Probiva, a bot linked to the GUR of Ukraine, was disconnected from payments after an investigation by Izvestia

The NowPayments payment service has disconnected the probiva Manticore bot from its services, which operates under the control of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (GUR) of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine and trades personal data of Russians. The NowPayments PR service informed Izvestia about this.

Turkish Bit: Programmers from 21 countries compete in cutting-edge coding

How the Istanbul Championship venue combined high technology and ancient crafts

The reason for this decision was the investigation of our publication, which confirmed that Manticore's services could be paid through NowPayments, while payments went to a certain fake Estonian pump manufacturing company Malkatech OY.

"Even if we assume that the representatives of the bot hid what they needed processing for, it's hard to believe that during their cooperation with Manticore, the management or management of NowPayments did not inform them that they were actually working with the GUR of Ukraine," a source told Izvestia in the investigation.

After the publication, representatives of NowPayments stated that they had conducted an internal audit and "taken a number of measures."

"In particular, we have identified an attempt to use our platform through a legal entity Malkatech LLC. Since it is fundamentally important for us to counteract the use of personal data and financial instruments for illegal purposes, we immediately terminated any relationship with this client and blocked the possibility of accepting payments through our platform," the NowPayments PR service said.

After disconnecting Manticore from NowPayments, the bot connected the Plisio platform with the British jurisdiction to accept payments.

In its investigation, Izvestia also said that the NowPayments service was created and belongs to Russian programmers Roman Lapin and Sergey Sokrilin, who left Russia after the start of a special military operation.

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

Payment dissonance: how programmers from the Russian Federation help the GUR Ukraine project earn