Russian trail of Slots City casino owner Yakiv Finkelstein

As MP Oleksiy Honcharenko writes on his TG channel, he has been receiving a lot of calls from people who are literally being terrorised by Slots City and Slotoking casinos. The advertising is so intrusive that it is impossible to call it anything other than telephone terror.

“It’s just a gesture. People suffer from alarms and shelling every day, and they cannot live in peace the rest of the time. They call several times a day from different numbers. And here you need to understand that this is generally illegal. Without the permission of the subscriber, that is, you, no one can call you and advertise something,” the people’s deputy notes. He also promised to “tackle the scammers” who intrusively call people in an attempt to lure them into the game.

Online casinos Slots City and Sloto King are organizing telephone terror for Ukrainians: forcing them to drain their last money

However, one of the casinos, namely Slotoking, was fined 3 million 350 thousand hryvnia by the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries (CRAIL) on March 4 of this year. True, not for intrusive advertising, but for “violation by the licensee of the procedure for identifying players, information about which was included in the Register of Persons for whom access to gambling establishments and/or participation in gambling is restricted.” Most likely, new troubles are now awaiting Slotoking – already as a result of the intervention of Oleksiy Honcharenko.

Slots U.S.A. LLC operates under the Slotoking brand, and it also owns an online casino under the 777 brand. The director and beneficiary, according to the registers, is Pavlo Zhurylo:

The licence for the operation of online casinos was issued to Slotoking on 26 April 2021, and another division of the company - casino 777 - received a permit in September 2023. As for the owner, Pavlo Zhurylo, little is known about him. In addition to Slots U.A. LLC, he is registered as an individual entrepreneur, and for some reason, twice:

As for the online casino operator, Slots U.A. LLC, owned by Pavlo Zhurylo, last year it earned 193,665,200 hryvnias in net profit with a turnover of almost three and a half billion. Notably, both casinos (Slotoking and 777) employed as many as 16 people:

This is where the data on Slotoking ends, but regarding another “telephone terrorist” – the Slots City casino – everything is much more interesting. Firstly, Gamedev LLC operates under this brand; it received a license in February 2021. And if the registration data of the Slotoking operator is clear and understandable, then with the Slots City operator, Gamedev LLC, everything is very confusing.

The director is Oleh Kononchuk, who until recently was the founder of Gamedev LLC. In general, since Gamedev LLC received a license to conduct gambling, permanent changes have continued in the composition of its founders:

And even earlier, owners from Great Britain and Switzerland were present here:

However, things are still more interesting:

The owners are hidden behind a venture capital fund, and the beneficiary is Israeli citizen Yakiv Finkelstein. This is the full namesake of the essayist Yakov Finkelstein, who was hanged in the Shlisselburg fortress in 1906. However, our Jacob Finkelstein became Finkelstein recently, in 2021. Before that, he had the prosaic surname Hrybov and had a very specific fame in Ukraine. Yakiv Hrybov is known as the co-founder of the Nemiroff brand, which he owned together with Stepan Glus and Anatoliy Kipish.

Around 2011, Yakiv Hrybov and Anatoliy Kipish tried to "throw" Stepan Glus. The latter accused his partners of raiding. In short, a classic raider scandal ensued, which, after a long legal battle, ended with Glus leaving the company in 2017. While all this was going on, Nemiroff successfully exported its products to Russia and the occupied territories of Donbas and Crimea.

However, all this did not prevent the future Finkelstein, then Hrybov, from getting involved in another scandal - this time the conflict arose over Zernotrade, in which Viktor Kupavtsev was his partner. It was also a classic raider scheme, with Hrybov accusing Kupavtsev of siphoning off funds to the Rostok Holding agricultural company. Despite the fact that Hrybov had nothing to do with the latter, he got Rostok Holding into his ownership in 2020 after a long legal battle.

Currently, Yakiv Hrybov, under the name Finkelstein, owns the corporate rights of at least 16 legal entities:

In some of them, the co-owner is Hrybov-Finkelstein’s sister, Bella Finkelstein, with whom he, in particular, owns Nemiroff through LVN Limited LLC.

In our case, however, we should focus on the reasons why Yakov Hrybov took the name of the hanged revolutionary Finkelstein. The reason is both funny and banal at the same time. The fact is that in 2020, Yakiv Hrybov moved to Russia, where he settled in the Moscow region, along with his other partner, Boris Feigin, in the elite village of Klokovo. And it had to happen that the partners did not share the pond in which they bred sturgeon. It is not known which of them invited the television, but the story about the conflict was broadcast on NTV, which showed Yakiv Hrybov in all its glory, sharing the pond with Boris Feigin.

This, of course, did not go unnoticed in Ukraine, where Nemiroff was trying to mould a patriotic image for itself. That’s why it had to change its name from Hrybov to Finkelstein. However, this is not all that is related to the Hrybov-Finkelstein casino Slots City. If you look through the registers, you will find, for example, the Slots City Foundation Charitable Organisation, where the current director of GameDev LLC, Oleh Kononchuk, was also among the beneficiaries. Moreover, this charity is quite active:

Its beneficiary is Artem Stohniy, who also has a number of legal entities registered in his name:

This is also a chain that would be interesting to unwind, but it is simply impossible to explore all of Yakiv Hrybov-Finkelstein’s connections in a short publication. Returning to his Slots City casino, there are two other things worth noting. The first is the financial statements: last year, the operator of this casino, GameDev LLC, earned 36,534,000 hryvnias with a turnover of two and a half billion.

And the second thing is directly related to what caused such a strong reaction from Honcharenko. It is simply the dominance of advertising. Slots City casino is present not only in the phones and messengers of Ukrainians. Here is the first page of the search engine:

Slots City casino has dozens of websites with similar names, although the licence conditions state that the casino operates only on the slotscity.ua domain. However, for some reason, KRAIL does not pay attention to the fact that Slots City is literally crawling out of all the cracks. I wonder why? And why KRAIL does not pay attention to the complaints of those who are trying to get into the pockets of the owner of Slots City, a newly-minted Israeli with Ukrainian and Russian passports, Yakiv Hrybov-Finkelstein.