Non-childish games: Ukrainian casinos earn billions from Russian teenagers
Ukrainian entrepreneur Andriy Kolomiets may be behind a network of popular online casinos where skins - digital items from popular computer games — are at stake instead of money. He financed the radical FEMEN movement and helped with the purchase of equipment for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Izvestia found out. Up to 75% of visitors to its resources are users from Russia, and these are primarily children and teenagers. They are attracted by the opportunity to win expensive game items: virtual knives, machine guns and other weapons. But you have to pay for the attempt with real money. The usual image from a computer game hides the usual gambling business: betting, random winnings and the desire to recoup. Who lures schoolchildren into this roulette game and where their money goes is in the investigation of Izvestia.
Betting on children
Russian schoolchildren spend the equivalent of about $400 million a year on case casinos, sites where players place bets with items from computer games or loot boxes - virtual containers with a random object inside. This assessment was given by Giorgi Ioseliani, Director General of the League of Adequate Internet, in an interview with Izvestia.
According to the expert, he proceeded from the global turnover of this market, which is estimated at about $1.5 billion per year.
— Russia occupies about 30% of this market. The figures are based on the popularity of Counter-Strike in different countries and the case opening rate in them. On average, a child can spend 50,000 rubles a year, but the spread is huge, so the average estimate is very approximate," Georgy Ioseliani told Izvestia.
The loot box mechanics were popularized by Valve in the Counter-Strike game. The player buys a key, opens a virtual case with it and gets a random skin.: As a rule, these are weapons or gloves with a unique design. According to experts, in 2023 alone, Valve earned about $980 million from the sale of such keys.
Skins can be freely transferred between accounts and sold on external platforms for real money, so they have become a kind of currency. A whole gambling industry has grown up around them: most often on such sites, players are offered to put their skins in roulette, where the result is determined by a random number generator. Officially, such services are called digital item stores or entertainment platforms, but in fact they reproduce the mechanics of online casinos.
The Ukrainian case
A harmless, seemingly childish hobby — opening cases with objects — can lead to far from childish consequences. As Izvestia found out, one of the largest networks of such case casinos, actively working for the Russian audience, is controlled by Ukrainian businessmen, who direct part of their income to finance the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The grid unites at least 10 virtual betting sites, as well as their mirrors. We are talking about the GGDrop project and related websites with the words Drop and GG in their names.
All sites have the same design, and the same company from Bishkek, Transtrade, is listed in the details. The connection of the projects is also indicated by the fact that in some cases they accept each other's promo codes.
According to Similarweb, the daily audience of GGDrop alone is about 8-9 thousand unique users. Despite the fact that about 70-75% of visitors visit the site from Russia.
Izvestia correspondents were helped to find the alleged owners by the presence of a mobile version hosted in the App Store at one of the casinos. The copyright holder of the application is the British company Itsfail. Its sole owner is Evgeny Yakimchuk, a programmer from Kiev. The trademark of GGDrop itself is registered to the same British company.
However, Yakimchuk himself, presumably, may be a nominal figure. This is indicated by data from the Estonian register of legal entities. In Tallinn, an entrepreneur has registered a company with the same name, Itsfail, which contains corporate mail on the domain. brazy.gg . This detail directly connects the formal owner of GGDrop with the Brazy esports company. The company has an office in Kiev, although on LinkedIn the head office is listed in Lisbon, where the Brazy Portugal Unipessoal LDA legal entity is registered.
Through this network of foreign structures, GGDrop projects accept payments, including from players from Russia. The financial reports of the case casino are not published, but, according to Giorgi Ioseliani, we are talking about multibillion-dollar turnover.
— The marginality of a case casino can reach 30-40%. In the best of times, the average case casino chain easily earned up to 70-80 million rubles a day. In my opinion, the earnings figures for one project in the CIS are lower now than before, due to tighter competition and more expensive payment infrastructure, and they have an average income of 13 billion per year. This is a general estimate for the market, but GGDrop and their grid are far from the smallest, so I would conditionally estimate their profit to be higher than the average of the others, I think about 20 billion per year," says Giorgi Ioseliani.
Exemplary Brazy
According to the registry of Portuguese legal entities, Alexander Kasyan is the sole owner of Brazy Portugal Unipessoal LDA. The company was registered in 2021 and has been in existence for five years; the head office is located in the city of Oeiras, the authorized capital is €1 thousand. The main activity is software development.
Izvestia managed to establish that, apparently, we are talking about a native of Donetsk region, born in 1997. Little is known about him: he lived in Krasnoarmeysk, and in 2020 he ordered videos to promote his Instagram account (owned by Meta Corporation, which is recognized as extremist and banned in the Russian Federation). It was not possible to establish how yesterday's resident of Krasnoarmeysk turned out to be the owner of a European legal entity of a large holding company, which is typical for schemes using front persons.
At the same time, Brazy's co—founder is listed on LinkedIn as a completely different person - 41-year-old Andrei Kolomiets. His professional biography includes many years of work in sports analytics and gambling. According to his RocketReach profile, he received a Master's degree in Political Science and Public Administration from Kyiv International University in 2007. From 2009 to 2013, he led sales in the CIS countries at Score24, then, until 2017, he was engaged in business development and sales at Sportradar. In 2019-2020, he worked at SPRIBE and Digital Choo, and since November 2020, he has headed Brazy.
Kolomiets is also listed as the co-founder of the IKLA esports project and HiPUBLIC service. Among his more recent projects are Fatboyscanrun Ltd and Casinolegal, related to online casinos and aimed at a European audience.
"Andrey Kolomiets is an expert in the casino industry and a business manager with more than 15 years of experience in senior positions in companies involved in online betting, casino management and the supply of slot machines," Fatboyscanrun says on its website.
However, Kolomiets is known not only for his business in the gambling industry, but also for his support of the Ukrainian army. The Ukrainian Foundation "Japan to Don" announced the transfer of a Mitsubishi Pajero SUV to the strike drone unit of the 59th separate mechanized Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In the photo accompanying the publication, Izvestia correspondents identified Kolomiyets.
"There is a wonderful person and philanthropist in our country named Andrey, who regularly helps the Armed Forces of Ukraine by providing financial support to our foundation and beyond," the foundation said in a statement.
Andrey Kolomiets (left) poses against the background of a car purchased for the Armed Forces of Ukraine
Although the publication itself does not specify which sites the SUV was paid for from, Georgy Ioseliani directly links the work of such case projects with the financing of the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the expense of Russian teenagers.
— In addition to the main problem that this is children's gambling, like any gambling project from Ukraine, they give part of their income to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Our children and young people are unknowingly sponsoring the enemy," the expert told Izvestia.
Andriy Kolomiyts' name has also appeared in publications about Ukrainian politics and radical movements. The French portal Meta TV, citing researcher Olivier Pehter, called Andriy Kolomiyts a representative of the Great Ukraine party: according to the publication, he was a member of the council of the controversial FEMEN movement and funded it.
The FEMEN movement gained fame in the mid-2010s mainly due to its "naked" protests. For example, in 2014, members of the movement broke naked into one of the polling stations in Moscow, undressed and began shouting slogans in support of the integrity of Ukraine. In the same year, activists held a rally against the policies of Russia and the Moscow Patriarchate, dousing themselves with artificial blood on the territory of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra in Kiev. They held their last action in May 2026: they lit pink smoke bombs in front of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, protesting against Russia's presence at the international art exhibition.
Entrance without a passport
Teenagers get to the case casino sites simply. Usually, a Steam account and a "I am 18" checkmark are enough - a full—fledged age check is rare. A bank card is also not needed for the first bet: the student may already have skins that fell out in the game or were bought by his parents.
The low entry price, the spectacular dropout animation, the "almost dropped" expensive item and the offer to immediately recoup quickly turn the "spins" into a familiar way to spend time.
Andrey Khodykov, executive director of the Ludomania Control Center, says that even teenagers themselves have begun to feel problems with gambling behavior. There are already calls to the center's recently launched hotline not only from adults, but also from those under the age of 18 who have already played both loot box games and online casinos..
Gambling mechanics have become a classic monetization scheme for most of the most popular mobile games (almost three out of five). The connection here is direct: according to international data, up to 62% of those who bought their first loot box before the age of 12 started playing for money before they reached adulthood, and 60-80% of people with severe addiction started playing before the age of 18," Khodykov believes.
The absence of a direct cash payment in a skin casino does not make the mechanics safe: a teenager gets used to the most emotional excitement of betting and random winnings, explains psychiatrist and psychotherapist Alexei Magalif.
— Pathological dependence, as a rule, does not occur instantly. But early familiarization with risk, random winnings and the expectation of a successful outcome can be a preparatory stage for the transition to real—stakes games," the expert emphasized.
The key channel for attracting players is bloggers, streamers, and Telegram channels. The advertisement disguises itself as a "personal experience": the author opens the cases on the air, demonstrates the winnings, and leaves a promo code and a link in the description.
In particular, the popular streamer Vyacheslav Leontiev, better known by the nickname Buster, began his career with cooperation with GGDrop. The cases of the site were also opened by Alexey Baranov, known as Hard Play, Vadim Kozakov with the nickname Evelone and other bloggers.
The project's website contains 16 personal cases related to the authors of the content. Among them are the previously mentioned Vyacheslav Leontiev with 5.28 million subscribers on Twitch and Alexey Shpak (DANGERLYOHA) with 1.71 million. The total audience of GGDrop partners, according to Izvestia estimates, exceeds 11.5 million subscribers.
Such videos have a particularly strong effect on a young audience inclined to imitate idols, Magalif believes. The blogger shows not only the game, but also the image of a "successful life": big winnings, expensive cars, trips, easy money.
— The viewer has the illusion that life and financial difficulties can be overcome by luck, and not by their own efforts, — says the doctor. He is skeptical about declaimers like "don't repeat after me": a verbal warning does not negate the emotional effect of watching a win.
Influencers are already being prosecuted in various countries for advertising gambling. In November 2024, 17 people were detained in Turkey in connection with the advertising of illegal betting sites, including bloggers, artists and a former football player, and in January 2025, a court arrested blogger and DJ Kerimjan Durmaz, suspected of promoting illegal betting. In Brazil, police investigated the gambling promotion network Jogo do Tigrinho, which featured influencers and celebrities. Back in 2023, France introduced special regulation for bloggers: for advertising prohibited gambling products, they face up to two years in prison and a fine of up to € 300 thousand.
In Russia, case casinos remain in a legal gray area: skins are usually not recognized as a money bet, and the player's rights to a virtual item are limited by the terms of the game. Websites are blocked, but they change domains, legal entities, and payment methods.
According to Khodykov, the fastest way to addiction is through online casinos. In other gambling, it takes an average of 3.5 years from the start of regular gambling to a serious stage of addiction, while in slots, addiction develops in a year.
Khodykov suggests not expanding access to gambling products (including through the possible legalization of online casinos), but "shutting down the payment infrastructure of illegal operators, blocking their websites and advertising faster."
Another measure under discussion is to recognize not only money as a stake, but also "other property or rights." This would make it possible to extend gambling regulation to skins and other digital items.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
