How Oleksandr Orlovskyi and his Financial Freedom Academy moved nearly $1 million through relatives’ FOP accounts, crypto wallets, and opaque payment chains while selling promises of fast profit

When people are struggling financially and looking for ways to earn money, scammers always show up — taking advantage of their hopes and offering fake promises of quick income. This was the case in the 1990s with the rise of financial pyramids, the most infamous being Sergey Mavrodi’s MMM. And it’s happening again today, during russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, with promises of quick riches through crypto trading.

Oleksandr Orlovskyi is currently one of the most visible crypto scammers online, luring people with stories of earning thousands of dollars a month by investing just $100.
But, as you might expect, in the end, he’s the only one left with the money — while those who trusted him are left with nothing.

Who is Oleksandr Orlovskyi and How He Uses the Image of Success to Sell His Courses

Oleksandr Orlovskyi gained popularity through a project called Financial Freedom Academy. This “academy” presents itself as the “largest crypto community in Ukraine” and an educational platform where people supposedly learn how to invest in cryptocurrency and profit from crypto trading. Orlovskyi is promoted as the founder of the project and a crypto expert who “earned his first million dollars at the age of 24”.

In one interview, he claimed he was born and raised in Kyiv but moved to Poland at 16, to the small border town of Zgorzelec, after his family faced financial difficulties. He finished high school there, and at 18 moved to Wrocław to attend university. While studying, he worked odd jobs: at a gas station, in a restaurant kitchen, and as a bartender. In most interviews, Orlovskyi shares a story about a life-changing encounter: a Polish customer named Mateusz, who turned out to be a crypto investor, introduced him to the world of cryptocurrency and became his first mentor in crypto trading.

And so, supposedly, the talented crypto trader Oleksandr Orlovskyi was born — who now runs an aggressive PR campaign on social media, branding himself as a successful crypto investor and financial expert. “At 26, I’m living the life many dream of: two brand-new cars, homes in two countries, a high income, and traveling the world. But all this didn’t come from luck — it’s the result of the right mindset and habits,” Orlovskyi writes on his Telegram channel.

He constantly posts photos of himself in designer clothes, expensive watches, in luxury apartments, next to exclusive cars and even private helicopters.

Orlovskyi constantly posts photos with luxury cars on his social media

He does all this to build the image of a crypto-wealth guru — someone who holds exclusive knowledge that, once purchased, will supposedly help you easily achieve a luxurious lifestyle with minimal effort. The goal is simple: to lure an average person, tired of constantly looking for ways to make ends meet, into thinking, “If he made it, so can I”.

For nearly two years now, his Financial Freedom Academy has been actively promoting and selling various types of courses, webinars, and expert consultations online. Ads for Orlovskyi’s project are everywhere — on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. He also pays for promotional articles in national media, and influencers on social media endorse his academy.

In these ads, Orlovskyi’s project promises that anyone who buys their courses will be able to start earning thousands, and eventually tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month through crypto trading. They claim that over 20,000 students have already succeeded. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?

It’s worth noting that the funnel for luring people into the Financial Freedom Academy is well-crafted. First, attention is captured through bold claims of quick money in viral videos. Then comes the personal “success story” of Orlovskyi himself. After that, viewers are invited to join a free webinar on how to profit from crypto trading. At the end of this webinar, the now “warmed-up” audience is offered to buy the full course, get their own personal crypto consultant, and start making huge profits. “If you want to level up your life — this video is a must-watch!” Orlovskyi promises in his ads.

Advertising for Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s crypto trading courses on social media

However, the internet is full of negative reviews from people who bought into the hype but later claimed that Financial Freedom Academy sells “hot air” and that students are simply scammed, receiving crypto-related info scraped from free sources online. Here are a few reviews:

•  “Just another crypto scammer. Save your time and spend your money on your family instead. These courses are full of fluff and more fluff. Nothing new, just stuff you can Google for free”
• “Scammers! You pay upfront, and the contract is impossible to cancel under any circumstance. On Orlovskyi’s website, it clearly states that either party can cancel within three days with no explanation, but that’s not true. Cancelling is impossible. Total scam”
• “This acquaintance cost me $3,000. Not the end of the world, but definitely unpleasant. For those seriously considering buying the course — know this: everything they say there is freely available online”

A review of Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s Financial Freedom Academy

Despite this, many people still fall for Orlovskyi’s promises of easy wealth. So we decided to dig deeper into how the project really works and how much money the young man from Kyiv, now living in Warsaw, makes off of deceived Ukrainians.

Where Does the Money Collected from Financial Freedom Academy Participants Go?

The first thing to note is that there’s no legal entity named “Financial Freedom Academy” in any official registry. Not in Ukraine, Poland, or even Dubai, where Orlovskyi claims to live according to his Instagram. That alone raises red flags about the legality and legitimacy of the project.

On the FFA website, there are seven different training programs. Six of them require a consultation with a manager, while one, called Discord 2.0, can be purchased directly, either by card or with crypto. Choosing Discord 2.0 redirects you to another website describing the program. In reality, it’s just a private group chat where participants can talk with mentors, supposed experts, and even Orlovskyi himself.

You can subscribe to Discord 2.0 for 1, 3, 6, or 12 months — for $100, $180, $300, or $480 respectively. We selected the $100 crypto option. A window popped up with a QR code and a crypto wallet address. But here’s the catch: every new purchase generates a new wallet address.

After analyzing several of these wallets, we found they were transit wallets — they don’t store funds. Instead, money flows through them and is quickly transferred to exchanges or other wallets controlled by Orlovskyi and his team. This alone looks like a classic cash-out scheme designed to obscure the origin and destination of the funds.

If you choose to pay by card, you’re prompted to enter your payment details and complete the transaction. A screenshot shows the funds are sent to a company that applied for the “FFA (Financial Freedom Academy)” trademark only recently — on January 20, 2025, under application № m202500849 by FFA Group FZE (Dubai). There’s no publicly available information about this company at all.

Just a year ago, people who paid for the courses were told in the offer agreement that payments were to be made to Orlovskyi’s registered sole proprietorship (FOP). But in reality, his managers provided bank details for an entirely different FOP. Legally, this allowed the Academy to avoid refunding payments: once the money was transferred to someone else’s account, the buyer had no legal right to a refund or even to complain, since the transaction wasn’t officially tied to the Academy. The same is true with crypto payments — in court, anonymous wallets carry no legal weight, and no one can prove who received the funds.

“One of my cohorts had 115 people. Each paid $500 — that’s $57,500 from just one stream. And they run these streams one after another. They can easily have 3–4 cohorts per month. Payments go through different FOPs, and they constantly change them to avoid hitting limits. You can imagine how much money that is, and they pay almost no taxes,” a former student of Orlovskyi’s Academy told us.

Review of the activities of Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s Financial Freedom Academy

Currently, the “Terms of Use” section on Orlovskyi’s website lists the following sole proprietorships (FOPs): Oleksandr Orlovskyi himself, registered on June 25, 2023, with a primary business activity listed as “Information technology consulting”; his mother, Tetiana Volodymyrivna Orlovska; Lyudmyla Volodymyrivna Kolomiiets; and Iryna Volodymyrivna Ertel-De-Dessau.

Notably, Orlovskyi’s own FOP received income only during the first two months after registration, in July and August 2023, during which he immediately received ₴5,537,139 ($142,667). Since September 2023, his FOP has reported no official income.

Instead, his mother Tetiana Orlovska registered her FOP on August 30, 2023 — precisely when her son stopped using his own account to receive payments (likely realizing that this would help avoid refund claims). Her newly registered FOP quickly began receiving tens of thousands of dollars in revenue: in the last four months of 2023, she received ₴4,881,748 ($130,000). In 2024, she reported another ₴5,513,910 ($137,333) in total income.

The FOPs of Lyudmyla Kolomiiets and Iryna Ertel-De-Dessau, also listed on Orlovskyi’s site, earned similar amounts. Kolomiiets, registered in the city of Khmilnyk in Vinnytsia region, received ₴5.5 million in 2023 and ₴5.9 million in 2024. Ertel-De-Dessau, from the city of Bakhmach in Chernihiv region, received ₴4.7 million in 2023 and ₴5.8 million in 2024.

The amount of money received by four sole proprietorships used to process payments for Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s crypto academy courses. Infographic by BlackBox OSINT

There is currently no information available for 2025 regarding payments received by the sole proprietorships listed on Orlovskyi’s website. However, even the data that is available shows that nearly $1 million was transferred through these FOPs in 2023 and 2024 by those who fell for the dream of becoming wealthy crypto investors. This does not include the additional shell FOPs used by Orlovskyi, nor the many crypto wallets he still uses today — none of which are subject to taxation.

It’s worth recalling that a year ago, the Economic Security Bureau opened a criminal case against popular blogger Oleksandr Slobozhenko, who was accused of evading over 200 million UAH in taxes by accepting payments in cryptocurrency. As we reported in earlier investigations, blogger Anna Alkhim used a similar tactic to hide more than $1 million in ad revenue from the state.

According to Kyrylo Yakovets, head of the NGO “NON-STOP”, Orlovskyi may have made around $4 million through his academy by exploiting the trust of about 15,000 people who gave him money hoping to learn how to earn from crypto.

What Assets Does Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s Family Own?

Perhaps thanks to these earnings, his 18-year-old younger brother Ivan Orlovskyi and their father Oleksandr came to own adjacent high-value land plots near the former presidential residence Mezhyhirya in the village of Novi Petrivtsi, outside Kyiv. One plot measures 1,630 square meters, the other 1,519 square meters and includes a residential home. Properties in that area are valued at upwards of $670,000.

Land plots owned by the brother and father of Oleksandr Orlovskyi in the village of Novi Petrivtsi, located right next to former president Viktor Yanukovych’s Mezhyhirya residence. Google Maps screenshot

Interestingly, Oleksandr Orlovskyi himself officially owns no assets in Ukraine — no apartments, no land, no cars. His mother, Tetiana Orlovska, owns only two apartments: one in Kyiv and another in the Russian-occupied Crimean town of Chornomorske. His father, also named Oleksandr Orlovskyi, owns two adjacent land plots totaling 0.5954 hectares in the village of Paryshkiv (Kyiv region), an 86-square-meter apartment in Malaysia, and a 550-square-meter commercial space in Kryvyi Rih, located at 34A Metalurhiv Avenue. That property is registered to his unprofitable company, LLC Yugas-KR, and is currently being leased out to the Maxximum CrossFit gym.

Orlovskyi’s wife, 29-year-old Yuliia Ponomarenko, who lives with him in Warsaw, owns an apartment in the Zoryane Mistechko-2 residential complex in Odesa (prices there start at $80,000), and a commercial unit in another Odesa complex, Assol. According to YouControl, Yuliia also purchased a 2023 Toyota Corolla in March 2025, which typically costs around $29,000. Since she works as an ordinary product manager (according to her social media), it’s likely that her husband is the one paying for all this — along with the many luxurious vacations she posts about on Instagram.

What Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s family members own. BlackBox OSINT infographic

Is Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s Image of a Successful Crypto Millionaire Just a Fake?

However, just recently, at the end of 2022, around the time Orlovskyi claims to have made his first million dollars, PrivatBank filed a lawsuit to recover a debt of 109,482 UAH under a credit agreement. This information is publicly available in Ukraine’s Unified Register of Court Decisions.

According to case No. 757/26048/22-ц dated December 14, 2022, the bank demanded 102,330 UAH in unpaid principal, 7,151 UAH in interest, and 2,481 UAH in court fees.

Odd behavior for someone who brags about his “success story” while flaunting luxury cars and vacation photos from abroad. It makes you wonder — is the millionaire trader image just a fake?

Another detail supports this theory. While digging through Telegram channels and news websites, we found a sponsored post about Orlovskyi in a Ukrainian news Telegram channel. It claimed that one of his FFA students uploaded an Orlovskyi lesson to a Silicon Valley startup platform, where it was watched by over 2,000 Americans — all of whom supposedly earned $3,000 each after testing the lesson.

The post included a photo of people watching Orlovskyi on a screen. But it turns out the image wasn’t real — it was a screenshot from the TV series “Silicon Valley”. The image of Orlovskyi had simply been photoshopped into the scene.

So much for the results. What’s real here is just Orlovskyi’s Photoshop skills.

Screenshot of a post claiming that Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s lesson was shared in Silicon Valley

Later, the same Telegram news channel published another story about the crypto “guru”, claiming that “a 23-year-old Ukrainian bought an apartment in Dubai with crypto”, featuring a photo of Orlovskyi in front of a skyscraper. One small detail — the building in the background is the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where Orlovskyi was apparently just traveling.

Screenshot of the news claiming that Oleksandr Orlovskyi bought an apartment in Dubai, featuring the Petronas Towers located in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia

If that’s a fake, could everything else be fake too? Including the whole academy, where “over 20,000 students earn tens of thousands of dollars a month” thanks to Orlovskyi’s teachings?

By the way, about those 20,000 students. After paying $100 for the Discord 2.0 course on the academy’s website, we were added to FFA’s supposedly exclusive student group. It has nearly 22,000 members. But after monitoring the activity in the group, we noticed something odd: despite the massive number of members, engagement is very low. Orlovskyi’s posts usually get only 200–300 reactions. That’s suspiciously low for a group of thousands who supposedly paid to learn how to become millionaires. So it’s likely that all those “students” are fake too — just another illusion created to impress potential new victims.

How Orlovskyi’s Team Helps Trusting FFA Students Lose Their Money

There are also serious questions about Orlovskyi’s team. As mentioned before, the FFA package includes not only crypto trading courses, but also “personal mentors” who are supposed to guide students on how and where to invest.

In one of many reviews, a former student of the academy wrote: “Their mentors know nothing about crypto, they can’t read the market, and they give advice that makes people lose their last money. They’re just scammy info-sellers. Some people ended up deep in debt, hundreds of thousands of hryvnias, because of these fraudsters”.

Reviews from Financial Freedom Academy students

According to reviews of Orlovskyi’s academy, the promised guidance from experienced crypto consultants either doesn’t exist or is of such poor quality that students end up losing their money.

On the FFA website, the “Mentors” section lists people hiding behind aliases like: Kyryll Lakerio, Vitalii DED USD, Kyryll Celeste, Maksym KobLs, VNykyta, Andrii Clack. Only two use what appear to be real names — Bohdan Parnakov and Volodymyr Chupa. We identified who’s behind these nicknames and what we found confirms that the criticism about their incompetence is well-founded.

For example, Maksym KobLs is Maksym Kobylianskyi, a 29-year-old former employee of the Citrus electronics store chain. Kyryll Lakerio is actually 23-year-old Kyrylo Vorobiov from Mariupol, who, as recently as 2022, was painting and selling artwork. In June and July of 2023, he wrote in Telegram groups that he’d only been in crypto for about a year and was looking for a job in the field.

Like Orlovskyi, these mentors with limited crypto trading experience try to portray themselves as wealthy and successful on social media posting photos of luxury cars and trips abroad. Yet none of them own any property or cars in Ukraine — except for Vorobiov, who still holds a flat in Mariupol.

No surprise then that Orlovskyi’s fraudulent activity is now attracting the attention not just of disgruntled students, but also of law enforcement. On November 8, 2023, police in Ternopil opened criminal case №120232110400002635 based on a complaint by local resident Nadiia Kovalishyn. She claimed that unknown individuals, possibly including Oleksandr Orlovskyi, scammed her out of a large sum under the pretense of investing in the “CapitalProf” platform.

Meanwhile, according to the International Organization of Securities Commissions, Orlovskyi’s training programs, FFA Crypto, FFA Crypto RISE, and FFA Crypto Capitalist, have been blacklisted by Ukraine’s National Securities and Stock Market Commission as suspicious investment schemes. Orlovskyi responded by filing a lawsuit in Kyiv’s Administrative Court, attempting to challenge the Commission’s decision.

How Oleksandr Orlovskyi Cooperates with Russians During the War

In another case, №991/8911/24, filed by the head of NGO “NON-STOP”, Kyrylo Yakovets, with NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, Orlovskyi is accused of running a criminal organization that scams crypto investors and allegedly doing so in coordination with the Russian platform VELES.

According to Yakovets’ statement, Orlovskyi and his mentors recruit clients from russia, pay for ads and referral links inside russia, and process payments using russian services — effectively channeling funds into russia’s economy.

Media sources confirm that Orlovskyi actively promotes VELES, a russian crypto platform, through his YouTube videos — encouraging people to register using his referral link, profiting from each sign-up.

Our analysis of the FFA course Discord group also found a channel called “results-crypto”, where students shared screenshots of trades done specifically on VELES. In other words, Orlovskyi is funneling his students onto this russian platform, giving them no real skills, and leaving them to lose money — money that then ends up in the pockets of VELES’ russian owners.

Even more concerning, all users of VELES are handing over their personal data to russia — data that could very likely be accessed by russian intelligence services.

VELES is owned and operated by russian national Vladislav Kriger. The platform, like Orlovskyi’s own projects, has been flagged by Ukrainian regulators as an unreliable investment scheme and may be involved in funding the russian military, according to BlackBox OSINT.

This paints a deeply cynical picture in light of Orlovskyi’s public claims about donating to the Ukrainian army (something he does rarely, judging by his Instagram). Given russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, his actions look not just unpatriotic, but downright treacherous.

In fact, leaked Telegram messages from July 2022 show that Orlovskyi was actively exploring investment opportunities in a russian crypto project called Amazy.

Amazy was developed by russian nationals, including infamous influencer Serhii Kosenko, known for peddling crypto and self-development courses and for launching the Amazy app, a classic pyramid scheme that paid users to walk around in virtual sneakers they had to buy first.

Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s correspondence from summer 2022 with the authors of the russian crypto project Amazy, where he asks about the project’s tokenomics (how the token is used within the project’s ecosystem) and its white paper — a document outlining the project’s goals, technical details, risks, and intended use, aimed at informing potential investors.

So despite russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Orlovskyi, who makes millions off trusting Ukrainians, had no hesitation or moral barriers when it came to preparing (or possibly already collaborating) with russian crypto projects. Not to mention that his FFA website is available in russian, and his courses are easily accessible to russian citizens.

Screenshots from the website of Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s crypto academy

So, Oleksandr Orlovskyi’s activities may not only be fraudulent, but also anti-Ukrainian — something that law enforcement should investigate. Not to mention the use of crypto wallets to hide income from the state, income earned by deceiving unsuspecting citizens. In this context, one of Orlovskyi’s recent Instagram stories, posted during a conference in London, seems particularly ironic:

Instagram story posted by Oleksandr Orlovskyi

Thomas Brown