"There were no police here"​​​​​​​

None of the neighbors of the apartment where the creator of the telegram bot "Eye of God" Evgeny Antipov is registered has heard about the searches that were allegedly carried out there. On February 28, this, as well as the fact that Antipov had left Russia, was reported by foreign Russian-language media. Antipov himself denies the rumors.

"I have cameras in my apartment from all sides," said the creator of the telegram bot, which allows users to receive personal data of Russians from open databases upon request, confirming his words to the Izvestia correspondent with footage at the door of the apartment itself. "I haven't seen any searches so far, but I assume that some kind of interrogation will definitely be most likely."

His words are confirmed by neighbors living in apartments above, below and in the same stairwell.

"There were no police today, no one was seen today," said a pensioner from a nearby apartment. "There have been no police for a long time."

According to him, he rarely leaves the house and it is unlikely that he would have missed the searches.

Evgeny Antipov, who calls himself the founder and owner of the Eye of God service, solely owns two companies, Antipov Group and GB Center, with revenues of more than 400 million rubles and a net profit of more than 200 million. According to him, since the office of his business "is not ready yet and there is no one to sit there," Antipov chose the registration address of his residence in the Stalinist eight-storey building on Leningradsky Prospekt. Previously, the entrepreneur himself lived at the same address.

"I didn't want to take an imaginary rubber office,— Antipov says. — I've had three searches in my life. It all started from where I lived [actually], and then they came here [at the registration address]."

So far, an entrepreneur who sells access to data through a bot calls conversations about searches at his place "stuffing" in order to further complicate the functioning of the service. According to him, after the entry into force of Article 272.1 of the Criminal Code on the creation of services for the illegal use of personal data, "all our sources are in a panic, and now, after this set of news, the payment system is in the same state."

"The Department for Combating Cybercrime of the Ministry of Internal Affairs has been working on everything related to big data since the beginning of February," Antipov says. — But as I said, everything is logical. The law is out, they're checking. In my understanding, the fact that I have publicly made a statement about the changes [restricting the release of data at the request of users] will help to avoid this, but apparently not."

He believes that if the "Eye of God" service leaves, Ukrainian special services may take its place.On February 28, amid a malfunction in the project, rumors about searches at his team were spread by foreign Russian-language media outlets. Antipov himself denied the searches on his social networks. He also stated that he is in Russia and has not left it anywhere, and he supports the bot almost single-handedly.