Shylo Artem Viktorovych
Former Head of the Department of Counterintelligence Protection of the State’s Interests (DKIB SBU).
Official biography
Graduated from Yaroslav the Wise University of Kharkiv, PhD in Law.
Family.
Mother — Olha Shylo — Head of the Department at Yaroslav Mudryi University.
Father — Viktor Ivanovych Shylo
Compromising material
Employees note that Artem Viktorovich likes to publicly declare absolutely open relations in the team and in personal communication, but, due to pathological greed, he is prone to abandon both his subordinates and direct “patrons,” curators and patrons. To whom he swore loyalty, but at the same time hides from them both his most valuable sources of income and the real amount of money that passes through him and remains in his pockets. For many years, Artem Viktorovych Shylo has been carefully guarding most of the “topics” from both his former management, represented by the odious former head of the State Committee for Investigations (2017-2019) Oleksandr Klimchuk and his former first deputy Mykola Kuleshov, and from his high patrons from the new government, thanks to whom he managed to stay in office under the current government, but in the end, he is ready to deceive these people in any situation that is most favorable for him.
According to his colleagues, Artem Shilo now considers himself the de facto head of the department and Korniychuk the “formal” head. Artem Shilo is trying to impose this position on all other employees of the DKIB. According to his own words, he has direct access to one of the deputy heads of the SBU, Bakanov, and this patron allegedly gave him complete carte blanche in relation to the department and is his “roof” for solving all issues. But this patron, of course, does not realize that Shilo has him wrapped around his finger and shows less than 20% of his “topics” and the income from them.
How to milk and strangle the IT business. The SBU has again saddled up corrupt financial flows
Recently, criminal schemes for obtaining illegal income by putting pressure on commercial enterprises of the IT market, providers and telecom operators have been finally established within the framework of criminal proceedings opened by other law enforcement agencies based on falsified materials.
In these criminal proceedings, unreasonable searches are conducted in the premises of IT companies, at the places of residence of their officials and founders, during which valuable computer equipment, cash and financial and business documents are seized, which effectively blocks their commercial activities.
In order to return the property seized during the searches, Artem Viktorovych Shilo demands illegal remuneration from the owners of IT companies, which reaches several hundred thousand US dollars, and then receives a monthly reward for unimpeded activities.
In case of refusal to give a bribe, entrepreneurs are subjected to additional pressure (interrogations, searches, blocking of bank accounts), and the return of property confiscated during searches is unreasonably delayed on the basis of court decisions.
Thus, within the framework of criminal proceedings No. 12018100010003769 dated 18.04.2018 under Part 1 of Art. 190 and Part 1 of Art. 203-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which was being conducted by the Holosiivskyi Police Department of the Main Department of the National Police in Kyiv, measures were taken to put pressure on entrepreneurs who serviced iBox electronic terminals on the basis of fictitious facts of their alleged provision of services in the field of gambling. Also, in the said proceedings, searches were conducted in commercial enterprises related to electronic trading in the international currency market “Forex” (companies Alitas Group, Star Way Media, MIZ Group, Prominvestconsult Group, Consulting Lane, Adel Investmens, Team Advice and others).
Artem Viktorovych Shilo. The main corrupt official in the SBU DKIB
Artem Viktorovych, being the acting head of the 2nd Department of the DKIB, which is operational and by the nature of its activities is mainly responsible for combating cybercrime
The main source of illegal income is the money received during the actual robbery of IT companies and tribute from providers and telecom operators who are defenseless against the arbitrariness of the law.
According to SBU sources, Artem Viktorovich Shilo has entire hacker groups under his control from Kharkiv and Dnipro, who are forced to cooperate under threats of imprisonment and carry out clearly criminal orders that are extremely far from the goals and objectives of the DCIB.
With the help of their knowledge and using their official position and connections in the Prosecutor General’s Office, some of whose employees “cover” them from possible requests for international legal assistance, they simply steal money from the accounts of ordinary citizens of China, the Russian Federation and other CIS and Asian countries that do not have direct treaties with Ukraine on international legal assistance in criminal matters or have such treaties, but only with the Russian Federation, as, for example, with the Russian Federation. This allows them to turn around credit cards and bank accounts of citizens of these countries with impunity.
It is anyone’s guess as to what enormous damage such activities cause to Ukraine as a state, its reputation and foreign policy.
PASSION FOR REAL ESTATE AND ABUSE OF POWER
Huge funds from criminal activity quietly settle in his possession in the form of expensive real estate.
Even the real estate itself, purchased with corrupt funds, is bought in a “gray” way. Using his connections and official position, Artem Viktorovych Shilo systematically creates artificial obstacles for construction companies and receives from them the maximum discount for expensive and liquid objects in exchange for loyalty and successful issuance of all permits. He buys real estate in different cities of Ukraine, which he registers in the names of his relatives and simply straw men. The public declaration describes only a small and modest part of his property and capital, most of which is not known even to his inner circle, patrons and allies.
D. IN COMMERCE
Artem Viktorovich bought the research paper from a person whose reputation is certainly not in doubt in academic circles. The real author of the work is Volodymyr Trofymenko, PhD in Law, Associate Professor of the Department of Criminal Procedure at Yaroslav the Wise National Law University. Whose basic poverty forced him to make a deal with his conscience for money and write a research paper for an old, stuttering, slurring student whose level of education does not allow him to do such work on his own even in the distant future.
Declaration
Let’s look at the official declaration of Artem Viktorovich Shil’s parents. Even a cursory reading of it raises a natural question — how, with an official salary of no more than 25 thousand hryvnias for an employee of his level, they managed to purchase several houses of 150 m2 with a real value of at least 2 million hryvnias each, 4 land plots and commercial real estate with a total area of about 600 m2, the market value of which may exceed 4-5 million hryvnias. According to the declaration, the parents’ income could not possibly be sufficient for such expensive purchases.
The family also registered two expensive cars, a 2017 Toyota Camry (price from UAH 700,000) and a 2018 Toyota RAV 4 (from UAH 800,000), as well as an Audi Q6.
By a strange coincidence, the main purchases took place in 2016-2019, during the period of Klimchuk and Kuleshov’s undivided rule in the SCIB.
POCKET MONEY FOR THE DKIB
The IT sector is not legally regulated, and most often it employs young people who earn good incomes by Ukrainian standards. Due to the specifics of remote work with customers, they rarely intersect with the state machine, so they do not have strong ties with the powerful. This makes them easy prey for enterprising “servants of the law”. For example, SBU DKIB officers Artem Shilo and his subordinate Oleksandr Sapalev were involved in such schemes. According to their colleagues, these employees find IT specialists in Ukraine, establish corrupt connections with them, and then use them for their own personal benefit for years.
According to the publication Bagnet, a source in the SBU reports that IT specialists are used to conduct cyberattacks on foreign banks, as well as to create and place malware, ransomware, and create resources for the distribution of objects withdrawn from civilian circulation. We will dwell on this in a bit more detail.
In Ukraine, it is no secret that drug sales through a network of bookmarks and advertisements on city walls are supervised by law enforcement. All these “boshkas”, “cones”, “hair dryers”, “salt” and other chemicals are sold under the “roof” of the guys with the shoulder straps, the ORD website writes. Moreover, the creation of websites and their “depersonalization” is a rather laborious job that is best done by “outside” hands. And if necessary, these same hands can be safely handed over to fellow law enforcement officers.
However, the proceeds from drug sales are prohibitively small compared to the amount of money that can be made from carding, a type of fraud in which a transaction is made using a payment or credit card or its details without being initiated or confirmed by its owner. There are a million variants of carding, and in the case of Ukrainian law enforcement, the most common victims are citizens of the Russian Federation, Belarus, and China. The choice of countries with which hackers work is obvious: due to the war, relations between law enforcement agencies have also cooled down, and coordination, joint investigations, and mutual assistance in finding the perpetrators are out of the question.
According to one of Artem Shil’s former “assistants,” the SCIB is engaged in its own struggle for markets, the results of which look like this:
«The SBU exposed a group of hackers who attacked the websites of government agencies and banks.
According to the investigation, the hackers established corrupt communication with law enforcement and government officials.”
The objective of this fight is simple: to create a criminal monopoly in Ukraine, controlled by those who are supposed to fight such phenomena.
Bagnet also writes that for such work, the SBU, in addition to “manpower,” which, believe me, the accomplices have a lot of, also needs high-quality equipment — servers, routers, system units. The equipment is expensive and requires professional adjustment; for example, the equipment confiscated from the Kharkiv-based company SteepHost would be a good fit. Initially, the SBU officers demanded money from the entrepreneur, and not getting what they wanted, seized the equipment as part of a criminal investigation under Part 2 of Article 110-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which concerned the financing of terrorists of the so-called LPR and KPR through the change-wm.com service.
Allegedly, the investigation found that the servers “hosting the automated system for the distribution of materials containing calls to raise money for the LPR and the KPR” are located in the SteepHost data center. This is one of the most popular formal reasons for seizing equipment from host companies. The second most popular are the distribution of pornography and the sale of bank card data. It is worth noting that such accusations create a huge scope for falsification of evidence. Such equipment rarely returns to its original owners. And in the case of SteepHost, despite the absence of any court conviction, the expensive equipment was returned damaged and looted to the point of scrap metal.
Artem Shilo and sanctions against 1Xbet
The decision to impose sanctions against the owners of 1XBet was incredibly delayed and, judging by the timing, faced fierce resistance. Unfortunately, the assumption that the Russian gambling business has found agents in the sanctions mechanism itself seems reasonable. One of these agents has already been named publicly in an investigation by the Bigus.info team.
A high-ranking SBU official, Artem Shilo, had and still has a great influence on the decision on Ukrainian sanctions. In August 2022, under the patronage of Oleh Tatarov, he was appointed Deputy Head of the SBU Department for the Protection of National Statehood and Head of the SBU Main Directorate for Counterintelligence Support of Critical Infrastructure and Countering Terrorist Financing. Under the leadership of Deputy Head of the SSU Anatoliy Sandursky, Shilo became one of the main persons responsible for sanctions policy in the Security Service of Ukraine.
“Among Shilo’s achievements known to the general public, the main ones were his work as an advisor to the Presidential Office and attending Oleg Tatarov’s birthday party. This is in the context of career success. In the context of personal financial success, Shilo was much more successful, which allowed Bigus.info journalists to find two three-bedroom apartments in the elite Novopecherski Lypky residential complex (owned by Shilo himself, market value about $700 thousand). Another two-room apartment and 360 square meters of commercial real estate worth more than $2 million, registered in the best corrupt traditions to his wife, were also found in Lipki. Shyla’s wife also owns a total of 275 square meters in a clubhouse in the center of Kyiv, where she runs a beauty salon. The market value is about $1 million. In addition to the real estate, Shil’s wife owns two Mercedes and a Toyota. Shil’s father owns a house near Kyiv. An interesting fact: the apartments in Novopecherski Lypky were purchased during the war, in May 2022,” journalist Serhiy Ivanov writes about this person on Censor.net.
Artem Shilo has already appeared in our OSINT investigation into 1XBet as one of their patrons, who brought Russians to Ukraine back in 2016-2017. The journalists discovered that the law firm Prykker LLC, which Shylo registered in 2021 when he was fired from the SBU, is registered at Tarasiuk & Partners Law Firm at 58 Shevchenko Boulevard in Kyiv. The owners of the company, Sergiy Tarasyuk and Anna Bryn, supported the licensing of 1XBet and defended Tvoia Betting Company LLC in court.
Artem Shilo’s influence on sanctions mechanisms was not enough to turn a blind eye to the scandal with the Russian bookmaker 1XBet. The National Security and Defense Council, the Interagency Working Group, and the CRAIL did their job. However, having received a blow in the form of sanctions, the Russians did not calm down. A study of the situation after the 1XBet sanctions shows that a new plan is in place. It consists in completely ousting or banning legal operators from the Ukrainian gambling market. This will open the gates for the return of 1XBet: if Ukrainian operators become illegal, Russian ones will be able to dominate the market.
This plan is already being put into action, and the same actors are helping with it. This is evidenced by a number of events.
Pressure on legal operators
In the fall of 2022, when sanctions against 1Xbet seemed inevitable, high-ranking SBU representatives began to make statements about restoring order in the gambling industry, which pays taxes poorly. This rhetoric was strongly supported by MP Danylo Hetmantsev, who is known for his ties to Russian agents. He constantly offers new ideas for putting pressure on legal market operators. Back in 2019, Danylo Hetmantsev had a stake in the lottery operator M.S.L. His work for the Party of Regions MP, ex-KGB officer Volodymyr Sivkovych from 2002 to 2010 or legal support for the companies of Viktor Yanukovych’s friend, former head of Ukravtodor Volodymyr Demyshkan is also known.
Talks about a campaign to fight for taxes (against the background of the fact that Hetmantsev has been blocking the law on taxation of the gambling industry for two years, and the SBU’s interest in taxes in general looks strange in times of war) were accompanied by actions that were opposite to this goal: pressure on licensed gambling operators to leave the market or go “underground.”
Under the control of the SBU, two criminal proceedings were initiated in the National Police and the Bureau of Economic Security — the MID of the NPU 12022000000000558 on June 23, 2022 (part 3 of Article 362, part 3 of Article 209 of the Criminal Code) and the BES 42022000000000938 on July 13, 2022 (part 2 of Article 203-2, part 3 of Article 212 of the Criminal Code). The listed articles relate to “Unauthorized alteration, destruction or blocking of information; legalization of the proceeds of crime; organization or conduct of gambling without a license; intentional tax evasion”. Ukrainian licensed gambling market operators were included in the listed proceedings. These cases are now being used to create problems for legal operators under false pretenses.
At the same time, massive and probably paid-for publications against other licensed market operators began to appear in the information space. In April, we recorded more than 250 articles about Pin-Up, Favbet, Cosmolot, VBet, and First brands on dozens of information resources with a rather dubious reputation. In fact, these are the largest licensed players remaining on the Ukrainian market. All publications were based on the same scheme and promoted a single main thesis about each brand’s ties to Russia, as if preparing grounds for SBU intervention. The chronology of the “jeans” campaign is clearly visible on the Antikor website by searching for the word “casino.”
According to estimates, such a campaign of several hundred publications cost the customers about $100 thousand, and media professionals say that the placement of texts was offered by people who help to disseminate the necessary information to law enforcement agencies.
Controlled publications in this case allow to start checking the activities of companies based on media publications, and in some cases even to replace real facts with information from the media. This can be enough to put pressure on companies, and in some cases, to justify putting a legal entity on sanctions lists.
In addition to the SBU, the National Bank of Ukraine has also become more active. On the personal instruction of the NBU Deputy Governor Dmytro Oliynyk, banks selectively stopped accepting payments from legal operators. Dmytro Oliynyk is considered one of the closest members of the NBU board to the head of the National Bank, Andriy Pyshnyy. According to Forbes, since the beginning of the year, all banks that provide acquiring services in the e-commerce segment have been subject to unscheduled NBU inspections. In fact, the acquiring process was switched to manual control. At the same time, it was not payments with misdirection (when a payment is “mimicked” as something else) that were blocked, but rather payments under the legal code 7995, which relates to payments in the gambling industry.
Artem Shilo’s management probably played a role here as well. Mr. Shilo told RBC-Ukraine that a unified online monitoring system for non-cash payments based on the NBU should be created. The presence of comments by a little-known SBU officer and the head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Andriy Pyshnyi, in the same journalistic piece is also an anomaly that could not help but attract attention, especially since the material looks like a programmatic position of a certain group of people.
“The task of such a system is to comprehensively control and monitor not only the gambling market, but also other schemes of legalization and money laundering. It should also take into account all the prerequisites for financing certain destabilizing activities in our country. For example, financing of separatist or terrorist activities,” Shylo said.
Artem Shilo, suspected of embezzling UAH 95 million from Ukrzaliznytsia, arrested for two months
Former advisor to the Office of the President and SBU officer Artem Shilo, suspected of embezzling UAH 95 million from Ukrzaliznytsia procurement, was taken into custody by the High Anti-Corruption Court. This was reported by the press service of the Anti-Corruption Action Center on Thursday, April 4.
The AntAC did not say how long Artem Shyla was arrested for. At the same time, Suspilne TV reported that the official will be held in custody for 60 days — until May 31 inclusive. It is possible that the measure of restraint for Shyl may be extended.
The former advisor to the Presidential Office can post bail in the amount of UAH 30 million. The decision was made by HACC judge Kateryna Sikora.
«If bail is granted, Shilo will have to stay in Kyiv, not communicate with other suspects, with SBU officers and other persons, in particular Yermak, Tatarov, Kamyshin, Kubrakov, about the circumstances of the criminal proceedings. He must also refrain from visiting the premises of Ukrzaliznytsia, the Office of the President, hand over his passports, and wear an electronic bracelet,» the AntAC press service said.
On April 2, Artem Shil was served with a notice of suspicion of embezzlement in the purchase of transformers for Ukrzaliznytsia. It is a case of embezzlement of UAH 94.7 million through a Bulgarian shell company.
Artem Shilo then sent a letter to Ukrzaliznytsia “On Threats to State Security”, which became the basis for rejecting the proposals of other bidders with much more favorable prices. It is noted that the winning company is controlled by a Belarusian citizen with ties to Russia.
Artem Shilo has been repeatedly involved in corruption scandals during his time at the SBU. It should be noted that during Shilo’s 10 years at the SBU, his family accumulated a fortune of more than $4 million. Shilo himself owns two three-room apartments, one two-room apartment, and a 360 m² non-residential area (registered in his wife’s name) in an elite Kyiv residential complex worth over $2 million. In addition, Shyla’s wife owns a million-dollar beauty salon and has three luxury cars worth approximately $238,000.
Former advisor to the Presidential Office Artem Shilo released from jail on bail of UAH 30 million
Former advisor to the Office of the President of Ukraine and former head of one of the SBU departments Artem Shilo has been released from custody on UAH 30 million bail. This was reported by the Anti-Corruption Action Center with reference to the HACC press service.
Key facts
- Shilo must comply with his duties: hand over his passports and wear an electronic bracelet.
- He also has no right to communicate about the circumstances of the case with the head of the Prosecutor General’s Office, Andriy Yermak, his deputy, Oleh Tatarov, the head of the Ministry of Strategic Industries, Oleksandr Kamyshyn, Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov, and others.
- In case of breach of duty, the bail may be forfeited to the state.
Summary
Artem Shilo, being a state hacker, decided to take advantage of his official position and, with the help of an organized group of other hackers working under pressure and threats, carry out hacker attacks on foreign banks and engage in carding (stealing money from credit cards). Hence the vacation in the Seychelles, the new Audi, and the real estate. This is how a person who is supposed to ensure cybersecurity profits from other people’s misfortunes.