Zombie Notaries: Why the Architects of a "Perpetual" Scheme Are Still in Business While Justice Stal

For nearly five years, a group of men with laptops gathered in a forest outside Kyiv. They would send infected emails to notaries, secure remote access to Ukraine's State Register, and for a fee ranging from seven to fifty thousand dollars lift court-ordered freezes from other people's real estate. The laptops went in the trash afterward, the phones were burners, the SIM cards disposable, the work done in rubber gloves. This continued until September 2019, when the SBU and the Cyber Police finally closed in on them in the woods. Among the clients who benefited from the scheme were the family of a senior police official named Yevhen Shevtsov, the head of Ukraine's Customs Service Maksym Nefyodov, and business structures linked to Vadym Novynsky. Six years have passed, and the landscape today looks surreal.

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