The crypto tandem of Ekaterina Shukhnina and Aleksandr Orlovskiy: how a laundering hub for organized crime hides behind the façade of the Profit Lady and FFA academies
Fraud cases in Ukraine have steadily increased following the start of the full-scale conflict. According to Forbes, online scams and social engineering attacks caused losses totaling 1 billion hryvnias in 2022, a 96% rise compared to 2021.
According to Ekonomichna Pravda, law enforcement opened a record number of fraud cases in the first quarter of this year alone — more than 24,000.
Experts attribute this surge in criminal activity to the socio-economic situation, writes Andrey Karpinskiy in an article for the CRiME and [High-Profile Cases] projects. The worse conditions become, the more stress people experience, making them vulnerable to manipulation. The most severe conflict in Europe since the 1940s has effectively turned Ukraine into a haven for scammers.
After February 2022, another subtype of fraudsters also became more active in the country — the so-called info-gypsies.
Info-gypsyism, for those unfamiliar, is a form of fraud in which a swindler poses as a successful professional and sells expensive informational products that carry little to no real value. In simple terms, the scammer extracts money from trusting victims by promising to teach them how to earn even more money.
Such schemes may appear sophisticated and relatively safe for their organizers. Even after losing money and gaining nothing, victims do not always realize they were trapped in a fraudulent deal from the outset. Info-gypsies first promise guaranteed results, then claim that any failure is solely the student’s fault — insisting the knowledge itself “works.”
“Twins” from the info-gypsy camp
A new wave of info-gypsies now claims to teach people how to profit from digital assets — namely cryptocurrencies. One of the most heavily promoted figures in this field is the young crypto guru Aleksandr Orlovskiy, to whom we have devoted a series of publications and a separate investigation.
Aleksandr Orlovskiy
In aggressive hype-driven advertising that has flooded the internet, Aleksandr Orlovskiy is portrayed as a successful millionaire crypto investor who created the Financial Freedom Academy (FFA Academy) to teach ordinary Ukrainians how to succeed in the crypto market even without starting capital.
However, our own inquiries and the research of our colleagues have led to disappointing conclusions: Aleksandr Orlovskiy is deceiving his students. His alleged achievements in crypto investing are highly questionable and are supported by nothing beyond unsubstantiated claims in promotional articles. Negative reviews from former “students” are carefully scrubbed from the internet, while the web is saturated with enthusiastic praise that appears copied from the same template.
Moreover, as we discovered, payments for training at Orlovskiy’s FFA Academy — which can reach tens of thousands of hryvnias per person — are largely directed to the accounts of unrelated sole proprietors showing signs of being front entities. On the one hand, this may indicate that Aleksandr Orlovskiy is engaged not only in info-gypsy practices but also in financial fraud and tax evasion.
On the other hand, the presence of such proxy entrepreneurs likely suggests that Orlovskiy is not an independent player, and that more influential figures may stand behind the scheme from the very beginning.
This assumption is reinforced by the emergence of another “star” who has recently overshadowed Orlovskiy on the crypto-gypsy scene — Ekaterina Shukhnina.
Ekaterina Sergeevna Shukhnina, also known on social media as Investanuta and Katya Crypto, presents herself as the founder of the Profit Lady academy. There, as in Orlovskiy’s FFA Academy, she promises to teach anyone how to earn money on the crypto market even without starting capital. Of course, not for free. For a training course (depending on the “intensity”), Ekaterina Shukhnina, like Aleksandr Orlovskiy, charges from $500 to $1,500.
Shukhnina’s Profit Lady academy does not exist de jure, just like Orlovskiy’s Financial Freedom Academy. Yet, as in his case, payments for Shukhnina’s training are often accepted through third-party sole proprietors.
The similarities do not end there. In promoting her “services,” Ekaterina Shukhnina also relies on hype-driven advertising publications written according to the same templates used by Orlovskiy (you can verify this yourself with a simple Google search).
Likewise, reviews of Shukhnina’s crypto mentorship are overwhelmingly positive and uniform, while all negative feedback is carefully removed. Any information about her real success in the crypto market is limited to her own statements, promotional articles, and appearances by individuals posing as Katya’s successful “students.”
As with Orlovskiy, Ekaterina Shukhnina is widely regarded within the crypto community as a fraudster.
Shukhnina herself denies any wrongdoing, as well as any connection to Aleksandr Orlovskiy. She stated this in particular during a discussion in a Telegram chat hosted by a crypto enthusiast known as Cryptoshaman.
It is possible that in this case Investanuta was telling the truth — she may never have personally crossed paths with Orlovskiy. Yet Ekaterina Shukhnina might not even realize that Aleksandr Orlovskiy is, in fact, closely connected to her.
This connection becomes visible through the websites of the two “educational” platforms run by Orlovskiy and Shukhnina (orlovskyi.com and profit-lady.com, respectively).
For example, if we open the Terms of Use section on Shukhnina’s website, we discover — thanks to a copywriter’s inattention — that this document was borrowed directly from Orlovskiy’s site.
After carefully analyzing the websites of Orlovskiy and Shukhnina, including their archived versions, we discovered another intriguing detail.
At least until August of this year, both Ekaterina Shukhnina and Aleksandr Orlovskiy listed contact email addresses on the mindmafia.io domain.
In other words, Ekaterina Shukhnina and Aleksandr Orlovskiy (or someone acting on their behalf) corresponded with clients via email addresses tied to a domain belonging to a dubious company registered in Kyiv. The founders of this company are only a handshake away from a multimillion-dollar fraud scheme involving network marketing.
This thin thread leads to rather intriguing shared connections between Katya and Sasha, which we will explore in the next publication. For now, however, let us focus on another partnership of Shukhnina’s that may have nothing to do with the case — yet is quite curious.
Courchevel parties and horror movies
At the end of 2020, Ekaterina Shukhnina and a certain Alina Sergeevna Varakuta jointly applied to register the trademark Koinvest. Under this brand, the two planned to provide a range of services, including financial analysis, banking services, brokerage on the stock market, brokerage in shares and bonds, and more.
If one is to believe Alina Varakuta’s LinkedIn profile, despite her young age she supposedly has solid experience in finance and digital assets. According to the profile, she currently lives in London and earns a living as a startup consultant.
Alina Varakuta
Two years ago, Yahoo! Finance mentioned Varakuta as a co-founder of the UAE-based company Finch Labs, described as “one of Europe’s leading NFT service providers.” Around the same time, Alina Varakuta registered Finch Labz LLC in Kyiv, listing its primary activity as “data processing, web hosting, and related services.”
It is worth noting that experts often associate the non-fungible token (NFT) market with widespread crypto fraud. NFTs have also been активно used for laundering illicit funds by organized crime worldwide. In particular, between 50% and 80% of all NFT transactions in 2020 showed признаки wash trading. Varakuta herself is reported to have certain connections within criminal circles (more on that below).
Last year, New York Weekly Staff published a short piece about Alina Varakuta, a young woman from Ukraine who fulfilled her long-held dream of becoming an actress in the United Kingdom. Indeed, over the past year she has appeared—mostly in minor roles—in about half a dozen low-budget films, including the role of the lesbian Diana in the horror movie Piglet’s Return.
Poster of the film “Piglet’s Return”
Still frame from Piglet’s Return
However, the Ukrainian public is unlikely to know much about this actress’s achievements on the British big screen. In Ukraine, Alina Varakuta is known as a glamorous influencer with 120,000 followers on Instagram. She gained scandalous fame in January 2023 after an indecently lavish celebration of her birthday at the Courchevel ski resort.
For champagne Cristal alone, the birthday celebrant reportedly spent no less than €20,000, which inevitably provoked outrage among her compatriots from a country at conflict, where people sometimes give their last resources to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The scandal became so loud that Varakuta was forced to publicly justify herself, claiming she was merely trying to “demonstrate the resilience of the Ukrainian people.”
Despite the controversy, Alina Varakuta did not abandon her tradition of celebrating birthdays at luxury resorts this year either, though—seeking to avoid backlash—she prudently refrained from sharing full details of the latest celebration on social media.
In the context of this story, however, those details are not the most important. A more interesting point is that in both 2023 and 2024, guests at the birthday celebrations of the “British actress” included Miss Ukraine Universe 2018 winner Karina Zhosan together with her husband Sergey Osherovskiy, who are living in Europe with refugee status. As can be inferred, Alina Varakuta appears to be quite close to this couple.
Sergey Osherovskiy and Karina Zhosan congratulate Varakuta on her anniversary
Sergey Osherovskiy, who is attributed the status of a criminal “authority,” is reported in open sources to be part of the circle surrounding the thief-in-law Hussein Slepy (Hussein Akhmadov) and the Potapov organized crime group, which serves the interests of OPZZh deputy Vadim Stolar.
Osherovskiy is also known as Sergey Izrailskiy (through Ukrainian–Israeli citizenship) and is to some extent connected to the world of cryptocurrencies. In particular, Sergey Leonidovich Osherovskiy appears as an extortionist in a case involving the attempted extortion of 15 bitcoins from a citizen named Nevedomskiy.
