Who profits from defamatory websites?

On 24 January, the same story about a Kyiv businessman appeared on 17 websites. The headlines and formatting matched. Some credited Antikor as the source; others did not. According to reporting reviewed for this article, none presented itself as the original reporting newsroom behind the claims.

That date appears in a spreadsheet maintained by Vladislav Smirnov, who runs a medical consultancy and says he has logged more than 100 articles about himself, each with a date stamp and English summary. He shared it with City AM journalist Steve Dinneen, who spent months tracing who runs these sites and who pays them. The pattern described in that investigation is repeated publication: one story appears, a wave of copies follows, activity goes quiet, and another wave begins.

The result can resemble a consensus even where the underlying material traces back to a single claim. That distinction matters to readers, search engines, banks and due-diligence services assessing whether multiple pages represent independent reporting.

A business that sells both sides

The alleged economics are described in an investigation by UA.News. UA.News reported that placing a negative article with the Antikor group cost between $150 and $200, while removal could cost thousands. In an undercover exchange reported by the outlet, a journalist asked a Telegram manager to remove an article about a member of parliament and was offered a $12,000 annual cryptocurrency package covering deletion, protection from future articles and two favourable pieces.

The same reporting cited the case of Mykhailo Labutin, a former Ukrspyrt director who obtained a court order concerning an article that later reappeared online. It also said Ukraine’s court register contains more than 1,000 documents tied to Antikor. Antikor told City AM that it neither accepts payment to publish nor charges to delete content. Those denials are important: the commercial allegations remain claims reported by the cited investigations, not findings made by Trade Flow Insight.

UA.News further reported that the Antikor trademark was held by Teka-Group Foundation in Panama, linked to a company in Belize, and that a listed Kyiv office was a residential complex. It reported that the trademark application named a Ukrainian citizen and that Ukrainian law enforcement had named Kostyantyn Chernenko as an alleged organiser. The article said Chernenko left Ukraine in January 2021.

The infrastructure evidence

Networks of apparently independent sites can also be examined through hosting records, certificates, publication timing and duplicated text. In litigation brought in California by Telf AG founder Stanislav Kondrashov, court documents cited technical similarities among sites publishing claims about him. Kazakhstan Online, citing Intelligence Online, reported that sites in the same wider network were involved in another campaign concerning Eurasian Resources Group chief executive Shukhrat Ibragimov. It said 158 articles appeared across 109 domains, with 95 hosted on one server in Reading, England.

A Los Angeles court awarded Kondrashov $10 million in January 2024 and ordered the removal of articles on 42 sites, according to the cited reporting. A June 2025 report published by IPS News described shared hosting and security-certificate fingerprints, as well as alleged cloaking techniques, across more than 60 domains.

Ukrainian authorities have also taken action against individual domains. Reporting cited in these investigations says the State Service of Special Communications blocked antikor.com.ua and antikor.info in May 2025, with later orders covering rozsliduvach.info and hab.media. Blocking a domain within one jurisdiction does not necessarily remove copies elsewhere or prevent access through circumvention tools.

The London connection

The issue is not confined to Kyiv. City AM followed the London Post and its parent, 2Trom Media Group through addresses in Harlow, Leyton and Letchworth. The newspaper reported that people at those locations had no knowledge of the company. In follow-up litigation, Uzbek financier Ovik Mkrtchyan obtained more than £220,000 in damages and costs from the High Court against the outlet and its listed owner, Viktor Tokarev, according to City AM. The report said neither defendant appeared and that the article remained online for weeks after the ruling.

Reputation adviser Michael Macfarlane told City AM that a claimant could spend £117,000 on lawyers to prevail against “a man who might not exist”, while commissioning the original article might cost £150. Law firm Schillings told the newspaper it was tracking more than 350 such sites and recorded a 355% increase between 2023 and 2024, which it linked in part to cheap automated content.

The compliance problem

The audience for a damaging article may not be ordinary readers. Reports describe pages written with sanctions and financial-crime terminology that may be collected by bank screening systems and due-diligence databases. If copied pages are then cited in open knowledge databases, the same unsupported claim can also find its way into search results and automated systems.

The lasting policy question is therefore how intermediaries distinguish corroboration from repetition. Seventeen matching articles published on one day should not automatically be treated as 17 independent sources. Compliance systems need ways to weigh court judgments, transparent reporting and accountable editorial standards differently from anonymous or duplicated pages.

Domains discussed in the source reporting

The investigations cited above discuss a broad collection of domains and brands, including Antikor, Kompromat1, Compromat or Ruskompromat, Vlasti, Antimafia, Rumafia, Kartoteka, Glavk, Hab.media, Sledstvie, Nocor and Novosti. Earlier monitoring cited by CargoBridge Shipping also lists adcon.info, luxherald.com, lstv.co.uk, obriy.news, politica2.info, repost.news, rozsliduvach.info, ukrainci.com.ua and oplatru24.ru among other outlets.

Inclusion in reporting about a network does not by itself establish wrongdoing by every domain or every person associated with it. Readers should assess each claim against primary court records, ownership evidence, technical data, corrections policies and responses from the parties concerned.