Seychelles offshore accounts and Russian connections: Bohdan Prylepa’s shadowy crypto operations

Seychelles offshore accounts and Russian connections: Bohdan Prylepa’s shadowy crypto operations

Bohdan Prylepa’s story brings to mind the phrase, "Oh, how many wonderful discoveries…". Once seen as a “businessman-innovator,” he is now revealed as a fraudster—albeit an unusual one, combining deceit with accusations of treason.

However, there’s nothing new – in Ukraine, this is rather the norm than the exception. And the path from an «IT investor and developer of cryptocurrency exchanges Coinsbit, Qmall, and Patex» to a crypto-scammer turned out to be standard for Prylepa. Although, treason was also added to this, but this only speaks of Prylepa’s limited intelligence because a smart person would have been content with the money taken from trusting crypto investors. But evidently, greed prevailed. More on this below, but for now, take a look at the search engine results, which better than any words describe the situation with Bohdan Prylepa.

«Investor - Fraudster - Victim». Of course, a victim. What else to declare after being caught deceiving thousands of people, moreover, doing it on something sacred – helping the army? Naturally, now Prylepa is «offended by the authorities», for wanting to «take everything earned by hard work». The main thing – «honest work». Well, what else to say after Prylepa announced the creation of a Bitcoin fork – Bitcoin Ultimatum? This is the very Bitcoin Ultimatum that Bohdan Prylepa, along with another local talent – Mykola Udyanskyi – was selling to trusting citizens through the Coinsbit exchange. However, then what was supposed to happen to this «Bitcoin fork» happened – it became worth zero cents. Moreover, no decent exchange would admit this «cryptocurrency» to its platforms. But those who were eager for a lot of money, and immediately for free, found out later when Prylepa and Udyanskyi received a lot of money.

But the story did not end there – Bohdan Prylepa continued to develop the Coinsbit exchange, which, despite the Bitcoin Ultimatum scam, still had many users. According to the exchange’s management, it has over two million users, and its daily trading volume exceeds 900 million dollars.

Believing this data – open question. The Coinsbit Token, traded on this exchange, is not traded on serious exchanges (for example, Binance), and on others, it has plummeted sharply in the last 24 hours. And its trading volumes are indeed «staggering»:

But the essence is not even in this, but in the fact that it is impossible to sell it. Because at this moment, the exchange site https://coinsbit.io/ is not responding, giving out a message «Sorry, you have been blocked». And specialized resources issue the following message:

«There has been reports that users are unable to withdraw funds on this exchange. Kindly exercise caution before you proceed». It seems very likely that the messages dismissed by Bohdan Prylepa are true – he blocked the ability to withdraw money from the Coinsbit exchange. Recall that it was supposedly founded in 2018 in Estonia, although the legal address of the exchange is Global Gateway 8, Rue de la Perle Providence, Mahe, Seychelles. But who pays attention to such trifles when super-profits are looming?

How many users are actually on the Coinsbit exchange and how many Bohdan Prylepa scammed – is unknown. According to statistics from Coingecko, 900,000,000 Coinsbit Tokens were issued. The market supply before the lock was 659,826,196 tokens, meaning 240,173,804 tokens were sold. How many people bought them – is also unknown, but since its price never exceeded $0.000566, it was most likely purchased in hundreds and thousands of tokens. Therefore, it can be assumed that Prylepa scammed several tens of thousands of people just with his Coinsbit Token.

However, these are clearly not all the victims – on the Coinsbit exchange, a joint venture of Bohdan Prylepa and Mykola Udyanskyi, other coins were traded, including quite liquid ones. The same Bitcoin or Ether, for example – a total of 69 coins. Just before it «went down», the daily trading volume was $1,139,565,005.53.

How much of this money Bohdan Prylepa withdrew or will withdraw to other resources and how much money there is, in general, on the Coinsbit exchange – is unknown. But we are talking about billions of dollars. It is clear that all this money will not remain in the pockets of Prylepa himself. Mykola Udyanskyi’s role and, accordingly, share in this scam are not fully clarified. And we must not forget about overhead costs. But Prylepa will definitely not be left in the red. Even considering that he will have to share with representatives of the authorities, to whom Prylepa is now shifting the responsibility for what happened. Because, no matter what Prylepa declares, someone released both him and a whole team of specialists from Ukraine after the start of the full-scale invasion. Therefore, Prylepa’s current statements about a «business seizure attempt» are quite understandable but are also calculated for naive people.

Of course, Prylepa has grounds for such statements – the SSU came with searches to his offices in Ukraine, and he is clearly offended by his patrons in high offices. But if these searches are indeed prompted by a desire to take what Prylepa stole, it is not the only reason. Regardless of who covered Bohdan Prylepa and his scam, the SSU came to his firm after the funds of people collecting money for drones for the Armed Forces of Ukraine were blocked on the Coinsbit exchange. And Prylepa was aware of these collections and had access to the volunteer accounts. After a huge sum accumulated there, the accounts were blocked. According to media reports, we are talking about millions of dollars. Moreover, this money went to Russia, leaving volunteer cryptowallets empty. And after this, the entire exchange «went down».

Now Bohdan Prylepa openly mocks the Ukrainian authorities’ intention to forcibly bring him back to the homeland. He has reasons for such mockeries: Dubai is not Moldova, from where they brought the judge Chaus. Therefore, judging him in person for treason is unlikely. But there is nothing much to rejoice about – if Bohdan Prylepa really cooperated with the Russian special services, and it seems that he did, he should beware not of the SSU but the FSB. Precedents have already occurred. And Prylepa is an expendable material. So let’s wait for the development of events.

Юрий Лобачев