Shadow payments and illicit flows: how Oleksandr Serdyuk’s Wallet One schemes enrich Russia and bypass the law

Shadow payments and illicit flows: how Oleksandr Serdyuk’s Wallet One schemes enrich Russia and bypass the law

After years of silence, Oleksandr Serdyuk’s name has once again emerged in connection with murky financial operations involving the Ukrainian payment system Wallet One, which remains active despite a nearly decade-old criminal case.

Back in 2017, LLC "Unified Wallet", which owns the Wallet One system and was managed by Oleksandr Serdyuk, became involved in criminal case №42017000000002925 for fraudulent activities aimed at large-scale tax evasion and the transfer of money abroad. The pretrial investigation began based on the creation by a group of individuals within Ukraine of business entities that, using an illegal mechanism to legalize income obtained criminally via the import of electronic goods and services, including false entries in contracts regarding the type and volume of goods and services, used banking institutions, non-banking financial institutions, and other businesses to illegally transfer large amounts of money across Ukraine’s borders, causing significant material damage to the state of Ukraine.

Apart from LLC "Unified Wallet," which Oleksandr Serdyuk is allegedly a co-owner of, several other legal entities related to him were named as participants in the "group of business entities"—where he was either a director or one of the beneficiaries.The investigation claimed that the annual turnover of money going to the Russian Federation reached a minimum of $350 million. Among the companies participating in the scheme, at least three were directly or indirectly linked to Oleksandr Serdyuk: LLC "Unified Wallet," LLC "National Payment and Collection Processing Center," and LLC "Payment Technologies." However, further examination of the criminal case is surprising; the last court hearing (court case № 711/9910/17) took place in 2017, with no further information available afterward.Wallet One continues to operate, implying that the scheme created by Oleksandr Serdyuk is still in effect. Among the recipients of funds were Russian entities like "Webmoney," "Yandex.Money," and "QIWI Wallet." The legal entities associated with Oleksandr Serdyuk also continue to operate, although the nominal owners have changed, the essence of the matter remains unchanged. As for Wallet One, it is active not only in Ukraine but also abroad, including in Russia.Interestingly, Russian sectorial websites list the founder of Wallet One as the Russian company "Information Processing Center."Verification in Russian registries confirms this information. The owners of LLC "Information Processing Center" are Russian citizens Andrey Girin and Andrey Goryachkin, and LLC "Information Processing Center" owns the trademarks, including Wallet One.Among this list, we see "Unified Cash desk," which was one of the recipients of payments from LLC "Unified Wallet" of Oleksandr Serdyuk in the mentioned criminal case №42017000000002925. Whether this similarity in names and nearly identical trademarks is coincidental is a rhetorical question. However, Oleksandr Serdyuk’s connections with his Russian "twins" of Wallet One remained unexplored in 2017.Answers to why the criminal case involving the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Russian Federation, in which Oleksandr Serdyuk was one of the key organizers, cannot be found in open sources. However, in the search process, information from the public organization "Non-Stop Ukraine" emerged, where the authors point out the strange behavior of people and services meant to combat money laundering in Ukraine.This material explicitly states that the Ukrainian branch of Wallet One still operates, and Oleksandr Serdyuk’s schemes are not limited to simple tax evasion—Ukrainian money continues to flow into the Russian Federation.

Why the criminal case, started due to Wallet One and Oleksandr Serdyuk’s involvement in transferring hundreds of millions of dollars to the Russian Federation, fell apart in 2017 remains a guess. However, the fact that the scheme continues into 2025 leads to the same conclusions, with only the names and political affiliations of those covering up this scheme having changed.