Let’s take a look at this godforsaken piece: “Eternity INC Launch in Vienna: Advancing Financial Education.” This abomination was born from the twisted imagination of GPT and is dedicated to laundering the reputation of a certain Roman Leithäuser and the Eternity INC company. It also mentions another international fraudster, Mykhailo Romanenko, “the visionary and founder behind Eternity INC.” Eternity INC positions itself as a vessel of financial wisdom, a neobank, and an investment superpower. In reality, it is a scam, orchestrated by Ukrainian citizen Romanenko and his accomplices. Roman Leithäuser and several others are brought into the spotlight to facilitate defrauding Germans, Austrians, and Turks residing in German-speaking countries.
Since the companies of these fraudsters (aka Danvel Group scammers) are mainly run by Ukrainians, it was up to Ukraine to investigate the issue. To much surprise, some progress is being made. The Security Service of Ukraine has apprehended and interviewed Mykhailo Romanenko. He acknowledged the guilt, and we have his interview at our disposal.
Mykhailo Romanenko’s confession
Mykhailo Romanenko, the front man and director of the companies Danvel and Eternity, which are typical Ponzi schemes, was detained by the Security Service of Ukraine and gave a confession. According to Mykhailo, the ultimate beneficiaries of these fraudulent schemes are the well-known fraudsters Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov, with the intermediary organizer holding a significant share of the criminal proceeds being Roman Leithäuser, an Austrian citizen. Currently, their victims, predominantly German citizens, are filing mass complaints with the police against this criminal group.
After his arrest, Mykhailo Romanenko not only confessed to everything but also filed a crime report with the SSU against his employers.
In his statement, Mykhailo Romanenko claims that in 2021, he met Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov through mutual friends in the crypto-trading sphere. The names of these “mutual friends” are not mentioned in the report, but during one of the interrogations, he referred to someone named Stas.
In December 2018, Mykhailo Romanenko and Stanislav Adzhiev registered LLC “Exa” in Chernivtsi (a provincial city in western Ukraine).
According to this record in Companies House, a few months later, on June 11, 2019, a company named EXA Consulting Ltd with a share capital of 1 million pounds sterling was registered in London. According to the registration document, the company shares were evenly distributed between Nazar Babenko from Dnepropetrovsk and EXA Limited Liability Company from Chernivtsi. The latter is the aforementioned LLC, co-owned by Adzhiev and Romanenko. Two years later, EXA Consulting Ltd was forcibly liquidated due to non-submission of reports, after which “mutual friend” Stanislav Adzhiev disappeared from this story.
According to Romanenko, Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov offered him the role of founder and CEO of Danvel. The company was purportedly supposed to manage investors’ assets. Mykhailo claims that initially, he had no idea he was being involved in a fraudulent scheme.
The birth of the two “Danvels”
Shortly after this meeting and productive discussions in the latter half of 2021, two “Danvels” emerged: Danvel Finances OÜ (Tallinn, Estonia) and Danvel Education Ltd (London, United Kingdom). Mykhailo Romanenko was listed as the sole beneficiary of both companies. Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov started planting paid articles in English-language media about the “successful crypto businessman” Mykhailo Romanenko.
Approximately a year later, on November 2, 2022, Danvel Ltd was registered in London under Romanenko’s name. The company was listed for a while as the owner of the website danvel.com. This domain hosted one of the online platforms through which Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov siphoned “investments” from unsuspecting investors.
However, during interrogations and in his statement to the SBU, Romanenko mentioned only one “Danvel” – Danvel Group Limited. The company was registered in London under Romanenko’s name nearly two years (in March 2023) after his first meeting with Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov.
The danvel.com platform, however, was operational six months earlier – shortly before the creation of Danvel Ltd in November 2022, followed by an intense campaign to attract “investors.”
It’s quite possible that Romanenko is now simply confused about the different “Danvels,” as the companies were created in his name by Nazar Babenko. He may not even know how many or what types of “Danvels” were registered under his name.
Here is how Mykhailo Romanenko described his involvement in his “businesses” during interrogation:
“The legal aspect of ‘Danvel’ and ‘Eternity’ is in my name. But I am not involved in the operations, negotiations, or activities. Sometimes I sign documents and participate in Zoom conferences. The speech texts are sent by Nazar Babenko. Babenko also instructs me on how to behave.”
Mykhailo claims that for playing the role of a “front man,” Nazar Babenko paid him between $2,000 and $2,500 monthly.
“When the company Danvel began attracting investments, I became aware that several million US dollars had been deposited into the company’s account, which was actually managed by Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov,” Romanenko stated in his declaration to the SBU. “Dividend payments were made for 5 months, after which the funds were transferred to personal wallets (of the pyramid scheme’s top members – ed. note), and the project was supposedly sold.”
To whom Danvel was “sold” and whether the sale actually took place, we will explore in our next publication. For now, let us focus on the fact that through this company, Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov extracted about two million dollars from EU citizens.
The victims are desperately trying to get their money back. We have dozens of complaints from “investors.” Many of them lost all their savings in Danvel – some losing hundreds of thousands of euros.
Elisabeth Braun and Uli Zimmer: mere victims or Ponzi officers?
Among the “record holders” is German citizen Elisabeth Braun, whose deposit amounted to $667,700. She is not entirely a victim, as she was aware of the Ponzi scheme and its criminal nature. The same can be said for Uli Zimmer, another half-victim-half-conman.
Uli Zimmer is the mayor of the small commune of Niedermohr near Ramstein-Miesenbach in southwestern Germany. Zimmer’s interest here is not his political career and public activity, but his role in Babenko’s larger fraud scheme – Eternity Business, which was developed in parallel with Danvel.
“So, it became clear to me that the activities of Danvel Group Limited were a cover for a financial pyramid, and I was used as a fictitious manager and owner, hence all material claims were redirected to Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov,” wrote Mykhailo Romanenko in his statement to the SBU. “These claims were ignored and left unsatisfied. However, I was offered to head a new company called Eternity Business Limited, which I was forced to agree to due to the promise of returning all the lost funds to the victims of Danvel Group Limited.”
Here, Romanenko is either being deceitful or again unaware of what is registered under his name in England. Because the day after Danvel Group Limited was registered on March 24, 2023, Eternity Business Limited was registered in London under Mykhailo Romanenko’s name. A couple of months later, in June 2023, the grand opening of Eternity Business took place, and a massive campaign to attract potential “investors” began.
During this time, according to our information, Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov, with the involvement of Romanenko and other citizens, continued to actively attract money from naive investors into Danvel. According to the testimonies of victims in our possession, the scheme was shut down in July 2023. The “hundreds” told investors that the company was sold to new investors, hence the “confusion” with the money.
In reality, the London-based Danvel Group Limited was renamed Eternity Business Globe Limited on July 25, 2023, while the nominal beneficiaries and directors remain the same to this day.
Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov simply closed Danvel after extracting around $2 million. Now, on the ruins of this financial pyramid, another one is being built (with a similar name), which we will detail in our subsequent publications. For now, let’s focus on Eternity.
Interestingly, the Danvel pyramid collapsed shortly after our first investigation into the fraudulent schemes of Babenko-Kotov. A month later, in September 2023, the domain name eternity.inc was registered, and the pyramid’s online platform moved to this domain. Eternity Business underwent rebranding and became Eternity Inc, continuing to attract naive investors under this new name.
How Roman Leithäuser Joined the Leadership of Eternity Inc
As we previously reported, the Eternity Inc website claims that the platform is owned by Eternity Prime Limited, established in Hong Kong (China) as a limited liability company on October 26, 2023. The Hong Kong registry does not disclose the names of the beneficiaries and directors of registered companies. However, from last fall until recently, Roman Leithäuser served as the CEO of Eternity Prime Limited and, accordingly, Eternity Inc.
According to our information, Roman Leithäuser, along with someone named Leo Peter, was part of the inner circle of the “officers” mentioned above, Uli Zimmer in the Danvel Group. In Eternity, he replaced Mykhailo Romanenko as the public face and leader. Unlike Romanenko, Leithäuser was not a fictitious director.
He became a trusted figure for Babenko-Kotov and a promoter of Eternity in Germany. Thanks to him, millions of euros from unsuspecting Germans flowed into the crypto wallets of these swindlers. The respectable-looking Roman Leithäuser organized online seminars and offline meetings. People believed him and gave him their money.
The appearance of Uli Zimmer and Roman Leithäuser at the top of the Babenko-Kotov financial pyramid is no coincidence. These gentlemen from Germany are professional “black” network marketers with extensive experience, which they prefer to keep hidden.
While tracing the digital footprints leading to Eternity Inc, we came across an interesting detail that we initially overlooked. We found about a dozen domain names that redirect to the website eternity.business (and from there, consequently, to eternity.inc). Among them are a couple of very noteworthy ones.
In the domain addresses ulizimmer.de and ulizimmer.com, Uli Zimmer’s name, Leithäuser’s partner, who joined Babenko and Kotov, is easily readable. But what is more important is where these addresses redirected before.
Using WebArchive, we discovered that in 2021, ulizimmer.de redirected visitors to an undeveloped platform called “Hyper Empire,” and ulizimmer.com to the address hypergroup.io. Both are directly related to HyperVerse – the largest financial pyramid in recent years, which extracted about $2 billion from thousands of people worldwide.
Here is a still shot from a video recorded in Antalya, Turkey, in the spring of 2022.
Roman Leithäuser and Other Global Fraudsters: a soft spot for Ponzis
Here we see Roman Leithäuser promoting the HyperCommunity project, part of the HyperVerse financial pyramid, to future fraud victims. Since Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov had already moved to Antalya at that time, it is quite possible they met Leithäuser at that event.
As reported by CryptoNews, HyperVerse was a fraudulent crypto investment scheme amounting to nearly $2 billion, led by a figurehead CEO. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a grand jury indicted two of its leaders on criminal charges on January 25 of this year.
The lawsuit stated that the online investment business, which operated under various brands including HyperFund, HyperCommunity, HyperCapital, HyperTech, and others, siphoned up to $1.89 billion from people worldwide who were lured by promises of quick wealth. The scam began around June 2020.
The SEC’s complaint alleges that Sam Lee, an Australian founder living in the United Arab Emirates, and Brenda “Bitcoin Beutee” Chung, a Maryland-based business promoter, deceived investors through this financial pyramid.
“HyperFund even hired an actor to pretend to be the new CEO when HyperVerse was launched,” the SEC’s complaint states. It details that the executive director, known as Steven Rees Lewis, who gave a speech at the project’s launch event, was actually a television host living in Thailand.
“With no apparent legitimate source of revenue, payouts to investors were made using contributions from new investors,” the SEC declared.
The SEC stated that Chung personally appropriated about $3.7 million and spent it on a BMW, designer clothing, a $1.2 million home in Maryland, and a $1.1 million condominium in Dubai. Lee, on the other hand, transferred $140,000 in digital funds to a wallet under his control.
On January 25, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland indicted Sam Lee and Brenda Chung for conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The SEC also charged them with offering unregistered securities and demanded they return all illegally obtained proceeds.
The publication notes that HyperTech founder Lee and his business partner Ryan Xu also founded the failed Australian bitcoin company Blockchain Global, which owed creditors $58 million.
In summary, it is evident that Roman Leithäuser and Uli Zimmer were significantly involved in the notorious HyperVerse scam and likely profited well from it. When this pyramid started to crumble, they joined forces with Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov.
“Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov are the shadow owners of the companies (Danvel and Eternity),” stated the frontman Mykhailo Romanenko during one of his interrogations. “All ideas, initiatives, funds, and development rest on their shoulders. <…> To develop and scale the company, they enlisted the support of black market networkers from Germany who participated in the Hyper Ponzi.”
Mykhailo Romanenko’s Statement to the SSU
In his statement to the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU), Mykhailo Romanenko wrote:
“After working for some time as the head of Eternity Business Limited, I began to realize that Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov, as the ultimate beneficiaries of the company, did not intend to make payments to those harmed by the activities of Danvel Group Limited. Instead, their intention was to accumulate funds from citizens of the EU, CIS, and Asia, then shut down the company and misappropriate the collected funds. The total amount of money that the ultimate beneficiaries of Danvel Group Limited and Eternity Business Limited have wrongfully taken for themselves currently amounts to about $20 million.”
As mentioned at the beginning, after falling into the gentle embrace of Ukrainian special service operatives, Mykhailo Romanenko decided to quit the financial pyramids and expose their real founders. The consequences were swift. One chilly winter day, he was ambushed by two unknown young men who began beating him with a metal pipe. However, a strong blow to the head with a blunt object did not prevent the frontman from gaining enough speed to escape from the henchmen sent by Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov.
Roman Leithäuser Tries to Hide His Criminal Connections with Ukrainian Fraudsters
It seems that the German “frontman” Roman Leithäuser has also decided to lay low. His mentions as the CEO of Eternity are being scrubbed from sources linked to this financial pyramid. The official website of the project now lists a certain Danila Drygola as the CEO of the “parent” company from Hong Kong, Eternity Prime Limited. The London-based Eternity Business Limited has also been “transferred” to him.
Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov are already heavily promoting Drygola as the new CEO of Eternity INC, highlighting his “achievements in AI-based trading.”
So far, we have not been able to reliably establish who Danila Drygola is. Ukrainian registers only reveal that in the hometown of Babenko and Kotov – Dnipro – a certain Drygola Danil Sergeevich traded meat and meat products with varying success from 2011 to 2014. Whether artificial intelligence was used in this business is unknown to us.
However, more and more information about the fraudulent schemes built by Nazar Babenko and Igor Kotov is coming our way every day. We dare to assume that the volume of data about these “pyramid builders” reaching law enforcement agencies is much larger. Moreover, it is not just Ukrainian law enforcement, but also those of Germany and other EU countries whose citizens were swindled by these fraudsters.
It is possible that several countries will compete for the chance to incarcerate these individuals, giving Igor Kotov and Nazar Babenko the opportunity to choose which prison to serve time in.
While Ukrainian authorities decide the fate of their fraudsters, perhaps it is time for Europe to address the issue of Roman Leithäuser? This is also a British problem, as several fraudulent companies were registered in our country.
