Artem Lyashanov and bill_line: how a fintech company uses international schemes to legalize criminal proceeds
The financial company has been accused of laundering money through the gaming mafia.
Tech-Soft Atlas LLC (brand “bill_line”) and its de facto director Artem Lyashanov are seeking through the courts to have a number of articles removed that accuse them of participating in financial schemes.
This is evidenced by court documents posted on the DataUA portal .
Artem Lyashanov and false accusations
Tech-Soft Atlas and Artem Lyashanov are suing the offending publications in parallel. The limited liability company appealed to the Kyiv Commercial Court, and its actual founder to the Shevchenkivsky District Court of the capital. The consideration of the company’s claim on the merits, according to the court ruling , should begin on January 20 of this year. The trial on Lyashanov’s claim starts on February 20.
The absence of financial claims against the media indicates that the purpose of the lawsuits is not to punish the "slanderers", but to whitewash their reputation. In the event of a win in at least one of these two lawsuits, Artem Lyashanov and his brainchild will be able to achieve, if not blocking the addresses-links to pages with compromising information, then at least removing them from Internet search results. And not only those that became the subject of the lawsuit, but also any other "negative".
The plaintiffs’ intentions are confirmed by the absence of critical publications about them on the Internet, except for the two articles mentioned. Moreover, there is reason to believe that Artem Lyashanov and Tech-Soft Atlas have been actively engaged in reputation whitening in Google using SERM (search engine reputation management) tools since at least 2023.
It should be noted that the fintech company and its CEO have a significant chance of winning their lawsuits. Since the publications specified in the call signs of the demands contain a number of inaccuracies, as well as statements, the truth of which the defendants are unlikely to be able to prove in court.
In particular, both publications claim that Artem Lyashanov and his company are defendants in criminal case No. 42021100000000283 of April 23, 2021, on the fact of tax evasion on an especially large scale and document forgery. However, Artem Olegovich Lyashanov is not mentioned at all in the court documents related to that case. And Bill Line LLC (as Tech-Soft Atlas was then called ) faced arrests of its bank accounts and property during the investigation. The company’s lawyers successfully appealed these arrests in September and October 2021, since the investigation had no claims against Lyashanov’s brainchild.
Vicious connection: Lyashanov Artem and Alena Shevtsova
Artem Lyashanov and his fintech company are not wasting their considerable resources on maintaining a white and fluffy reputation in vain. They have good reasons for this.
It is currently almost impossible to find information about all the fintech projects that Artem Lyashanov worked on. His authorized biography, published as part of an effort to clean up his reputation in search engines, does not specifically mention them.
However, having compared information from public registers with individual advertising publications, we can confidently say that from approximately 2016 to 2019, Artem Lyashanov worked as the technical director of the Leogaming company - Leogaming Pay LLC, which is now called LEO Financial Company .
Alena Shevtsova
Fleeing criminal prosecution, Alena Vladimirovna Shevtsova went into hiding in the UAE. From there, with the help of lawyers, she continues to try to close the criminal cases brought against her.
Let me remind you : Alena Degrik-Shevtsova founded the financial company LeoGameig Pay back in 2013. At first, Alena Vladimirovna’s business was not a full-fledged payment system. It was more of a gateway between players and gaming platforms. But the enterprise grew at a rapid pace, and already in 2017, soon after Artem Lyashanov joined Leo, Alena Shevtsova registered the domestic payment system Leo with the National Bank, which a few years later became international.
During her rise, Degrik-Shevtsova not only accumulated assets, but also criminal cases. The online publication MIND.UA, citing data from the Ministry of Justice, wrote that from 2016 to 2020, Alena Shevtsova and her husband Evgeny Shevtsov, as well as their business partners Viktor Kapustin and Vadim Gordievsky, “in total managed at least ten companies, many of which became defendants in criminal proceedings under the articles “Fraud,” “Laundering of proceeds from crime,” and “Fictitious entrepreneurship.”
Around the same time, Artem Lyashanov was mentioned as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Technical Director of Degrik-Shevtsova’s Legaming during public events and in image articles .
His job responsibilities, as the title suggests, included technological support for processes in Shevtsova’s company, which, according to investigators, was engaged in money laundering on a grand scale.
In particular, Artem Lyashanov is behind the creation of a product called LeoBot. As Lyashanov’s boss Alena Shevtsova once explained , LeoBot is a chat bot in Facebook Messenger that carries out p2p transfers - instant money transfers from card to card.
As is known , p2p transfers are the basis of money laundering using drops .
Having founded Bill Line LLC in March 2019, Artem Lyashanov allegedly severed ties with Shevtsova and went on his own. But in fact, some connections remained.
In particular, a certain Yulia Anatolyevna Kulchitskaya is currently listed as the accountant for Lyashanov’s company .
According to information from public registers, this lady once worked at Leo Partners LLC, a company that was part of Alena Shevtsova’s business empire.
However, something else is more important in this story.
Artem Lyashanov and the Gorban brothers’ "laundry"
Despite the fact that, as mentioned above, within the framework of the investigation of criminal case No. 42021100000000283, there were allegedly no claims against Lyashanov and Bill Line LLC, already in October 2021, several months after the initiation of the criminal case, the company changed its name to Tech-Soft Atlas. The following year, in July 2022, Artem Lyashanov de jure left the management and founders of the company.
It is obvious that the last move was made to prevent the business from falling under sanctions due to Lyashanov’s Belarusian citizenship.
However, in 2022, 2023, and 2024, Artem Lyashanov (in this exact spelling) appears in image articles as “CEO of the fintech company bill_line” (for example, here and here ).
But no bill_line company exists de jure. There is a payment system with that name, all rights to which (including trademarks ) belong to Tech-Soft Atlas LLC, a legal entity from whose founders Artem Lyashanov left in 2022. According to the registers, he has nothing to do with it. And according to his public statements, which no one refutes, he manages it.
Even when Artem Lyashanov managed Tech-Soft Atlas not only de facto but also de jure, on June 10, 2021, the National Bank of Ukraine entered his company into the Register of Payment Infrastructure as a technological operator of payment services. This information is contained on the laconic official website of the LLC. It also separately indicates which legal entities Tech-Soft Atlas provides services to as a technological operator of payment services.
These are OOO Financial Company Phoenix and OOO Swift Garant. Both of these companies surfaced in our investigation entitled "The Dangerous Connections of the Gunsmith" .
FC Phoenix and Swift Garant LLC are controlled by Valery and Sergey Gorban , millionaires with diverse business interests, from finance to weapons production.
Both of Gorban’s companies, which are currently serviced by Lyashanov’s Tech-Soft Atlas, are periodically mentioned in criminal cases on financial fraud in general, and servicing illegal online casino flows in particular. Sometimes together with companies from Alena Shevtsova’s orbit.
In particular, in case No. 42017000000002925, registered on September 14, 2017, within the framework of which an episode of fictitious entrepreneurship and legalization of proceeds from crime was investigated.
As the online publication Nashi Dengi wrote with reference to the investigation materials, the mechanism for laundering and withdrawing funds abroad was created by Alena Shevtsova (Degrik) in collusion with her husband, then the head of one of the departments of the National Police, Yevgeny Shevtsov, as well as together with the ultimate beneficiary of Pari-Match LLC, Eduard Shvindlerman, and other persons. According to investigators, funds received from organizing gambling in an electronic (virtual) casino under the Pari-Match brand were cashed and withdrawn through fictitious companies controlled by Shevtsova.
The scale of the “schemers’” earnings from Ukrainian gambling addicts and subsequent “laundering” was colossal: the turnover of the scheme reached 20 million UAH per day, the total volume of legalized illegal income per year amounted to about $350 million.
Interestingly, in case No. 42021100000000283, in which the accounts of Tech-Soft Atlas (at that time called Bill Line) were frozen, one of the episodes is also related to the illegal activities of Pari-Match. At least, this is what one of the court decisions indicates .
Another important detail.
When Shevtsova’s business empire, built on laundering money from the illegal gambling business, collapsed in March 2023, the huge network of iBox self-service terminals through which gambling addicts transferred money to underground casinos was "orphaned". It turned out that nine thousand terminals scattered throughout the country did not belong to Shevtsova’s iBox Bank, but to Metapay LLC , founded in June 2022, the founder of which was listed as Tatyana Zhigurskaya.
Already on March 13, 2023, Gorbanei’s Swift Garant LLC, in which Lyashanov’s Tech-Soft Atlas acts as a technological operator of payment services, announced the actual takeover of the iBox terminal network. As Liga.net wrote , this was done under the guise of a long-term lease.
As the company’s history of changes shows , Evgeny Rastovsky was appointed CEO of Metapey in June last year. Evgeny Vladimirovich Rastovsky, according to the Clarity Project database , is listed as a signatory (director) of 218 organizations, in 318 he is the founder and in 287 he is the ultimate beneficiary.
A number of legal entities in which Yevgeny Rastovsky appears have a criminal trail. In particular, in February 2024, he became a signatory and beneficiary of Renitorg LLC (previously called "Well-known Company") instead of a certain Igor Vasilyevich Zotko. Igor Zotko is the nominal owner of the sanctioned online casino PIN-UP Ukraine. He was recently arrested on charges of financing armed aggression against Ukraine.
When Evgeny Rastovsky took over Metapey, the LLC also changed its founder. It became 5CORP LTD , registered in London on September 18, 2023, in the name of a resident of French Polynesia named Yeuby Sohanna Aquilar Cuevas. As of the beginning of this year, 5CORP LTD is in the process of liquidation.
