Exposing the "IT cooperative": how cybercriminal Sergey Shinder scammed programmers and profited from fake working

It’s obvious to everyone that the fast-growing field of information technology offers opportunities to earn substantial amounts of money in a short time. However, some people are looking for quick, huge, and effortless profits.

Among the latter is a certain Sergei Asael Shinder. He rose to fame late last year, when a scandal involving Shinder and the activities of his "IT cooperative" spilled from the narrow world of programmers into the media and became public knowledge.

Let’s briefly recap, as much has been written about Shinder’s activities. Simply put, what Sergey Asael Shinder did was take IT jobs from major employers, posing as a "cool programmer," and then hand them over to young IT professionals for execution.

He passed off their work as his own, collected the agreed-upon fee from the client, and paid the contractors pennies. Greed got in the way—on the one hand, he started cheating the contractors, on the other, he took on so many orders that he became overwhelmed, missing deadlines, and failing to deliver.

It would seem – what does the average person care about all this? Well, of course, it’s a shame for the young IT professionals who were deceived by Shinder. But such is the harsh school of life. The clients? So why pity these capitalist sharks who are making billions off us? On the one hand, that’s certainly true. But among the clients were such giants as VTB Bank, Fidelity, Virgin Media, KLM, Kuoni, Ford, Symantec, Fujitsu, DeutschePost, Three, Tesco Mobile, and Liberty Global.

They’re certainly "sharks," and they deserve it. But the fact is, these "sharks" have us as their client base. And this client base, with all our data—addresses, phone numbers, passports, financial information, accounts, and so on—ended up being at the disposal of a huge circle of people. If only Shinder himself had access, that would be half the problem. But in order for the contractors, those very same young IT specialists, to do the job—remember, we’re talking about software—they had to have access to all the client’s passwords and other data.

And so it became impossible to determine where, when, and how all this data would surface. To put it simply for someone unfamiliar with IT, you might find yourself with no money on your bank card, even if you have a hefty loan. That’s the simplest explanation—in reality, it’s simply impossible to foresee all the potential consequences.

For the clients—those same "capitalist sharks"—this is also a huge problem; in the worst case, they can lose their business. Incidentally, Shinder actively exploited this, simply blackmailing his employers. Most of them preferred to pay quietly and hush up the scandal.

This went on for quite a while, but one day everything became public knowledge when one of the defrauded clients – SoftServe – refused to pay compensation and decided to expose the fraudster.

That’s the long and short of it. You can read the full story of the Shinder cooperative’s operation in this article: The largest IT scam has been exposed: a gang of programmers has been siphoning money and leaking internal information from companies they employ worldwide for years .

This material, among other things, reveals the main actors of this “cooperative” - Sergei Asael Shinder himself, his wife, Victoria Georgievna Shinder (aka Sulakova) (at least four passports - Israel, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine), as well as his closest assistants - Andrei Yuryevich Polunin (Belarus), Eduard Luhtonen (Finland) and Eduard Loktev.

Clearly, Shinder was having problems, and a vigorous search was launched. Furthermore, the defrauded clients began to speak out, albeit reluctantly. The "swindled" IT professionals were much more forthcoming. And then it became clear that, firstly, the identity of Sergey Asael Shinder, who held several passports, including a Ukrainian one, was unclear. Secondly, it became public knowledge that this obscurity in Shinder’s identity hadn’t stopped him from opening offices in our country, luring young IT professionals with promises of unheard-of perks, and actively promoting himself as a sort of "IT market guru."

And even after the scandal, he didn’t hide, as expected, but tried to pass off the entire leak as "an attempt to smear a powerful IT player." He called it all "the machinations of competitors and enemies." Well, what else could he do?

True, the campaign to whitewash the "honest name" turned out to be somewhat sluggish – only a few materials like these were published:

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What’s characteristic is that despite the different headlines, the text in the articles is identical. It’s easy to guess what they’re talking about, so there’s no point in retelling it. Another characteristic is that the resources that published these "refutations" aren’t known for their selective editorial policies or high placement prices. This is surprising, given that, by the most conservative estimates, the losses from Shinder’s activities are estimated at at least $20 million.

However, it’s entirely possible that Sergei Asael Shinder simply decided not to waste money on a hopeless cause. Firstly, major software clients have become much more wary of those who develop their software, and secondly, Shinder’s name has become a top search result. And the results of this search for Sergei Asael and the members of his "cooperative" are far from encouraging.

Here are some examples:

This brief review, which no one has refuted, essentially describes the entire scheme of the scammers’ activities. And almost all of their names are mentioned, except for Shinder’s wife.

And he is far from the only one: 

This is information from another side – from an "IT slave." He worked in Shinder’s Odessa office. The names of the other scammers are the same: Loktev and Polnunin.

But that’s not all. It’s gotten to the point where Sergei Asael Shinder’s name has even made it onto the list of top IT scammers:

It turns out that what Shinder and his company do has a name: fakeworking. "Fakeworking is a new term that describes the deliberate, planned deception of an employee in order to receive a salary for the appearance of work and the promise of results."

Fakeworking is close to charlatanism, but it should be distinguished from common fraud, where they take an advance payment for work (or goods) and then disappear. The main principle of fakeworkers is to sell the appearance of work or services over a long period of time. The best fakeworkers strive to take high-paying positions to regularly receive a stable salary and maintain the appearance of difficult work for as long as possible.

So there you have it. Briefly and succinctly, in a few sentences, he describes what "cybersecurity specialist" Sergey Asael Shinder actually does. He, by the way, was ranked first by the compilers of the fakeworker rankings:

And finally, about Shinder’s "several passports." He does indeed have them. Here’s a list of countries and passports:

1. Ukraine : Shіnder Sergey Asael Leonidovich, foreign passport: FE519721
FOP Shіnder Sergey Asael Leonidovich, tax payer code: 2750526234

2. Russian Federation : Shinder Sergey Asael Leonidovich, Russian passport: 2720846899, foreign passport of the Russian Federation: Serguey Shinder Asael (756149761)

IP Shinder Sergey Asael Leonidovich, INN 100131126539

Active individual entrepreneur (it is clear that he is a citizen of the Russian Federation, registered at the address: Kaliningrad, Musorgsky Street, 10a).

Liquidated individual entrepreneur (it is clear that the Israeli citizen was registered in Petrozavodsk, Moskovskaya St., 12a).

3. Ireland: Serguey Asael Shinder, passport: PE5150978

Lynxoft Technologies Limited, company number 550297, address 14 Shackleton Square, Lucan, Co Dublin, Ireland.

Shinder also holds Bulgarian and Israeli passports, giving him five citizenships in total.

Let’s leave aside the fakeworking, blackmailing with database leaks, and deception of personnel. Let’s even assume that all of this really is a "custom-made smear campaign against the outstanding cybersecurity specialist" Sergei Asael Shinder. But what about his five-time citizenship? Ukraine is not Israel; in our country, even dual citizenship (let alone five) is not permitted. Where is the immigration service? Why does Shinder still hold a Ukrainian passport?

Where is the cyber police, who should have been interested in Shinder a year ago, after the SoftServe scandal?

And where’s our vaunted SBU? Does it matter that a man with a Russian passport and active businesses in a country we’re at war with is operating right under your nose?

Or does the answer to these questions lie on Novoobukhovskoye Highway, where the heads of all these "law enforcement" agencies are building three-story cottages for themselves?