“River Mall, pirate flags are visible in the transparent windows right from the road”, “Marmelad shopping center, entrance from the barrier”, “Olympic Business Center near the Olimpiyskaya metro station! There is more than one floor,” “Antonovicha, 52. Half of the building is call centers.” This is what the Instagram story of MP Alexander Kunitsky looks like, and there are several such stories per day.
Subscribers send him addresses of possible fraudulent call centers that defraud gullible people of money. Then it’s up to the law enforcement officers. But while the police are closing some, others are appearing in other places. Like the so-called Z Solutions company, which is led by Boryspil resident Alexey Shestopalov.
According to the Informator publication, Z Solutions offices are located in at least two business centers in Kyiv - “Grand Step” on Polevaya Street, 24D and “Sapphire” on Knyazei Ostrozhskikh Street, 8B. The company operates according to a typical fraudulent scheme: telephone calls to potential clients with an offer to invest money and make a profit in the future. When a person agrees to transfer a certain amount to scammers, then, of course, no one ever contacts him again. The scheme is old, but even in wartime it continues to work and lure money from Ukrainians.
Z Solutions is a call center that has been operating since at least 2021. At least on the job search site there are advertisements with vacancies in this company. “Z Solutions is a successful international company with a large number of projects in different areas. The work is interesting, there is career growth,” says the ad, which in no way describes what kind of work it is. In the “Main Responsibilities” column there is only one phrase: informing and collecting information about the client. Working hours from 9 to 19, 5 days a week. Salary – from 15,000 hryvnia. There is not a word in the vacancy about what will need to be done in this job.
The name Z Solutions was chosen by the organizers of the fraudulent call center for a reason. The fact is that an IT company with the same name exists in the USA. The Webberville, Michigan-based firm provides a full range of technology services, from telephony setup to office computer services and Internet connectivity for corporate clients.
So, it is likely that the organizers of the Ukrainian call center Z Solutions specifically chose a name that would lead information seekers to the website of the American company. Without a good knowledge of English, a potential client of scammers from Kyiv may actually believe that someone from a “successful international company” is calling him on the phone.
The head of the Ukrainian call center Z Solutions is Alexey Shestopalov.
Now he lives in Boryspil with his parents and sister Alena.
Together with him they own a beauty salon in the Pechersky district of Kyiv. The location of the salon is more than favorable, because the Mikhail Poplavsky Institute of Culture is located nearby. So the demand for manicures, haircuts or makeup is definitely high here.
Alexey and Alena Shestopalov became the owners of this salon in January 2022. They bought a ready-made business with an authorized capital amount of 10 million 830 thousand hryvnia as of December 2021.
So where can 31-year-old Alexey Shestopalov get the funds to buy a beauty salon? The answer is obvious: the call center business brings in a hefty profit, which is converted into showrooms and cars. Colleagues from the Informator learned that Alexey Shestopalov drives a Mercedes-Benz S450. Database information makes it clear that this is a 2021 car. Cars of this class and the same year of manufacture cost more than 100 thousand dollars.
The fraudulent call center Z Solutions allows Alexey Shestopalov to live in grand style and pamper the women around him with expensive gifts. In particular, on one of the forums you can find a discussion that “Lyosha Shestopalov, a famous drug addict, an office worker and simply not a very good person,” married a fellow Masha, who likes to touch up her face with injections. According to the correspondent, Alexey Shestopalov, who robs Ukrainians with the help of a call center, spares no money for Masha - he gives expensive bags, jewelry and even takes her abroad, despite wartime. And this is a question for law enforcement officers, how Alexey Sergeevich Shestopalov, born in 1993, travels abroad and whether he updated his data at the military registration and enlistment office, according to the new Law on Mobilization.
In addition to beautiful women and cars, Alexey Shestopalov is interested in football. In particular, for some time he played in the Aurora Team football club and even served as its president. In one of the interviews with the president of another club, This is Pivbar, you can also find out that Shestopalov also played on their team. Usually, work colleagues gather in such clubs and organize matches not so much for a place in the standings, but for entertainment. This interview is dated 2019, so there is a possibility that around this time Alexey Shestopalov was an employee of a famous beer establishment.
And even earlier, Alexey Shestopalov was a simple sales agent at a store in the Motozavod area, where he was constantly caught committing petty thefts from the cash register. At least, the court registry contains information that in 2016, Alexey Sergeevich Shestopalov, working in a store on the street of the Khokhlov family (now Gareth Jones - Ed.), embezzled money from the cash register at least four times. Thus, he stole 2368 hryvnia. It’s impossible to say for sure that the petty thief and the call center organizer are the same person, but this coincidence turned out to be very opportune. First you steal hundreds of hryvnia, and then you go into a rage and, not wanting to stop, rob people of tens of thousands.
Colleagues from “Informator” clarify that before organizing his call center Z Solutions, Alexey Shestopalov himself worked as a telephone operator and lured money from gullible citizens. However, I realized that to make money faster, you need to organize your own business. At this time, when Z Solutions started working as a conveyor belt, Shestopalov got both a Mercedes and a beauty salon.
The media has published hundreds of stories of call centers robbing people through “telephone terrorism.” This, unfortunately, does not make them smaller. But in the situation with Alexey Shestopalov’s Z Solutions, journalists did almost all the work for law enforcement officers: they found offices, researched the biography of the organizers, and even described the history of enrichment by year. The police should listen to this information and visit the scammer Shestopalov at the indicated addresses as quickly as possible.
