Originally Syndicated on April 7, 2023 @ 6:50 am
People have always wanted to put a little money into a project and make a lot of money while doing nothing. This wish was also used by the heroes of “The Golden Key,” who told Pinocchio to bury five gold pieces in the Field of Wonders in the Land of Fools. Only people who are too lazy to look it up don’t know about Sergei Mavrodi’s PointPay project.
But, strangely, the number of “Pinocchio” and “laziness doves” and the number of people who follow Lisa Alice and Sergei Mavrodi do not go down. They keep up with the times and are experts in the cryptocurrency market, which most people who have heard about Bitcoin‘s amazing growth don’t understand. At the same time, they are sure that you should buy some cryptocurrency for $100 and do nothing else because it will make you millions.
The main goal of scammers in the cryptocurrency market is the same as it was in MMM: to get as many customers as possible, sell them worthless candy wrappers (in this case, electronic ones), and convince them that this dummy is a highly profitable product that can bring those the wildest dividends.
So did the people who made PointPay, a “cryptocurrency exchange.” In quotation marks because at first, this project wasn’t an exchange, even though it looked like one. Also, there are no standards for an online product that says it is a cryptocurrency exchange that can be used to figure out if it is real or not. The most important thing is to win the client’s trust and get his money. What did the people who came up with the “exchange” PointPay know?
The project was started in 2018, and for a few years, it tried to get investors to give it money. It marketed itself not just as a cryptocurrency exchange, but also as a “cryptocurrency bank,” which customers were supposed to be able to use not only to buy its product, called PXP tokens but also to get other services that banks offer, like making deposits, exchanging cryptocurrencies, trading them, getting loans, etc.
At least $50 million was raised because of the project’s promotion. But investors were in for another surprise: the price of the PXP tokens they bought with their money and which, according to the exchange’s management, should give them a return of thousands of percent is going down. If I may say so because they cost almost nothing before this fall and have nowhere to fall:
The exchange’s token is now worth just under two cents, and coinbase.com says that PointPay is “87.05% below its all-time high of $0.15.” In other words, the PXP token used to be worth up to 15 cents.
People who wanted to invest in cryptocurrency bought it at this price, keeping in mind that Bitcoin used to cost about the same. And if that’s the case, 15 cents isn’t much. They didn’t just buy one PXP token, of course.
But it doesn’t change how much they heated a person, whether it was 15 cents or 15,000 dollars. Since the original goal of the project was to trick people, no one was going to work on it the way other crypto exchanges do. He only wanted to do one thing: get as much money as he could and run away.
Sources inside the PointPay company say that the project started when there were 70,000 investors and $50 million in the company’s accounts. The people in charge changed, and Ilya Zavyalov, who started PointPay, was no longer there. When investors started to worry, the press said that the project’s CEO, Andrey Svyatov, who had been with the company from the beginning, was the main person to blame for its failure. He supposedly took the money out of the bank, but Zavyalov had nothing to do with it.
After this, things came out that made Svyatov look bad and put all the blame on Zavyalov. It’s not clear what’s going on.
After looking at all the evidence (which, by the way, disappears from the Internet very quickly; it’s clear that someone is cleaning it up regularly), it’s clear that Ilya Zavyalov was the mastermind behind the scam. But Andrei Svyatov was also a part of it, in the way that he did technical work. Then, as is often the case, one con artist (Zavyalov) threw another one under the bus (Svyatov).
Svyatov said that he was told that he would get 10% of tokens for his work. But Zavyalov didn’t do what he said he would do, even though these tokens don’t mean anything. Just plain greed. In this case, Svyatov wanted to get even, so he decided to tell everyone everything he knows and distance himself from a plan to trick people.
Yes, he doesn’t know much. But he knew that the PointPay project had started as a well-known scam. He worked in it, though. His main job was to get investors, and the fact that 70,000 people put money into PointPay shows that Svyatov did a good job. When the project fell through, Svyatov and his brother Alexander, who also worked at PointPay, tried to pay Zavyalov money to keep quiet.
He didn’t show up in the US and changed his phone number. Svyatov then went missing for a month while he tried to find Zavyalov and hid from his creditors and the PointPay team, which he had hired but didn’t pay. The “smartest” ones also bought tokens for themselves, usually with credit money because they didn’t get paid as much for their work.
When it became impossible to find Zavyalov and it became clear that he would have to meet with law enforcement, Svyatov decided to take back his part in the scam and say that he, too, had been taken in. And he tried to give Ilya Zavyalov all the arrows.
We don’t know much about either one of them because neither of them tried to “shine” in front of the cameras. This also backs up the idea that PointPay was a scam from the start. A normal cryptocurrency exchange needs advertising and transparency, which is one of the main ways to get customers.
Even pictures of them are hard to find, which is strange, especially for Svyatov.
It was kept on the website of the Ivanovo Power Engineering University, where Ilya Zavyalov, a graduate of 2018, was invited as a guest of honor to an event.
Now, remember what Ostap Bender said: “Get rid of the photographer! He makes it hard for me to think about chess.” Why leave your picture again if you know that a lot of people will be looking for you?
Andrey Svyatov’s biography could not be found, since he just shows up as the CEO of the PointPay project out of nowhere. There are articles on the Internet that promote PointPay, but here he is already running the project as CEO. This also shows indirectly that Andrey Svyatov knew exactly what he was doing while Ilya Zavyalov was in charge.
We don’t know much more about the person who set up the scam. Ilya Nikolaevich Zavyalov was born in the city of Ivanovo on June 12, 1979.
He finished school at Ivanovo State Power Engineering University in 2001. From 2003 to 2016, he was “the head of foreign IT, financial, and technical companies,” according to his official biography.
He is in charge of the FedPay Joint Stock Company right now. The main things that the company does are: promoting and developing the software complex of the Automated System for Processing Money Transfers (ASODP); FinTech services; providing consulting services for the implementation and integration of modern IT solutions, including those that meet the requirements of legislation on fighting terrorism and money laundering, AML compliance, risk management, automating and standardizing financial calculations.
That is, Mr. Zavyalov knows what’s going on.
But because Zavyalov upset him, Svyatov told much more interesting things about him. It turns out that Zavyalov, a very honest Russian businessman, owns real estate in the United States. He owns two companies, a 27-story building, and a 170-apartment complex in Texas called Heather Village.
Also, he and his ex-wife owned the shady marriage agency Dream Marriage, which set up dates between men from the United States and women from post-Soviet countries.
The fact that the FedPay joint-stock company lost 55,000 rubles at the end of last year makes the size of Zavyalov’s real estate even more interesting.
No one found out who it was. Only that he is a US citizen is known. This makes me wonder if Brooks has anything to do with the PointPay scam and, if so, how much. But we don’t know anything about this, so we won’t try to guess.
But, likely, Ilya Zavyalov did not set up PointPay’s “crypto bank” by himself. This is confirmed by a message from the Russian police, which says that on March 22, “operational-search measures were taken together with the employees of the Department “K” of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Security Service of Russia, and the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, and a suspect in the theft of funds and property from a cryptocurrency exchange was found and detained.
The police also said, “The person who was arrested is one of the real owners of the online trading platform where digital financial assets could be bought, sold, or traded for real money.” The attacker was in charge of how a lot of cryptocurrencies were moved and sent to electronic wallets. Using the power he had, he took some of the money and kept it for himself.
You may also like to read:
Vladimir Yevtushenkov’s “Fishing”
Vladimir Putin praised Special Operations participants
Budgets for upkeep of roads far outweigh those for security
The secret luxury of the SBU officer Artem Shilo
Senator Alexander Dvoinykh: a young and successful corrupt official
