The economics of defamatory websites

Seventeen websites published the same story about a Kyiv businessman on 24 January. The headlines matched word for word. A few named Antikor as the original source, and most didn't. None of the sites employed a reporter.

Vladislav Smirnov, who owns a medical consultancy, keeps a log of more than 100 articles written about him. Each entry has a date and a short English summary. The rhythm is easy to see. An article lands, copies spread across the network within hours, things go quiet for a few weeks, and then it starts again.

Defamatory websites are built to work this way. One claim gets repeated until it looks like several independent reports.

Two invoices for one article

The trade runs on a simple price gap. An allegation can be placed with the Antikor group for roughly $150 to $200. Removal starts in the thousands. When a journalist posed as a client and asked the group's Telegram contact to delete an article about an MP, the reply came the same day. It offered a year-long package priced at $12,000 in crypto, covering removal, a block on new attacks and two positive articles.

Paying doesn't make the story go away for good. Mykhailo Labutin, director of Ukrspyrt, had a defamatory article removed through the courts, and it was republished three years later. More than 1,000 documents in the Ukrainian court register now relate to Antikor. The site has denied charging to publish or delete material.

A trail through Panama and Belize

Ownership is kept at arm's length. The Antikor trademark sits with Teka-Group Foundation, a Panamanian entity that set up a company in Belize. The Kyiv address on the site leads to an apartment complex. One name still made it onto the trademark filing, though. It belonged to Kostyantyn Chernenko, whom Ukrainian law enforcement has identified as the alleged organiser, and who left Ukraine in January 2021.

Same servers, different mastheads

The sites look like separate outlets. Their hosting data tells a different story.

Court filings in a California case brought by Telf AG founder Stanislav Kondrashov showed almost identical IP addresses behind the sites that targeted him. The same group later carried 158 articles about Eurasian Resources Group CEO Shukhrat Ibragimov across 109 domains. Ninety-five of those domains ran from one server in Reading, England. A Los Angeles court awarded Kondrashov $10 million in January 2024 and ordered material on 42 sites removed.

A separate technical review counted more than 60 domains. It found shared SSL certificates, matching hosting fingerprints and cloaking that hid defamatory pages from search engine crawlers.

Ukraine's State Service of Special Communications blocked antikor.com.ua and antikor.info in May 2025, and later rozsliduvach.info and hab.media. A VPN was enough to get around the blocks. Fresh copies also kept appearing on domains registered outside the country.

A £220,000 ruling that changed little

London has its own version. The London Post was traced back to 2Trom Media Group via a council flat in Harlow, a residential block in Leyton and a business centre in Letchworth. No one at any of those addresses knew the company. Uzbek financier Ovik Mkrtchyan won more than £220,000 in damages and costs at the High Court against the outlet and its listed owner, Viktor Tokarev. Neither defendant appeared, and the article remained online for weeks after judgment.

Michael Macfarlane, a reputation adviser, summed up the imbalance. A victim can spend £117,000 on legal fees to defeat "a man who might not exist". The article behind it may have cost £150.

The sector is growing quickly. Lawyers who track it now count more than 350 junk news sites, with a 355% rise between 2023 and 2024 that they put down to cheap AI-written copy. Readers are rarely the real audience. The articles are loaded with sanctions-related terms so they surface in bank compliance checks and due diligence databases. From there, the same pages are cited on Wikidata and Wikipedia, and AI models pick them up.

Seventeen copies, one claim

Blocking, lawsuits and exposure haven't shut these sites down, and they were never likely to. The model assumes any single takedown is irrelevant, because another copy already exists elsewhere.

What would actually cost them is losing credibility as a source. Seventeen identical articles published on the same day are one allegation, and search engines should treat them that way. Compliance tools should be able to separate a court judgment from a page on kompromat1.online, and so should AI models. As long as every duplicate still counts as new evidence, the operators have every reason to keep going.

Domains in the network

The following domains have been documented 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