The CEO Was Real. The Company Was Not.
Six weeks of polished negotiation. A registered company name. A LinkedIn profile, a website, and a Kyiv office address. Everything a legitimate joint venture looks like — except nothing was real. The €180,000 "compliance deposit" was five days from being wired when we filed our report.
German entrepreneur, freight and logistics sector. Sought a distribution partner in Ukraine for EU market expansion.
€180,000 protected. Company registration forged; director name stolen from a real firm; office a paid virtual address; domain registered 19 days before first contact.
How six weeks of trust was built — and dismantled in five days.
Week 1–2. "Viktor Petrenko" made contact through a B2B trade platform. His profile listed 12 years in logistics, a company with 200+ employees handling freight across Ukraine, Poland, and Romania. He spoke competent business English, referenced real EU trucking regulations, and asked sensible questions about the German client's freight volumes.
Week 3–4. Viktor sent a company overview document, a copy of the Ukrainian Unified State Register extract, and a professional website with an About page, a fleet page showing articulated lorries, and an office address on Khreshchatyk Street in central Kyiv. The site had a TLS certificate. There were three employees listed on LinkedIn under the company name.
Week 5. A joint venture term sheet arrived via a Ukrainian law firm. The structure was plausible: shared revenues from cross-border freight contracts, the German company providing EU-side relationships, Viktor's firm handling Eastern European operations. The deal looked like a good one.
Week 6. Viktor introduced the compliance requirement. Ukrainian banking rules, he explained, required an escrow deposit of €180,000 before cross-border partnership agreements could be registered with the state financial authority. The funds would be held — not spent — and released when the agreement was formalised. Standard procedure, he said. He needed it by Friday.
The client had seen similar structures before in legitimate deals. He asked us to take a look.
Day 1–5 of our investigation. See below.
The company existed. The director didn't.
We searched the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (the Ukrainian equivalent of Companies House). The company name appeared — it was real, registered in 2017, and active. The registered director, however, was a different person entirely: a woman from Dnipro with no public connection to Viktor or to logistics.
Viktor's name appeared nowhere in the filing. He was not a co-founder, not a signatory, not an employee of record. He had borrowed the shell of a real business and presented himself as its CEO.
A prestigious street. A shared mailbox.
The Khreshchatyk Street address was real — one of Kyiv's central boulevards. The building, however, was home to a virtual office provider that rents registered addresses and meeting rooms by the hour. The same address was listed as the business seat of 47 other companies across a range of unrelated industries.
The fleet photos on the company website — the articulated lorries parked at what looked like a depot — were pulled from a legitimate Ukrainian freight operator's Facebook page. The depot was in Zaporizhzhia, 500 km from Kyiv.
Reverse image search: one result.
Viktor's LinkedIn profile photo returned a single result on Yandex: the same face, different name, on the website of a logistics consultancy in Kharkiv. The real person — a genuine freight industry professional — had no knowledge of the scam and had not consented to the use of his image.
This pattern is common. Fraudsters targeting the logistics sector specifically choose profile photos of real industry professionals to add plausibility when their targets do rudimentary checks.
Created 19 days before contact began.
Domain registration records showed the corporate website was created three weeks before Viktor first reached out through the trade platform. The law firm that issued the term sheet had a registered address in Kyiv, but its licence had been suspended by the Ukrainian Bar Association fourteen months earlier.
The LinkedIn accounts of the three "employees" had each been created within a ten-day window in the month before the scheme launched. None showed any activity before that date.
The Ukrainian State Register is free. It takes three minutes. Check it.
The Unified State Register of Legal Entities (usr.minjust.gov.ua) is publicly searchable in English transliteration. Enter the company name, confirm the director's identity matches the person you are dealing with. A mismatch is a stop signal. If the match is correct but you still have doubts, we go further — ownership structures, financial liens, litigation history, sanctions checks.
We have been conducting corporate due diligence on Eastern European and Central Asian entities since 1999. We know which registers are reliable, which are incomplete, and what additional sources fill the gaps.
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