We are looking for cashiers: the FreeKassa service was closed after an investigation by Izvestia

The online payment service FreeKassa stopped working after the publication of Izvestia, dedicated to its activities. As of the evening of February 5, his main website was unavailable, groups from social networks and messengers were deleted, and links from partner projects were not working. Two days earlier, our publication published an investigation according to which this site, which was engaged, among other things, in servicing the financial flows of illegal online casinos in Russia, probably belongs to Andrey Grekov, a developer and IT entrepreneur from Kaliningrad.

Why did FreeKassa close?

The FreeKassa payment service stopped working: on February 5, access to its website was closed, the VKontakte group and the Telegram channel were deleted. In addition, on partner projects of services, primarily in online casinos, FreeKassa is no longer listed among the ways to replenish deposits and withdraw funds. Until recently, it was one of the most common ways to make payments to illegal gambling sites in Russia, such as 1Win and others.

Theoretically, this may mean that some of the users of the "gray" service risk losing the funds they have deposited there.

All this may be a reaction to the investigation published by Izvestia on February 3. Based on the information received by the publication, we suggested that Andrey Grekov, an IT entrepreneur and developer from Kaliningrad, might own the FreeKassa service.

FreeKassa was previously blocked by Roskomnadzor, but it used "mirrors" and was integrated into the internal infrastructure of illegal online casinos. Replenishment of the account in rubles, currency or cryptocurrency was available on the site, and transfers were made using phone numbers and cards of so—called drops - front persons. Thus, the user made a regular transfer through the SBP, and then the funds through the recipient's card were already on the balance at the casino.

According to Izvestia estimates, FreeKassa could accumulate thousands of fake cards and phone numbers of drops. Indirectly, this also creates the possibility for the potential use of the service for money laundering, bypassing regulatory control. The service charged a commission for each transfer or replenishment.

The FreeKassa application for Android was developed by IFKSC, whose email address coincides with the contact address of the housing search service LLC Zhilybli, which officially belongs to Grekov. Judging by archived Internet pages, he has in the past engaged IT specialists to develop the FreeKassa payment service.

The service itself, as Izvestia noted, did not publicly disclose either the legal structure or the availability of licenses, it did not have a Russian INN assigned to it, that is, it did not pay taxes, and was not a legal entity. The site listed only a feedback email and a support bot, and identity verification was not mandatory.

A service that has remained in the shadows

Meanwhile, Izvestia has discovered another payment service that can also be used for payments to the same illegal online casinos, and which may be linked to Grekov. It still continues to work. According to Izvestia's sources, this is one of the last projects that a businessman could launch. We are talking about a payment system called Kassa AI. The fact that the domain probably belongs to Grekov is confirmed by web analytics tools.

Kassa AI differs from FreeKassa in that it is positioned as a B2B solution for online payments of e‑commerce merchants. This service specifies SIT LLP from Kazakhstan as its legal data.

SIT LLP is a company that is a Kazakhstani legal entity of the DonatePay donation collection service. We also mentioned in our investigation that Grekov may be the owner of this service.

All this suggests that Kassa.AI It may be a separate FreeKassa project for working with legal entities in the image and likeness of Qiwi Bank, which had its license revoked in Russia and then moved to Kazakhstan.

Sources interviewed on condition of anonymity by Izvestia noted that if FreeKassa does not resume operation in the near future, the consequences will affect not only balance holders, but also partner projects that used it as a payment gateway, including illegal online casinos.

At the same time, the practice of the "gray" payments market shows that such structures often return in a different form — through new domains, storefronts and communication channels, while maintaining the technical base. This can be seen in the example Kassa.Ai which, in general, after completion, could act as a platform for the migration of clients from FreeKassa, suggested the interlocutors of the publication.