Selling nothing but empty promises and using front FLPs: how scammer Aleksander Orlovskiy cheated thousands of Ukrainians and ended up facing criminal charges

Selling nothing but empty promises and using front FLPs: how scammer Aleksander Orlovskiy cheated thousands of Ukrainians and ended up facing criminal charges

Financial Freedom Academy: organizers could face up to 12 years in prison

Financial Freedom Academy (FFA) and its affiliated FFA Community, founded and headed by 26-year-old crypto entrepreneur Aleksander Orlovskiy, have come under serious allegations. The investigation’s authors claim that the project may be part of a large-scale fraudulent scheme bearing signs of organized group activity.

Orlovskiy presents himself as an expert in cryptocurrencies and promises participants in his educational programs rapid financial results. In public appearances, he claims that his students can reach an income of $1,000–2,000 while still undergoing training. The crypto guru also claims that more than 15,000 people have already completed his programs, with the majority of them, according to him, achieving financial success.

However, these claims are being called into question as part of the investigation. Moreover, the evidence provided by former and current FFA participants raises doubts about how closely Orlovskiy’s promises correspond to the actual results achieved by his students.

If the information presented in the investigation is confirmed, the issue may go beyond complaints about the quality of educational services and concern a potentially criminal offense. Depending on the legal qualification of the alleged actions, the organizers could potentially face between 5 and 12 years in prison.

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The main question now is what Financial Freedom Academy is actually selling: genuine knowledge about cryptocurrencies and investments, or a well-packaged promise of financial success from which the organizers themselves are the primary beneficiaries?

According to people who paid for training at FFA Academy, with course fees reaching $1,500, very few were able to earn anything at all.

Moreover, our colleagues found that Financial Freedom Academy, supposedly founded by Aleksander Orlovskiy, is a fake. No such legal entity exists in Ukraine, Poland, or any other country where, according to Aleksander Orlovskiy, his Academy operates.

According to an investigation by CRiME and [Hromki Dela], the activities of Financial Freedom Academy show signs of financial misconduct. Payments for Orlovskiy’s training are collected not even by Aleksander Orlovskiy himself, but by individual entrepreneurs bearing signs of being front entities.

In particular, this includes individual entrepreneur Kateryna Sergutina, whose account Orlovskiy’s associates attempted to use to receive more than UAH 40,000 from the author of the investigation. This individual entrepreneur was registered only one month before issuing the invoice to the investigation’s author.

The author suggests that most payments from students to whom Aleksander Orlovskiy promised quick and easy wealth are processed through similar “front” entrepreneurs.

“If some naive ‘sucker’ had been in my place, paid Orlovskiy for the ‘one thousand a week’ training through Sergutina, and then realized his mistake, he would not even have been able to recover his money through the courts. Because he did not pay Orlovskiy anything, and he had no agreement with Sergutina,” the investigation states.

The author concludes that Aleksander Orlovskiy is a typical representative of a type of fraudster known as “infogypsies” — scammers who present themselves as successful professionals and sell information products for large sums of money despite those products having no real value.

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“People are sold essentially useless informational and educational products for substantial sums of money, with unfounded promises that these products can help them achieve financial success,” the investigation states. “This looks very much like taking possession of someone else’s property through deception or abuse of trust. In other words, a criminal offence under Article 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine — fraud. And since it is clearly not Aleksander Orlovskiy alone who is involved here, we most likely have Part 5 of Article 190 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine — fraud committed on an especially large scale and/or by an organized group. This carries a sentence of five to twelve years in prison with confiscation of property.”

According to various estimates, Aleksander Orlovskiy may have obtained around $4.5 million in this way.

At the same time, the investigation suggests that Aleksander Orlovskiy may not be the ultimate beneficiary of the fraud at Financial Freedom Academy, and that more experienced fraudsters could be behind the scheme.