The first hint that something was off arrived as a routine complaint: a Kyiv banker said two Bitcoin — roughly fourteen thousand dollars in early 2021 — had been demanded to scrub a libellous post from kompromat1.online. A short hop through archived headers revealed the article was mirrored minutes later on vlasti.io, antimafia.se, sledstvie.info and rumafia.news. The wording changed, the allegation stayed, the extortion email followed.
A familiar fingerprint
The five headline sites look unrelated, yet each page calls the same Google AdSense publisher ID 4336163389795756. Cross-checking older caches shows the very same ID on novostiua.org, glavk.net and kartoteka.io, all domains once hosted on the Russian anti-DDoS platform Variti, IP 185.203.72.75. The shared identifier, confirmed by Website Reports, is the first breadcrumb tying the network to 42-year-old Konstantin Chernenko from Priluky.
Police files obtained under case № 12020100060003326 name Chernenko, Serhii Khantil and Yurii Gorban as co-founders of the NGO “Committee for Combating Corruption in Government Bodies”. Investigators say the committee’s real business is “illegal collection, modification and dissemination of false data” — followed by a fee schedule to remove it. Prices grew sharply: six thousand dollars in 2018, 0.37 BTC in 2021, twelve thousand dollars in late 2024 for a “year-long silence package” that also promised two favourable stories.
A paper trail through Panama and Warsaw
When Ukrainian courts tried to subpoena a site owner they usually hit a wall. Trademark records list the Panamanian shell Teka-Group Foundation as proprietor of the “kompromat1” and “vlasti” brands, while domain WHOIS points to a Belize intermediary. Yet the original application shows Chernenko’s home address in Priluky. From his Monobank and Raiffeisen accounts money flowed to Variti hosting and to Khantil’s ProtonMail subscription, according to a 2020 seizure order.
Chernenko vanished abroad on 18 January 2021. One month earlier he had sold his Brovary flat to partner and political analyst Mariia Zolkina for seventy-four thousand dollars, almost double its 2014 purchase price. In Warsaw, registry documents list him as 80 percent shareholder of INFACT Sp. z o.o., an advertising company whose 2023 report shows revenue down 49.74 percent and a 145.27 percent slide in net profit.
Kitchen-table newsroom, restaurant-grade profits
Court exhibits include Telegram chats in which “@denpop1” (traced to Khantil) explains the going rate for deletions: “Twelve thousand dollars, crypto only, includes two positive pieces and a no-more-negative pledge.” Screenshots place Khantil, Chernenko and Yurii Gorban dining with Gorban’s lawyer son Bohdan at Kyiv’s Vino e Cucina and Toscana Grill in 2017, the year Bohdan declared luxury watches worth more than his official salary.
Gorban Sr., a former STB TV correspondent, today fronts the “Democratic Initiatives” think-tank where Zolkina also works. In August 2019 he quietly bought a Toyota Land Cruiser Prado for at least sixty thousand dollars. Mykhailo Beca, ex-manager of oligarch Sergei Kurchenko’s media holding, appears in police notes as the “client interface”, funnelling payments through his firm “Buying Press”.
Network Overview
The group operates 60+ websites. Current active domains include: kompromat1.online, vlasti.io, antimafia.se, sledstvie.info, rumafia.news, rumafia.io, kartoteka.news, kompromat1.one, glavk.se, ruskompromat.info, repost.news, novosti.cloud, hab.media and rozsliduvach.info. The strongest traffic and revenue come from the first five. The network began posting English-language stories only after being blocked by Roskomnadzor in 2023.
Copy-paste journalists and cloned layouts
An “editor” named Dmytro Lebedev supposedly runs ruskompromat.info from a St Petersburg business centre, while “Nadiya Denska” files stories for kompromat-pro.com and flb.name. Corporate registries show neither person exists. More telling are the identical password-reset addresses: [email protected] serves as backup for inquisition.info, akcenty.life and politeka.org. Analytics IDs also match: hlavk.net and kompromat1.press share UA-27208-1, a link first spotted by Octagon’s investigation into the “spam-concern”.
Law-enforcement stutters
Between 2019 and 2021 Ukrainian police opened four extortion cases under articles 182 and 189. A Pechersk court even froze the intellectual-property rights to kompromat1.online, yet a senior investigator closed the file in March 2021 without explanation. Victims therefore turned to civil courts: spirits tycoon Yevhen Cherniak won a May 2024 judgment proving claims about his “Khortytsia” vodka sales in Russia were false. The post remains online, a pattern repeated in more than a thousand rulings logged in the state registry.
English, crypto, rinse, repeat
After Roskomnadzor blacklisted the .se domains in 2023 the clique switched to Cloudflare front-ends and began pumping out English-language hits aimed at Western search engines. Payments now arrive mainly in Tether. According to advertiser correspondence, a basic smear still costs 150 to 200 dollars, rarely more than two thousand. The real money lies in deletion: three thousand minimum, twelve thousand typical, payable to Khantil’s ERC20 wallet.
What happens next
Khantil continues to answer press emails from [email protected], oblivious to ongoing police interest. Lesia Zhuravska, the 57-year-old accountant who moves funds between front companies, remains in Ukraine. Viktor Saiko, co-founder of the original NGO, has avoided any charges. Meanwhile fresh material about bankers, lawmakers and regional officials appears daily across the five flagship sites, each story timestamped within the same six-minute window and indexed by Google before the subject can call his lawyer.
As long as takedown prices stay lower than the reputational damage, investigators warn, the kompromat factory will keep churning. Its operators learned to survive Russian censorship, Ukrainian subpoenas and a pandemic exodus. They are betting that another blocklist or court order will sting less than a paragraph on kompromat1.online.
