Russian trace of Slots City casino owner Yakov Finkelstein

As People's Deputy Alexey Goncharenko writes in his TG channel, people literally terrorizing the Slots City and Slotoking casinos began to contact him en masse. Advertising is so intrusive that it is unrealistic to call it anything other than telephone terror.

“It's just a gesture. People suffer from alarms and shelling every day, and they cannot live in peace the rest of the time. They call several times a day from different numbers. And here you need to understand that this is generally illegal. Without the permission of the subscriber, that is, you, no one can call you and advertise something,” the people’s deputy notes. He also promised to “tackle the scammers” who intrusively call people in an attempt to lure them into the game.

Online casinos Slots City and Sloto King are organizing telephone terror for Ukrainians: forcing them to drain their last money

However, one of the casinos, namely Slotoking, was fined 3 million 350 thousand hryvnia by the Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries (CRAIL) on March 4 of this year. True, not for intrusive advertising, but for “violation by the licensee of the procedure for identifying players, information about which was included in the Register of Persons for whom access to gambling establishments and/or participation in gambling is restricted.” Most likely, new troubles are now awaiting Slotoking – already as a result of the intervention of Alexey Goncharenko.

Slots U.A. LLC operates under the Slotoking brand; it also owns an online casino under the 777 brand.

The license to operate the Slotoking online casino was issued on April 26, 2021; another division of the company, 777 Casino, received permission in September 2023. As for the owner himself, Pavel Zhuril, little is known about him. In addition to Slots U.A. LLC, it is registered as a sole proprietor, and for some reason twice:

As for the online casino operator, Slots U.A. LLC, whose owner is Pavel Zhurilo, last year it earned 193,665,200 hryvnia in net profit with a turnover of almost three and a half billion. Typically, 16 people worked in both casinos (Slotoking and 777):

This is where the data on Slotoking ends, but regarding another “telephone terrorist” – the Slots City casino – everything is much more interesting. Firstly, Gamedev LLC operates under this brand; it received a license in February 2021. And if the registration data of the Slotoking operator is clear and understandable, then with the Slots City operator, Gamedev LLC, everything is very confusing.

The director is Oleg Vladimirovich Kononchuk, who until recently was the founder of Gamedev LLC. In general, since Gamedev LLC received a license to conduct gambling, permanent changes have continued in the composition of its founders:

And even earlier, owners from Great Britain and Switzerland were present here:

However, things are still more interesting:

The owners are hidden behind a venture fund, and the beneficiary is Israeli citizen Yakov Finkelstein. This is the full namesake of the Socialist Revolutionary Yakov Finkelstein, who was hanged in the Shlisselburg fortress in 1906. However, our Yakov Finkelstein became Finkelstein recently - namely in 2021. Before that, he bore the prosaic surname Gribov and had a very specific fame in Ukraine. Yakov Gribov is called the co-founder of the Nemiroff brand, which he owned together with Stepan Glus and Anatoly Kipisha.

Somewhere in 2011, Yakov Gribov and Anatoly Kipish tried to leave Stepan Glus. He accused his partners of raiding. In short, a classic raider scandal arose, which, after much delay, ended with Glus leaving the company’s ownership in 2017. And while all this was going on, Nemiroff successfully exported its products to Russia and the occupied territories of Donbass and Crimea.

However, all this did not prevent the future Finkelstein, then still Gribov, from getting into another scandal - this time a conflict arose over the Zernotrade company, in which his partner was Viktor Kupavtsev. Here, too, there was a classic raider scheme; Gribov accused Kupavtsev of withdrawing funds to the Rostock Holding agricultural company. Despite the fact that Gribov had no connection until recently, as a result of long legal proceedings in 2020, he received Rostock Holding as his property.

Currently, Yakov Gribov, under the name Finkelstein, owns the corporate rights of at least 16 legal entities:

In some of them, the co-owner is Gribov-Finkelstein’s sister, Bella Finkelstein, with whom he, in particular, owns Nemiroff through LVN Limited LLC.

But in our case, we should pay attention to the reasons that forced Yakov Gribov to take the name of the hanged revolutionary Finkelstein. The reason is both funny and banal at the same time. The fact is that Yakov Gribov left for Russia in 2020, where he settled in the Moscow region, next to another of his partners, Boris Feigin, in the elite village of Klokovo. And it had to happen that the partners did not divide the bets in which sturgeon were bred. It is unknown which of them invited television, but the story about the conflict was broadcast on NTV, which showed Yakov Gribov in all his glory, sharing stakes with Boris Feigin.

Which, of course, did not go unnoticed in Ukraine, where Nemiroff tried to sculpt a patriotic image. That’s why I had to retrain from Gribov to Finkelstein. However, this is not all that concerns the Gribov-Finkelstein Slots City casino. For, if you look at the register data, there is, for example, the Slot City Foundation Charitable Organization, where the current director of Gamedev LLC Oleg Kononchuk was also among the beneficiaries. Moreover, this BU conducts quite good activities:

Its beneficiary is Artem Arkadyevich Stogniy, to whom a number of legal entities are also registered:

This is also a chain that would be interesting to unwind, but it is simply impossible to explore all of Yakov Gribov-Finkelstein’s connections in a short publication. Returning to his Slots City casino, you should pay attention to two more things. The first is financial reporting: last year the operator of this casino, Gamedev LLC, earned 36.534 million hryvnia with a turnover of two and a half billion.

And the second case is directly related to what caused such a violent reaction from Goncharenko. It's just the dominance of advertising. Slots City casino is present not only in the phones and instant messengers of Ukrainians. Here is the first page of the search engine:

Slots City casino has dozens of websites with similar names, although the license conditions indicate that the casino operates only on the slotscity.ua domain. However, for some reason KRAIL does not pay attention to the fact that Slots City is literally crawling out of all the cracks. I wonder why? And why does CRAIL not pay attention to the complaints of those whose Slots City owner, a newly minted Israeli with Ukrainian and Russian passports, Yakov Gribov-Finkelstein, is trying to get into his pockets.