Denis File (Exrates, Atomars and Alterdice exit scam investigation)
This document provides publicly accessible data that points to Denis Deputatov as the main administrator of these exchanges and Denis Syomkin as a partner and collaborator of D. Deputatov.
All the information that will be shown below is accessible on the internet and can be easily verified.
Screenshots and all possible links will be added. Probably after this document is made public, the administrators of these exchanges will try to eliminate or modify the information that is now accessible on the internet.
Since exchange websites are currently unavailable, links will be displayed using the archive.org tool.
Chapter 1: The Exchanges
Atomars ( https://atomars.com/ )
The exchange was launched on 06/12/2019, ATOMARS registered in the Seychelles. Although it was registered in Seychelles, the workers were always from Ukraine.https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/atomars#about https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/atomars/ The exchange was working fine, adding new coins and providing the services expected of an emerging exchange.
In April 2021, the exchange began blocking withdrawals for some of the major cryptocurrencies, stopped providing support, and also stopped communicating on social media. The Telegram group where information and support was offered was blocked. Supporting accounts in this group were removed. There are only some CM left there like Mike Filipenko.
Finally on May 5, 2021, the website publishes a statement:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210721095633/
https://atomars.com/news/the-cfo-and-administrator-of-exchange-has-disappeared This statement says that the administrator has disappeared “ CFO and administrator of exchange has disappeared ”
This statement was probably created by some “employee” who was not directly involved in the scam and who had permissions to create web posts.
Users affected by this exit scam got organized and created a Discord server to find the scammer: https://discord.gg/vYY2QH8c6K They also created a Reddit post with a schematic of the alleged people involved in the scam: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/nneuq6/atomars_scam_if_you_have_lost_money_on_this/ The investigation focused on Mike Filipenko and Anton Dziatkovskii. Little information was found on “Denys Somkin” because the name was not correct. The correct name is Denis Syomkin, but we will see this later.
Mike Filipenko was publicly portrayed as a victim of the scam.
All the people who worked for Atomars and were asked about what happened stated that they did not know the identity of the exchange administrator, profiles such as community managers and commercials who were in charge of searching for and listing new coins never met the administrator. They communicated with him through Telegram with usernames like “@AtomarsAdmin”.
Exrates.me ( https://exrates.me/ )
This exchange was created in 2016 and belonged to the company DexTechnologies OÜ (14499374) registered in Estonia. Although it was registered in Estonia, the workers were from Ukraine.
https://www.teatmik.ee/en/personlegal/14499374-DexTechnologies-O%C3%9Chttps: //web.archive.org/web/20211107121517/ https://www.coingecko.com/en/exchanges/exrates#about
The exchange offered its services apparently correctly until February 2022. That month the exchange began to block withdrawals, then stopped offering the support service.
The (fake) profiles that supported Telegram were removed.
Some users had already reported that withdrawals had not worked for months. The administrator/support only dealt with the harshest complaints from those people who threatened the exchange the most insistently.
In this case, it seemed that no one was working on the exchange anymore, only the administrator and a person “putting out fires” of users who were increasingly annoyed with their service.
Finally, on March 15, 2022, Exrates.me closed the website.
DexTechnologies OÜ activity license expired on 07.01.2020
Alterdice.com https://alterdice.com/
It was created in 2018 and registered in Singapore by the company ALTERDICE 53389964L
(Address: Manulife building #28–018 Cross Street Singapore 048424.)
https://www.companies.sg/business/53389964L/ALTERDICE
https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/alterdice/ This exchange has all the red flags to be another exit scam. Telegram group bloated with fake users and now users have created another Telegram group due to admin not responding. Blocked withdrawals and on their social networks such as twitter https://twitter.com/AlterdiceSocial or Facebook you can read comments from users who have been claiming their money for a long time.
ALTERDICE’s activity license expired on 04.26.2019
CHAPTER 2: A single administrator for 3 exchanges.
As you may already suspect all 3 exchanges, Atomars, Exrates and Alterdice are managed by the same person. How can we affirm this?
1- Atomars, Exrates, Alterdice are Ukrainian exchanges that have followed the same scam model known as exit scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_scam
2- Exrates and Alterdice use exactly the same interface.
3- When there was an update or a maintenance job, all three exchanges were put into maintenance at the same time.
4- Exrates and Atomars used the same user experience logic for most interactions in their interface, deposits and withdrawals as well as other functions of the exchange interface.
5- All workers related to these exchanges are from Ukraine.
6- In Github there is an unofficial API for Alterdice and Atomars https://github.com/hyperevo/Atomars-alterdice-API
7- Same doc API
We could list more coincidences but these are enough for now to understand that the three exchanges are created and managed by the same administrator.
*There are more exchanges created by ukrainians that use the same core, api, pre exit scam behavior etc. Like DEX-TRADE https://dex-trade.com/ (https://docs.dex-trade.com/ ) . But we cannot investigate all of them. DYOR!
CHAPTER 3: THE SCAM
As we have commented in the previous chapters, the strategy to carry out the scam is the classic Exit Scam strategy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_scam
In the case of these three Exchanges, the fraudster’s strategy was always the same.
1/ Acquire an exchange without a license or create an exchange and register it in a tax haven to leave no trace.
2/ The workers do not know the administrators.
3/ Make the exchange work properly long enough to fill their wallets with BTC and other cryptocurrencies.
4/ Manage to list the largest number of currencies to increase the number of users. In the case of this scam, the coin collectors and listings worked for a group of Ukrainian exchanges that were associated and made offers to list a token on various exchanges including Atomars, Exrates and Alterdice.
5/ When the time is right the scammer disappears with all the coins and no one knows who he is.
CHAPTER 4: Who is the administrator?
We are already clear that the three exchanges are from the same administrator and that they have used the same scam strategy. Now we will talk about the identity of the alleged administrators.
Denis Deputatov, creates the Alterdice exchange in 2018 we can see how in some places Deputatov is named as “General Manager, Alterdice”
https://10times.com/profile/denys-deputatov-65134016 has recently attended the Binance Blockchain Week event (27–30 Mar 2022) as “General Manager, Alterdice” https://10times.com/e1r3-f0g1-6phd/visitors
In 2019 Deputatov was allegedly involved in the creation of Atomars.com, an exchange that was probably already designed as an exit scam project. Deputatov is very careful not to leave a trace, nor does he reveal his identity to any employee.
Deputatov uses several fake profiles it was not easy to find his “official profile” on Telegram Den_Cryptosolutions and surprise! Deputatov was also part of the official AtomarsExchange group https://t.me/AtomarsExchange
Deputatov has a more technical profile and needs a partner to keep these exchanges alive and build a credible appearance that the exchange is not a scam. For this, he has Denis Syomkin, a profile closer to the “Global Business Development and Partnership” as his Linkedin profile says https://www.linkedin.com/in/denys-s-0869a3185/ .
Syomkin has a more active social media identity than Deputatov, but it is difficult to find his public identity directly related to these exchanges. Ultimately, this is normal if you know that it is a product that will end up being a scam. But Syomkin has also left some traces.
On his Linkedin profile he likes and shares Alterdice and Atomars posts.
He also shares content and likes the exchange https://snbtoken.io/. An exchange that was only active for 2 years and then stopped working, does this sound familiar to you? Probably another exit scam, just by doing a search on Google or Twitter we can see several people denouncing this exchange as a scam.
Lalit Bansal https://www.linkedin.com/in/l-k-bansal/ is another person investigated in the Atomars scam since he was officially “Atomar’s strategic Partner” and was also “Co-Partner CSO at snbtoken.io ”. After the Atomars scam was uncovered, Lalit removed her professional relationship with Atomars from her Linkedin profile. It is possible that he has nothing to do with the scam and has only been used to promote the exchanges and get more users and credibility.
On his Facebook profile https://www.facebook.com/denis.syomkin Syomkin follows the Alterdice page.
Some time ago we were able to speak with one of the administrator profiles of the group that provided support in the Alterdice Telegram https://t.me/alterdice_chat_eng AlterdiceListing whose name is “Denys”.
How does Deputatov become the sole administrator of Exrates?
Well, this is a bit more complex since in the beginning Exrates.me was an exchange that belonged to the same group of partners of a group of exchanges, all of Ukrainian origin.
In this “holding” are the exchanges Atomars.com, coinsbit.io, Exrates.me, P2PB2B.io, Alterdice.com, Localtrade.cc, whitebit.com and probably other Ukrainian exchanges.
In the following screenshot we can see how the promoters of this group try to attract new coins by promoting this group of exchanges.
Vincent Veisman https://www.linkedin.com/in/veisman/ was the former partner of this holding company/exchange alongside Deputatov.
In 2018 Veisman separates and creates Coinsbit.io together with other former employees. In 2020 he left Coinsbit to be part of the new project http://buytex.net/, currently the website is closed, the project lasted 1 year and is considered a scam by users. Wow, another scam….
P2PB2B.io is run by Valery Solodovnik who became independent from its former owners (also owners of Exrates). On the internet we can find several forums where he is accused of scam and being related to Exrates.me and other exchanges since P2PB2B.io and Exrates.me share the same partners and many texts that we could find on their website were identical. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5205331.140https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5166049.20
When you ask P2PB2B workers about the Exrates or Atomars scam, they state that they are different companies from P2PB2B and that they only had a strategic association (no one tells us how they were associated). In the case of Exrates, this association lasted until 2022.https://localtrade.cc/ was under the same ownership as P2PB2B and Exrates. But it was sold in 2020.WhiteBit was created by the early developers of P2PB2B. According to some ex-workers, it seems that the former owners of P2PB2B cheated their workers and some of them created their own project called https://whitebit.com/ .
Between 2019 and 2020 the owner and administrator of Exrates fired his workers including Konstantin C, the CEO of Exrates.me (who has currently deleted his linkedin profile), and Taras Podgorodetskyi (CTO), a very controversial character according to public opinion from Ukraine. You just have to google a bit to find out.
Former Exrates employees fired in 2020 claim that the new owner/administrator (presumably Deputatov) did not want to continue growing technologically.
Deputatov would have kept the entire user base and then revamps the Exrates website, gets rid of his old interface and builds the entire exchange as a copy of the Alterdice interface. From this moment the exchange stops having efficient support and communication is disastrous and they hardly add new Coins/blockchains. The exchange would already be ready to perform an exit scam when the time is right.
As we can see all the people involved in all these Ukrainian exchanges are very shady people.
CHAPTER 5: Deputatov & Syomkin
Denis Deputatov
Telegram: den_cryptosolutions https://t.me/den_cryptosolutions
Deputatov is from Kyiv, Ukraine and currently lives in Thailand. On his Telegram profile den_cryptosolutions https://t.me/den_cryptosolutions appears a Thai telephone number.We have not been able to find out if they have any current jobs. He’s probably freelancing or just living life “carefree.” He plays online chess every day on the chess.com portal https://www.chess.com/member/deputatov . We can see the Thai flag next to his username.
On his Linkedin profile he says that he lives in Phuket, Thailand. A heavenly place to crypto-retire? https://www.linkedin.com/in/denys-deputatov-38a169173/
Denis Syomkin
Telegram: Denishappy https://t.me/Denishappy
He has a more public social profile and we can see that he attends events around the world related to Blockchain technology or economics. He has recently attended the Amsterdam blockchain week or the World Economic Forum in Davos as a spectator.
He practices Yoga, Acroyoga, and meditation and regularly travels to Thailand where he practices these hobbies. What a coincidence!… Thailand (Ko Pha-ngan)… his Deputatov partner is also there.
Syomkin joined Facebook in November 2011. But Syomkin’s first Facebook post is from March 2020 (a bit strange).
His first post in March 2020 is a landscape photo from Thailand. We can speculate that he deleted all old posts of his, many of them related to exchange scam to start with a cleaner social identity. The image he currently projects is that of a businessman (no one knows exactly what business he is in), who does yoga, travels to Thailand (Zen beach, Dipabhāvan Meditation Center Koh Samui Thailand ,… and is aware of the defense of Ukraine in its current situation of war with Russia.
CONCLUSION
We cannot calculate the amount that these exchanges could have scammed during all this time. Probably, and being conservative, we are talking about several tens of millions in value of the cryptocurrencies stolen from users.
The exit scam strategy is the main scam methodology carried out. But, it is probably not the only one since, according to some comments from the users of these exchanges, it can be deduced that other types of scams were carried out in the last months of life of these exchanges.
Some users have reported that they were posting fraudulent coins, ICOs and IEOs.
We have also been able to read users who denounce malpractice of these exchanges. For example, generating “fake volume” to deceive Coinmarketcap or Coingecko and thus appear as solvent exchanges on these well-known portals. Portals that most users use as reliable indexes to assess the reputation of an exchange.Deputatov is the administrator of the exchanges and Syomkin one of his collaborators.
We don’t know what relationship Deputatov and Syomkin currently have, nor do we know if they could be working on a new exchange or exit scam. We also don’t know if there is any partner or boss above Deputatov. Probably if this investigation is extended, more people directly involved in these scams could appear.
At this point, there is no doubt that Deputatov and Syomkin could know the whereabouts of the cryptocurrencies stolen in these scams.
We hope that this investigation will serve to clarify a little more what has happened with these exchanges. We also hope that this investigation can serve as a starting point for a police investigation in your country.
If you are affected by these scams and you live in EU, Ukraine or Thailand, perhaps this information can help you start a police investigation and thus be able to recover your cryptocurrencies as soon as possible.
This investigation has been conducted thanks to the help of people affected by these scams. The objective is to know the identity of those responsible for these exchanges, in order to bring them before a criminal court and thus ensure that the stolen cryptocurrencies are returned to their legitimate owners.
If you have any relevant information that can help in the investigation, you can share it here.
UPDATE (September 15, 2023)
One year after revealing the identity of the perpetrators of the Extates.me, Atomars.com, Alterdice.com exchange scam, we will add some updates to the investigation.
Denys Deputatov
Deputatov is still at large probably in Thailand spending all the money he has stolen with all his crypto scams.
After publishing this investigation, Deputatov tried to clean his digital footprint by eliminating some data from the links that we published in this post.
He deleted the information and profile photo of his Telegram account https://t.me/Den_Cryptosolutions, although it seems that he is still using that telegram profile since it does not appear as a “deleted account”. He might have some clients/scams open with that user and can’t remove him easily.
He also canceled his chess.com username https://www.chess.com/member/deputatov.
Days after Denis Fiel’s publication, Deputatov’s wife who lives in Thailand changed her Facebook username so that she would not be recognized as Deputatov’s wife. She dropped her married name. But what she didn’t know is that we were already investigating her. Deputatov’s wife could incur the crime of complicity and concealment of a crime of international fraud. She could also be committing a crime if, knowing that her husband was a scammer, she would also have benefited from the money from the scams. Like Denys Deputatov, Alina Deputatova or now Алена Павлишина, according to what her Facebook profile shows, https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100006188404501 she would not be working in Thailand. Like her husband, they will be enjoying life and the paradisiacal beaches of Phuket with the money they have obtained by scamming thousands of people.
Photos of Alina taken from her Facebook.
Denys Syomkin
Some users on Discord claim to have spoken with him, and Syomkin allegedly still does not acknowledge his involvement in the scam but acknowledges that Deputatov is the main scammer.
Meanwhile Syomkin continues to live a luxurious life full of world travel without apparently having any remorse for his crimes as an accomplice in international fraud. It does not seem that he has a real job, it seems that he continues to live off the money he earned during his time as a collaborator in crypto scams and throughout the year 2022–23 he has been traveling with impunity around the world: Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Macau, Switrzaland, Milan, Sicily, Kronberg, Cannes, Monaco…
Photos of Denys taken from her Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/denis.syomkin
We will update this post with more information soon.
