Pavel Vrublevsky(RedEye) from Fethard scam. Judgement Day

Many people don’t believe him. Some of them have left and slammed the door. Some have dropped a careful hint that RedEye’s style of work is beyond the bounds of decency of any country in the world. If you have ever run a business on the Internet you will certainly understand what it is all about. Many of the adult-webmasters and the toilers of pharma-industry have added this person to their ICQ block list. So did the spammers who thought that Pavel Vrublevsky (RedEye) was their friend. They even couldn’t imagine the person he has turned into. Pavel Vrublevsky needed 9 years to gain such a trust and to became, probably, one of the most hateful people throughout the Internet. And in 1999 he was just a 19-year young boy, grown up in a problem area of Moscow who dreamt of earning money by all means. According to Pavel he has got his first money from a computer crime. However, it is known that a fast buck doesn't last,so soon enough RedEye, who hasn’t reached even 20 by then, got fixed up for a job of an errand-boy in a cashing company. Having understood the whole mechanism of that light-fingered company, Pavel Vrublevsky has started his own business and opened a porn-project on the Internet. In his interview for Forbes RedEye admitted to finding a kind of manual on creating and the technical support of porn sites on the Internet. That business has become a start point for a further online activity of Pavel Vrublevsky known today as the president of the international company Chronopay, the owner of several other payment systems and of a whole porn empire. 

RedEye made the first move towards his capital by creating a disgusting site Pornocruto.es, the content of which shocks even adults. Within a few months that affiliate program has boosted the funds in the accounts of Pavel Vrublevsky. However, RedEye understood that he needed to gather all potential customers in one place. And the task was to make it so that people come to Vrublevsky themselves. The solution was found very quickly. He has created a forum Crutop.nu, a community that has joined all those who cashed on gay porn, child porno (cp), rape porn, zoo porn, necro porn, freak porn and other similar niches. And Pavel Vrublevsky admits that his idea worked. According to him the turnover of his business has increased from several thousands up to hundreds of dollars. In the early 2000’s Crutop was so popular that even today a great amount of the websites offering the child porn are tied to Crutop and hence to Pavel Vrublevsky. 

One more blemish of Pavel Vrublevsky was a story that caused a great stir some time ago. Some years ago one of the visitors of some paid porn site which belonged to Pavel Vrublevsky, being greatly impressed by everything he had seen, went to a park and raped a little girl. This story was covered by reputable sources including BBC.  

The business was growing, and the number of Vrublevsky’s sites increased… And here he started thinking of a money matter. RedEye felt that when he made payments through some processors he depended on somebody, and he wanted to be independent, to become a king of a porn segment of the Internet without any fear that his accounts would be blocked. The end of  2001 was the time when Fethard.biz payment system came into being, or being more precise, it was the time when Pavel Vrublevsky held the talks with Bis-corp.com. As a result of those talks in 2002 the world was introduced to Fethard.biz.  

However, it is necessary to mention Bis-corp.com. This organization located in Ussuriysk had two services, cashing the funds kept in the accounts of Montenegro-based bank which was the very financial tool used by hundreds of the Internet users to transfer money. 

The age of bis-corp.com, that was connected that time with SunBill, ended when the accounts were locked. After that event the owners of bis-corp.com have cooperated with RedEye and launched a new product - Fethard on the market. The people dealing with adult, spam or pharma called it simply Fet.  

We should admit that at that moment RedEye was providing the services highly demanded by the webmasters worldwide. Everybody understood that fethard was conducting its transactions via the offshore banks without granting any guarantees of funds security. RedEye tried to capitalize on everything. Some people know the story when Pavel Vrublevsky, under the guise of a common users, on one famous carder forum was selling some Fethard accounts and allowed to receive big amounts from accounts in the system. Certainly such offers had interested dozens of carders (people stealing credit card numbers) on carderplanet.com. Having sold the accounts with a good rating in his own system, RedEye has locked them. As a result people lost more than $700k. 

Probably because of that account locking or for some other reason but Fethard had undergone the longest DDoS attack ever done on the Internet. The customers of Fethard could manage their accounts only by phones. Lots of people even didn’t believe that Fethard could come back.  

But after the storm there is always a quiet period and the time when people believed RedEye though they shouldn’t have had. Starting from 2004 and up to 2007 Fethard was very popular and many clients believed Pavel Vrublevsky. The webmasters still remember the time when they used Fethard like a bank without any fear. The scheme was very simple: the  webmasters were sending their income from porn and cp industry by wire from various affiliate programs in Fethard and the team of Vrublevsky was distributing it to the offshore banks depriving the law agencies of any possibility to unravel RedEye’s criminal web. 

The same year, RedEye has launched one more payment system, StandartPay, intended to replace the western billing systems for the adult webmasters. We should admit that the project was a success and very soon lots of people started using the processing services of StandartPay. However, soon enough the system was shut down, as well as Porocruto. To be more precise, both of the projects stopped paying simultaneously. 

It was the time when Pavel Vrublevsky faced with the dilemma: on the one hand he wanted to become a legal businessman running his business without looking back at the past and, on the other hand, that past was drugging him back to the bottom, to the underground of the World-Wide Web with big amounts needed to be laundered through Fethard. However, Pavel Vrublevsky has found a way out and decided to make ChronoPay payment processor (a business of P.Vrublevsky launched in 2003) his priority project. RedEye did his best to promote his ChronoPay business and to conceal his background from the partners. At times he even succeeded…  

Recompense 

However everything has its end and 2007 was a turning-point for RedEye. On September 12, 2007 the officers of Federal Service for Economic and Tax Crimes of the Russian Federation have burst into the office of Fethard located in Moscow near the Kremlin and the Red Square. The officers searched the office and have seized 16 computers and the company safe. Later Vrublevsky said that in the seized safe he kept the digipasses, stamps and the documents of a heap of Fethard’s offshores. Though it is necessary to say that during that week the most part of the funds kept in the accounts of Fethard was withdrawn.  

For several days following that event people on the Internet were calm as they trusted Pavel Vrublevsky. However,  people have no steel nerves so the panic began. Though, it was not a panic but a kind of competition where people competed in exchanging of Fethard to any other liquid currency as soon as it was possible. The exchange services suffered most of all. People still remember the post which was like a cry from the heart of Obmenka.com.ua, a Ukrainian exchange service, posted among the dozens of other forum announcements: Have 130k of the old Fet for sale. The old Fet is the name of the money blocked in the accounts due to the event happened on September 12. Lots of businesses collapsed. The total amount of all the blocked funds was about $18M. However, Pavel Vrublevsky was arrogant in his silence and only on October 19 came with the announcement that starting from that day the currency of Fethard would be divided into the old and the new Fets.  

In October of 2007 Mr. Vrublevsky made lots of promises that the old Fet will be unblocked and all the operations with the new one will be conducted smoothly without any problems. In other words, he tried to call upon the webmaster to continue using Fethard payment system. And people believed. They again believed him with a hope that with the new Fethard they would start a new life and that the old one would be unblocked. 
Here is a word-for-word statement of Pavel Vrublevsky: 

“We guarantee that there will be no payment delays for the new incomes. We won’t make a pyramid scheme of these funds. ”

However, the analysts agree that the funds in the new Fet were the basis for the pyramid scheme, i.e. the debts on the old Fet were paid at the expense of the new Fet funds, or being more precise, at the expense of those who believed RedEye once again. March 2008 became fatal for everyone who has tied his or her business with the new Fet. The processor closed the withdrawal option and denied all the opportunities to cash in. 

It was like stabbing in the back of those who believed Pavel Vrublevsky. Nobody understood why the person whose companies had achieved the dominant positions in their fields, couldn’t pay his credit debts little by little.  

The time was passing and nothing changed. September 12, the day assigned by RedEye as the day when the accounts will be unblocked, was also coming, however the money of the clients in the accounts of Fethard was still blocked.  

Too many questions

Everybody who knows Pavel Vrublevsky has many questions to ask. Or, it's better to say, too many questions to ask. However the main one is: Was the office of Fethard searched and was the money stolen indeed?

There is an opinion that the people who burst into the office were the ex-owners of bis-corp.com who participated in the creation of Fethard. Probably it was a revenge of friends of some Roman who mysteriously drowned. However it is just a guess-work.  

There is one more creditable version that comes from the questions around the situation with the safe seizure. One shouldn’t be an economist or a lawyer to ask why such reputable company as Fethard kept all its documents, stamps and digipasses in one place. It contradicts all the security principles and the main thing is that it is hard to believe that such an experienced person as RedEye could put all eggs in one basket.  

Also it is not clear how it became possible to transfer all the money and to encash it within such a short period. If we follow the words of Pavel Vrublevsky it appeared that the money was withdrawn during several days and no traces were left to track the operations. 

Here is one interesting thing: immediately after the crisis of Fethard and its worst recourse, the other businesses of Vrublevsky showed a striking progress. Just look at the traffic history graph of chronopay.com and fethard.biz:

On this chart one can see a rapid traffic increase on chronopay.com. Here the question suggests itself: what’s the secret of such development success? Starting from that very moment one could see the active promotion of ChronoPay payment system in the world mass media. The company made a deal with Alipay and partnered with PayPal but probably has forgot to tell the owners of the company about the credit debts of Mr. Vrublevsky. 

Certainly, Mr. Vrublevsky would like to hide his background from the new partners however due to the troops of the deceived  investors who had invested their funds in Fethard and the bitterest enemies of RedEye, the information about the past of Pavel Vrublevsky was spread on the hundreds of forums worldwide. Not this  issue is more important today but the question: Who can guarantee that Mr. Vrublevsky, who had deceived his partners, friends, and the clients of Fethard, will not deceive the new ones? Unfortunately RedEye probably knows only the business where everything is made according to the law of the stone jungles of Moscow. He came from the 90-s when Russia was sunk in a chaos and the revolution, so money could be earned only through  lies. Well,  he chose these particular methods to gather his first wealth  which he still uses today. Probably a young talented man from Moscow couldn’t apply his abilities to a legal business however it is not an excuse for his deeds. As we know in business everybody chooses a partner for himself, however there is a rule: check your contractor before starting your biz.

Our journal will be thankful if the readers post their interesting and informative comments to this article which could be used as a basis for a new article.