Fraudsters from Ukraine exposed for creating a cryptocurrency pyramid scheme worth tens of millions of hryvnias

According to the National Police of Ukraine, under the guise of the international investment fund S-Group, fraudsters offered users passive income by investing in cryptocurrencies. Law enforcement officers are currently looking for victims of the large-scale fraud.

To use their services, the criminals created their own financial crypto wallet, where the victims transferred funds. They defrauded depositors of tens of millions of hryvnias.

Law enforcement officers found out that to conceal the further movement of assets, the fraudsters used fictitious tokens that were not on the list of official international cryptographic data provider platforms due to the inability of S-Group to pass an audit. They were promised to depositors as a profit from investing in projects, trading on the international currency market «Forex» or other transactions with financial assets. In addition, the scammers guaranteed their clients significant «bonuses» in case of attracting new participants to the project.

According to the investigation, citizens of Ukraine were involved in the organization of the pyramid scheme, but the geography of the fraudsters' activities also extended to the territory of Russia, the temporarily occupied Crimea, and the EU countries. The fraudsters misled tens of thousands of people from these countries, including Ukrainian citizens.

As a reminder, in October, cyber police operatives together with investigators of the Main Investigation Department of the National Police under the procedural supervision of the Prosecutor General’s Office identified six Ukrainian citizens who organized a shadow money transfer scheme through Russian payment systems banned in Ukraine.