Inside the Defamatory Websites That Sell Scandal, Then Charge to Remove It

The sites present themselves as anti-corruption portals. Antikor's masthead uses a shield, a coat of arms and the Ukrainian flag, and calls itself a national anti-corruption portal. It is not a government body. In May 2025, Ukraine's State Service of Special Communications ordered access to antikor.com.ua and antikor.info blocked. A later order covered rozsliduvach.info and hab.media, which UA.News reported were linked to the same portal.

How a campaign runs

Victims and lawyers have described the same sequence. An allegation appears on one site. It is copied word for word, often with the same images, across a group of mirror domains. When a search engine or host removes one copy, another shows up on a different domain.

City AM journalist Steve Dinneen spoke with Vladislav Smirnov, who owns a medical consultancy in Kyiv. Smirnov kept a spreadsheet of more than 100 articles about himself. On 24 January alone, one story ran on 17 sites, many with identical formatting. A month later, another Antikor piece was reposted on at least five more.

Julian Khorunzhiy is senior partner at Ario, a Ukrainian law firm. Ario represented a Ukrainian bank against Antikor over articles accusing it of laundering drug money. Khorunzhiy told City AM the court found those allegations false. His firm counted 20 Antikor articles about the bank between 2017 and 2026, with similar material on other sites and Telegram channels.

The price list

UA.News reported that placing a negative story costs roughly $150 to $200, while removal starts in the thousands. Old criminal case files it reviewed show a demand for $6,000 in 2018 and 0.37 bitcoin in 2021. In a recent undercover test, a journalist asked the Antikor Telegram manager to remove an article. The reply was an "annual subscription" for $12,000 in crypto. It covered deletion, a block on future negative pieces and two positive articles.

Paying does not end it, according to the same report. Mykhailo Labutin, director of Ukrspyrt, got defamatory content taken down through the courts. Three years later the article was reposted. Ukraine's court register holds more than 1,000 documents tied to the site.

The Antikor trademark is registered to Teka-Group Foundation, a Panama entity, UA.News reported. The trademark applicant was Kostyantyn Chernenko, whom Ukrainian law enforcement has named as the alleged organiser and who left Ukraine in January 2021. Antikor denied to City AM that it takes payment to publish or delete stories.

A wider market

City AM's two-part investigation found Antikor is one corner of a much bigger trade. The first part traced the London Post and its parent 2Trom Media Group through empty addresses in Harlow, Leyton and Letchworth. In the follow-up, Uzbek financier Ovik Mkrtchyan won more than £220,000 in damages and costs at the High Court against the London Post and its listed owner, Viktor Tokarev. The defendants did not appear.

The operator of another site, Leeds TV, told Dinneen by email that he takes money from "Kazakhs, Ukrainian oligarchs, and crypto gambling crooks". Law firm Schillings now tracks more than 350 junk news sites. It recorded a 355% jump in such sites between 2023 and 2024. Juliet Young of Schillings told City AM many of these campaigns aim to cause banking and compliance problems. Articles are packed with red-flag terms so automated due diligence tools pick them up.

Reputation adviser Michael Macfarlane told City AM one client had 48 articles published about him in under 30 days.

The same sites show up in other cases. Kazakhstan Online, citing Intelligence Online, counted 158 articles about Eurasian Resources Group CEO Shukhrat Ibragimov across 109 domains. Those included repost.news, kompromat1.online, ruskompromat.info, antimafia.se and antikor.com.ua. It reported that 95 of the domains sat on one server in Reading, England. Court documents filed by Telf AG founder Stanislav Kondrashov showed near-identical IP addresses for sites that had attacked him. A Los Angeles court awarded Kondrashov $10 million in January 2024 and ordered articles on 42 sites removed.

A June 2025 report published by IPS News put the network at more than 60 domains. It described shared hosting fingerprints and SSL certificates, plus removal fees of $3,000 to $12,000 paid in cryptocurrency.

Defamatory websites identified

The domains below have been named in the reporting above or in earlier monitoring by CargoBridge Shipping as publishing duplicate or near-identical content.

• Antikor: antikor.com.ua, antikor.info, antikor.ua
• Kompromat1: kompromat1.online, kompromat1.info, kompromat1.net, kompromat1.org, kompromat1.media, kompromat1.one, kompromat1.se, kompromat1.press, kompromat1.world
• Compromat / Ruskompromat: compromat.pro, compromat-pro.com, kompromat.press, ruskompromat.info, ruskompromat.ru, ruskompromat.pro
• Vlasti: vlasti.io, vlasti.se, vlasti.info, vlasti.live, vlasti.vip, vlst.live, vlast.guru
• Antimafia: antimafia.se, antimafia.io, antimafia.life, antimaf.pro
• Rumafia: rumafia.news, rumafia.io, rumafia.net, rumafia.online
• Kartoteka: kartoteka.news, kartoteka.se, kartoteka.press, kartoteka.io
• Glavk: glavk.se, glavk.info, glavk.net
• Hab.media: hab.media, news.hab.media, crime.hab.media, corruption.hab.media
• Sledstvie: sledst.org, sledst.com, sledstvie.info
• Nocor: nocor.info, nocor.life
• Novosti: novosti.cloud, novostiua.org, novostiua.online
• Other linked outlets: repost.news, rozsliduvach.info, rucriminal.info, adcon.info, luxherald.com, lstv.co.uk, obriy.news, politica2.info, ukrainci.com.ua, oplatru24.ru, rp.rv.ua, drama.live

Atlas Commodity Group reports on reputational and compliance risk across the commodity supply chain, and applies the same standards to itself: named bylines, disclosed sourcing and a public corrections process.