You’re a Russian businessman looking to buy European-made drones, but sanctions stand in the way. No need to despair — an industry of sanctions-busting enablers is here to help.
“There will be no trace of the Russian company, and the payment will be successful,” a representative of one such service provider wrote when approached by an undercover reporter on Telegram.
Posing as a Russian businessman, the journalist had asked for help making a payment to a German drone supplier. It was important, they said, that the German bank did not realize the funds had originated in Russia.
Under EU sanctions, the export of drones to Russia would be illegal apart from rare exceptions, as would assisting in the circumvention of those sanctions. But the representative, who only gave his name as Dima, did not express any concern about facilitating the payment for such a deal.
“We are ready to select companies and start paying,” he wrote.
Since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been hit by waves of sanctions from the EU, U.S., and U.K. covering goods ranging from laptops and luxury watches to oil, liquified natural gas, and arms. Western nations have also severed over 70 major Russian banks from SWIFT, the encrypted messaging system that shares payment instructions for international financial transfers.
These restrictions have given rise to a shadowy industry of payment providers — some of whom openly advertise their assistance in dealing with sanctions or obscuring Russian involvement in transactions, reporters found.
“When sanctions shuffle the cards, we offer real solutions,” reads the Russian-language ad posted on the Telegram channel of one such payment agent, the now-defunct Fin Platform. Another offered advice on its website on “how to get paid for goods if the client doesn't want to deal with Russia.”
Moneyroo’s website displaying an article titled “how to get paid for goods if the client doesn't want to deal with Russia.”
To discover more about this market and the “solutions” these middlemen offer, OCCRP’s partners SourceMaterial and Delfi went undercover and exchanged messages with eight other apparent payment providers on Telegram, Russia’s most popular social media and messaging platform, where users can communicate anonymously.
Most of the entities operated websites under trading names that OCCRP could not find listed in Russian or other corporate databases. Others appeared only to exist on Telegram.
While reporters did not go through with the payments, in five cases agents agreed to assist them in transactions that would deliver the money to European companies while obscuring the cash’s Russian origins.
In these conversations, reporters explicitly noted that sanctions were an obstacle — either because the goods the company was supposedly buying from Europe had been blacklisted, or because the Russian company itself was sanctioned.
In response, the agents offered to route the Russian money to Europe through companies in jurisdictions such as Hong Kong, Dubai, and Indonesia.
One solution, offered by Dima, also involved the use of two companies whose key personnel have been listed as senior figures in firms that served TGR, a business group accused by the U.K. and U.S. of running a money-laundering network that helped Russian elites bypass sanctions. (When reached for comment, the director of one of the intermediary companies suggested by Dima denied any connection to TGR).
The listed London address of TGR at 55 Riding House Street, Fitzrovia, London
The outfit that Dima represented, CW Group, advertises a slate of vague financial services on Telegram, but does not appear to have a website, and reporters could not obtain corporate filings showing it was a registered business.
When later confronted about findings of the investigation, Dima declined to address the specifics of his offers, saying only that “some of the wording and conclusions in your message are your subjective interpretation,” and that “our activities are focused exclusively on supporting international settlements and selecting relevant payment solutions for specific client needs.”
According to Elise Thomas, of the U.K.-based research group the Centre for Information Resilience, a “cottage industry of shady international payment service providers” has flourished in part due to the rise of sanctions on Russia.
These operators often create “several layers of intermediaries” between legitimate financial institutions and their true clients, she said. And by using financial structures that are spread across borders, they make it “difficult for law enforcement in either country to tackle the operation as a whole.”
Ilia Shumanov, a managing partner at TriTrace Investigations, which works for corporate clients to map ownership structures and expose sanctions breaches, said Russia’s sanctions evasion system is mutating faster than Western authorities’ efforts to contain it.
“From a law enforcement perspective, payment systems are…
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