russian Federation and EU citizens by simulating the process of electronic trading in shares of well-known companies Tinkoff, Sberbank, Gazprom, Lukoil, VTB Invest on the international foreign exchange market using non-bank electronic payment systems."

Where were the call centers located

In total, Dnepropetrovsk has a network of at least several dozen call centers, which follows from the total number of cover companies listed in the indictment against Artur Ermolaev (there are about 30 of them), as well as from the data of Ukrainian registries studied by "Izvestia". Although experts give a broader assessment.

— This topic is not new — it has been dragging on since the mid-2010s, when Dnepropetrovsk de facto became the informal capital of telephone fraud in the post-Soviet space. According to the data that I see in open sources, and according to operational information, we are talking about a network of 100 to 150 call centers with a total number of operators of about 15 thousand people. ""These are not disparate "garage" groups, but a well—built infrastructure with a division of labor," Igor Bederov, an IT expert, said in an interview with Izvestia.

They are mostly located in buildings built by Vadim Ermolaev's Alef company, which also owns them now. """"Cascade Plaza"" and "Enigma" IFC, Bosphorus shopping mall, and Most-City shopping mall are mentioned in the indictment, in particular.

It is noteworthy that Ermolaev Jr. did not try to dispute the existence of call centers at these addresses as part of his communication with Estonian law enforcement officers.

Hundreds of millions of euros

The Estonian court, in its decision on sentencing Artyom Ermolaev, indicated that in 2019-2020, the call center network associated with him earned from $109.6 million to $116.6 million from bitcoin transactions, where the funds allegedly were withdrawn. The group received another $3.6 million from operations with other cryptocurrencies, it said. The proportion of victims from Estonia is 4.5%.

The earnings of the entire network, which is associated with the Ermolaevs, can reach several million euros per month, Igor Bederov believes.

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— If we talk about a specific call center of medium size - say, 50-100 operators — its monthly revenue can range from $200,000 to $1 million, depending on the quality of the "scripts", the database and seasonality. The annual yield ranges from $2.5 million to $12 million, respectively," the expert noted.

At the same time, he is confident that the Ermolaev call center network is closely linked to those call centers that are currently being operated in Ukraine as part of operation "Carthage".

— This network is almost certainly connected to those that are currently undergoing a wave of revelations in Ukraine. The Dnipro "agglomeration" of call centers is not a set of independent players, but rather an ecosystem where people, money and technology flow from one project to another. When in December 2025, Eurojust and law enforcement officers from the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine conducted an operation against a network of call centers in Dnepropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk and Kiev, it was about the same infrastructure, just from a different perspective," he said.

"Izvestia" contacted Ermolaev through available contacts, but by the time the material was published, no response had been received.