From VSquare, May 1, 2025:
- A group of Russian fraudsters created two pyramid schemes, called Recyclix and Juicy Fields, swindling victims out of €700 million.
- They rehearsed their scheme in Poland. At the height of their activity, they were featured in the media and even took photos with Polish president Andrzej Duda.
- After eight years of investigation, the Polish prosecutor’s office charged only a front man — and then let him go free.
- We later discovered that he became a GRU saboteur who sent out explosive devices that caused fires in Poland, Germany, and the UK.
- The first part of our investigation focuses on Recyclix. Click here to read the second part about the Juicy Fields pyramid scheme.
In April 2024, more than 400 police officers raided 38 locations across Europe and the Dominican Republic on the same day. The operation, codenamed “Operation Stoner,” was organized by Germany, Spain, and France, with support from Europol, and involved law enforcement officers from 11 different countries.
Most of those arrested held Eastern European passports. The most prominent among them, a Russian named Sergei Berezin, was arrested in the Dominican Republic. Viktor Bitner, a German citizen born in the USSR with ties to Russian intelligence services, was arrested in Germany. Another Russian accomplice, Nikolai Mikhailuk, was arrested in Lublin, Poland. The Polish police later published a video showing the confiscated equipment — laptops, memory sticks, and phones — as well as footage of Mikhailuk being led from the Lublin police station to a car.
Along with six others, they were suspected of organizing one of the largest scams in history: the Juicy Fields financial pyramid scheme.
Three months later, in July, a container of shipments caught fire at the airport in Leipzig, Germany — the blaze broke out just before the shipments were to be loaded onto a plane. The cause: one of the packages contained a concealed incendiary device.
According to Wyborcza, a day later, a similar shipment was activated in a truck near Warsaw. The next day, another device was found at a DHL facility in Birmingham, UK. A fourth device was intercepted by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (ABW). The packages had been sent by Lithuanian citizen Aleksandr Šuranovas, who was caught on CCTV wearing a T-shirt and shorts while mailing the bombs from a DHL office in Lithuania.
The Lithuanian and Polish prosecutors claim that the parcels were sent on behalf of the Russian intelligence service GRU.
What connects the sender of the explosive parcels with the Russians from Juicy Fields? Šuranovas is their man. A decade ago, his associates set him up as the front man for the Polish company Recyclix, which received money from an identical scam. The swindlers defrauded customers of almost €40 million before disappearing.
What role does the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, play in all this? Who are the people behind Recyclix and Juicy Fields? What connects them to Putin’s regime? How were they able to launch another pyramid scheme even though the Polish prosecutor’s office had them within reach? And how is it possible that money stolen from customers was used to build a military drone factory near St. Petersburg?
A Wagner Associate: Turning Against His Own
We have been tracking Šuranovas and his associates since October 2024. We established that the GRU saboteur and his colleagues from Russia quietly built and tested the Polish version of the Juicy Fields pyramid scheme. They named it Recyclix, after their Warsaw-based company. It was a trial run, a first attempt — and when things got hot, they disappeared with at least €39 million. Their next scam, Juicy Fields, was a pyramid scheme on steroids. This time, they stole almost €645 million from their victims.The reality we uncovered behind the Recyclix and Juicy Fields gang is as dense and colorful as a thief’s ballad. The action unfolds quickly, across several continents, with exotic locations and colorful characters: expensive banquets on the French Riviera, celebrities, private jets, promises of easy profits, glitz, and luxury. Add to that fake aristocrats, medical marijuana, and — as the icing on the cake — a warm embrace with the president of Poland.
We will cover Juicy Fields in the next part of our investigation, but here’s a brief summary: in 2020, criminals from Russia (or with ties to Russia) created a platform that lured investors with promises of profits from medical marijuana cultivation. It promised sky-high returns to investors from around the world.
In reality, Juicy Fields never grew cannabis at all. The entire business, registered in Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, and the Netherlands, was a pyramid scheme — a scam in which investors’ profits were paid from the deposits of new users until the scheme’s creators shut down the operation and vanished to tropical islands.
The gang defrauded €645 million from 550,000 people, mainly Europeans. It stands as one of the largest Ponzi schemes in recent years.
After the pyramid collapsed and the criminals disappeared, investigators from Germany, France, and Spain took up the case. Igor Kekszin, a repentant gang member and former associate of the Wagner Group, revealed the real names of the leaders to both investigators and journalists.
It was Kekszin who disclosed that a few years earlier, the same group had created a nearly identical pyramid scheme in Poland, using a waste management business built around the Recyclix company to defraud investors.
Waste: Perhaps Worth Its Weight in Gold
In the spring of 2025, there is no trace of Recyclix; it has been removed from Polish registers.When it was founded a decade ago, the idea sounded enticing: the company would buy used plastic packaging, process it into valuable plastic granules, and resell it at a profit. Most importantly, the profits would be shared with investors through a crowdfunding model. The message was simple and appealing: even small savers could make a fortune from recycling — as long as they kept investing regularly and brought in new customers.
To share in the profits, investors had to deposit a minimum of €20 (with an incentive: each new investor received an additional €20 in virtual cash to use on the platform). There was also a commission bonus for deposits made by referred users.
The recycling profit game took place entirely online. On recyclix.com, with just a few clicks, you could buy several tons of plastic waste and then wait patiently for the company to process it into granules within five weeks. No need to worry about suppliers, sales, or efficiency — zero risk, pure income.
Where did the waste come from? Where was it processed into granules? Who were the buyers? Could you visit Recyclix factories — and if so, where? Customers didn’t ask questions....
....MUCH MORE
The crooks have been attracted to the garbage business for years:
Talking Trash and Making Cash: FT Alphaville On The Garbage Beat
....The "Talking Trash...." formulation is not original to me.
I first heard it from a mafia guy years ago as he was pitching the remunerative opportunities I would be afforded by portfolio or direct exposure to the municipal solid waste removal businesses serving the City of New York.
For folks looking for the philosophical underpinnings of waste we have on offer "Waste and Recycling: 'In the flow of things'" which links to the indispensable Discard Studies...."Putin’s Inner Circle Corners $30Bln Garbage Reform Market"
Talkin' Trash and Makin' Cash: Crime and Illegal Landfills in Scotland
Police in Italy Seize Mafia-linked assets worth $1.9 billion "Mob was Going Green"
