THE DEEPFAKE ERA HAS COME FOR BLACKLIST.AERO! WE TELL YOU WHO, HOW AND WHY

Three months ago, I told a story about how fraudsters created a fake BLACKLIST.AERO page on X (former Twitter) with the goal of publishing any nonsense on it just to discredit our reputation. I laughed at this “innocent” idea and said that we need to prepare for much bigger provocations, using deepfake technology. And I was right!

But believe me, intuition is not some kind of “sixth sense”. Intuition is a quick calculation made in the head. All these crooks that the BLACKLIST.AERO team is fighting with, although having a huge self-esteem, are actually quite primitive and predictable individuals.

We’ve been looking the other way to all these publications that denigrate us for a long time. If the scammers squeal, it means we hurt them. And that means we are doing everything right. As supporters of our activities have repeatedly told us: “These crooks themselves do not understand what kind of advertising they are doing for you…”

Well, up to a certain point, all this demonization of me personally and the BLACKLIST.AERO team really amused us. However, one of the “publications” made us not only outraged, but also conduct a detailed journalistic investigation. Now we know who, how and with the help of what is conducting a campaign of falsifications against us. In addition, as a result of our investigation, 32 (!) “stinkings” about BLACKLIST.AERO were removed from one-day websites. All of them were distributed through one channel.

1. HOW?

Our investigation began when I was sent a link to a publication that alleged that one of the most odious Ukrainian defectors to Russia, former Ukrainian deputy Ilya Kiva, was involved in financing the BLACKLIST.AERO Registry. And as confirmation of this information, my “photo” with this bastard was given. Naturally, this was a forgery using deepfake technology.

Within 10 minutes, my team was able to find the original photo and an article that talked about the real hero of this photo (Ilya Kiva’s driver) and his criminal past:

https://news.obozrevatel.com/society/pyitalsya-ubit-ofitsiantku-ilya-kiva-otkrestilsya-ot-avtoriteta-vitalika-iz-poltavyi.htm

Despite the fact that some defamatory materials about us were duplicated without any changes on different one-day websites, this particular fake was published only on one website. This website, https://md-eksperiment.org/, like all the others, had nothing to do with aviation. However, what distinguished it was that it was clearly not a one-day website. This is a website about art, and more specifically about musical and theatrical events in Ukraine. In addition to this article about Ilya Kiva, there were two more articles about BLACKLIST.AERO, which were most often distributed on other websites.

I was able to quickly find the phone number of the website owner, German Goshkador, published in an ad in which he offered the services of a piano and acting tutor. Having called and introduced myself, I explained to him that since his site contains not just materials with evaluative judgments about BLACKLIST.AERO, but easily proven falsification using deepfake technology, we will not even bother filing a lawsuit. I will simply write a statement to the Ukrainian cyber-police about the committed cyber-crime. Well, this was enough for German to remove not only all the fakes about BLACKLIST.AERO within 5 minutes, but also to tell where these ordered materials came from.

As it turned out, his site cooperates with the COLLABORATOR.PRO platform. This platform was created in Estonia by Ukrainian Ihor Rudnyk. It allows you to place promotional articles on sites that cooperate with COLLABORATOR.PRO on a paid basis. In fact, it is an intermediary between the customer and the contractor in the placement of paid publications. You register, send your material and pay for its placement. COLLABORATOR.PRO places it through sites that are ready to do this for a fee. COLLABORATOR.PRO keeps a part of the profit received from the customer.

The main advantage for customers is the fact that the customer and the contractor do not know each other. The customer does not know which specific site will undertake to place his order. They can only regulate the number of sites on which it will be placed using the budget. After placement, COLLABORATOR.PRO sends the customer a report on which sites they can see their promotional material. Quite convenient for PR campaigns. And simply incredibly convenient if you want to anonymously “bury” someone with the help of black PR.
After all, besides the fact that the customer and the contractor do not know each other, in addition to this, the “organizer” in the person of COLLABORATOR.PRO does not check whether the hypothetical John Do, who contacted them to place his promo, is really John Do. Also, this system does not check the sites that cooperate with them. Who is the owner of the site, what kind of site it is - they do not care at all.

This was indirectly confirmed in correspondence with me by the owner of COLLABORATOR.PRO Ihor Rudnyk when I later asked him to provide data of the fake articles orderer. Referring to the confidentiality of this information, he mentioned that I was right in saying that the customer’s data registered in their system could be false. Nevertheless, we later managed to find out through our channels that the orders came via email: Aero News <newsaero7@gmail.com>. And we will return to this later.

In his letter, Ihor Rudnyk expressed extreme regret that his system was used to spread black PR, and using deepfake for it. He also said that his team would make every effort to ensure that all materials distributed through COLLABORATOR.PRO were removed. I will allow myself to quote the text of his letter informing about this without any cuts:

QUOTE:
(Translation from Ukrainian)

Good afternoon, Artem.

Accept our apologies that you had to face such a situation and spend nerves and energy on its resolution.

Before answering the initial questions that were raised in the first letter, we would like to note the following points:

1. The Collaborator system regulations prohibit posting articles of a political nature and articles that harm the reputation of other people; a full list of topics is available at the link, we strictly adhere to it ;

2. you use the phrase “your partner sites” — this is not entirely true, they are not our partners, we do not have partnership agreements and relationships with them; they are users of the platform according to the general offer and rules;

3. the Collaborator system is not responsible for the materials published by sites. Each site makes this decision independently.

Regarding the mentioned questions.

1. Were materials about BLACKLIST.AERO posted through the Collaborator system? Unfortunately, yes.

2. If so, can the Collaborator system help remove them?

Yes. Our team will analyze all articles of the described nature, where were references to BLACKLIST.AERO, and will make a request to the owners of the sites to remove it. We can guarantee that we will make an effort to do this, but we cannot guarantee that they will be removed.

In this correspondence, we will inform you about it additionally within 2-3 business days.

3. Why did this happen?

This is the first time that the system has encountered the posting of materials with deepfake.

4. Can the Collaborator system prevent further posting of such materials?

Yes. Additional checks of graphic materials of publications will be implemented and additional moderation rules will be introduced for news related to personalities. Posting of materials mentioning blacklist.aero will be prohibited within the Collaborator system in general.

I hope that these actions will be sufficient. We will report on the progress on issue two within 2-3 business days.

Thank you and have a good day.
UNQUOTE

Well, while the COLLABORATOR.PRO team “worked on the bugs”, we decided to continue investigating the sites where all this rubbish was placed. First of all, we began to investigate sites where several “stinkings” about us were posted at once. Despite the fact that most of these stinkings are published in English, 90% of the sites have Ukrainian or supposedly Ukrainian roots. What is not surprising, since COLLABORATOR.PRO is also from Ukraine, part of the team of this platform is also located in Ukraine.

And the first experience of researching such site led us to the discovery! In particular, on the site NENWS.COM, where three articles about us were also published, there is a section Editorial Team https://nenws.com/en/portal-editorial-team/ . Look closely at these people.

On this page there are quite a few names, most of the editors are allegedly “Ukrainian journalists", a few more names are allegedly “foreign authors cooperating with the editors”. In addition to names, photos of each person from the "Editorial Board" are also presented.

However, when I wanted to learn more about Chief Editor of Nenws Media Vitaliy Kovalchuk, I couldn’t find ANYTHING specifically about a person with this image and this last name. Although there is his profile on LinkedIn, and I even communicated with someone through this profile. After that, all articles about BLACKLIST.AERO were instantly deleted.

However, a deeper analysis allowed us to conclude with 100% certainty that this person is a fake. Such a man does not exist. The photo was taken from the Internet and practically did not change compared to the original. From this fake account, this user registered pages not only on LinkedIn, but also on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and X (Twitter)

Well, then we did the same work with the other persons presented on the page https://nenws.com/en/portal-editorial-team/. And it turned out that there is NO real person! All these Ukrainian and foreign “authors” of Nenws Media are pure fiction! Moreover, we have good reason to suspect that this site was created and administered from Russia. Most of the photos were taken from the profiles of Russians in the Russian social network “Odnoklasniki” or, for example, from such a site as “News of Altai”. You can check this yourself, having at least a little OSINT intelligence skill and spending some time.

It is noteworthy that a number of “Ukrainian” sites on which articles about BLACKLIST.AERO were published, such https://antikor.com.ua/, https://www.rupor.info/, https://from-ua.org/ media also associate with Russian propaganda mass media. So, in most cases, we are dealing with Russian media resources that pretend to be Ukrainian.

2. WHAT DOES THE CREATION OF SUCH A PUBLICATION SAY ABOUT?

The very fact of such a publication, in which everything from the first to the last word is pure fiction, and this “photo” to allegedly confirm the “facts” testifies to the real desperation of our opponents. For a long time, they tried to twist the facts in order to discredit BLACKLIST.AERO as an idea of a transparent and public fight against defaulters and scammers, as well as me personally. But realizing that this does not affect the opinion about us that has formed in the aviation world, our support from aviation market participants, they decided to invent facts.

This is a serious shift. Very dangerous for them, because it is a real criminal offense. The facts of creating fakes on the Internet with the purpose of inciting hatred towards a specific person or group of people are investigated by cyber police of countries, this is no longer the area of civil law. And the fact that, being fully aware of the possibility of criminal prosecution, they went for this shows the full extent of their desperation! So where does this come from?

3. WHO?

As you understand, we have many enemies. And every day there are more and more of them. This is normal, since the number of cases in the Global Aviation Register of Defaulter companies BLACKLIST.AERO is growing. We often have to deal with real bandits who are used to making money by outright robbery. Many of them have serious connections in political circles. This does not scare us, which infuriates all these big and small crooks even more. That is, the “circle of suspects” in theory can be quite wide.

However, in addition to guesses, comparison of facts, stylistic and morphological analysis of all these stinkings, one funny incident helped us to establish the main source of their production and distribution:

Earlier I told you about the promise of the owner of COLLABORATOR.PRO to make every effort to remove articles about BLACKLIST.AERO that were posted through this system. So, within a couple of days, according to the report that Ihor sent, 32 articles were removed from the sites. In total, 36 of them were posted through COLLABORATOR.PRO.

And after that, the orderers of this crap realized that they had lost an important source of distribution of their shit and, out of desperation, decided to act by direct threats to our partners. Less than a week after the articles were deleted, one of our partners received this email:

QUOTE:
Request for Immediate Removal of Defamatory Content and Unauthorized Use of Personal Photos

From: Aero News <newsaero7@gmail.com>

Dear Silver Arrow Aviation Solutions Team,

I hope this message finds you well.
I am writing to bring to your immediate attention that a website hosted on your platform, specifically https://blacklist.aero/news/6698dd4c7f84ff3c9786c5cc and https://blacklist.aero/news/6408616b4983c17998a54b65 is publishing false and defamatory information about me and my company. In addition, my personal photographs have been posted on this site without my consent. These actions are not only damaging to my personal and professional reputation but seem to be deliberately intended to discredit both myself and my business.

Here are the specific concerns:

False Information: The site contains harmful and misleading statements about me and my company. You can find the true and accurate information about us on my official page here: https://ifuel.aero/about-us/ or https://ifuel.aero/rinad-el-rabaa/
Defamation: The false claims on the website are causing significant damage to my reputation and the credibility of my business.
Unauthorized Use of Personal Photos: My personal images have been posted without my permission, violating my privacy and personal rights.

These actions violate multiple legal standards, including defamation laws and privacy rights. Additionally, the unauthorized use of my personal photographs violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as these images are being used without my explicit permission or a valid license.

I kindly request that you take immediate action to remove the defamatory content and unauthorized images from your servers as soon as possible.

Please confirm that you have received this request and inform me of the steps you will be taking to resolve this matter. I reserve the right to pursue further legal action if this issue is not addressed promptly.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. I look forward to your swift response.

Sincerely,

RINAD EL-RABAA

Founder and CEO iFuel AG, Switzerland

Phone: + 44 (0) 207 692 8288

Address: Alte Steinhauserstrasse 1, 6330, Cham, Switzerland

UNQUOTE

Didn’t you notice anything??? The letter was received not from Rinad El-Rabaa’s official email in iFuel, but from the same Aero News <newsaero7@gmail.com> mailbox from which ordered articles were sent to COLLABORATOR.PRO!

The same name Aero News has an account on YouTube, where now not at all “unknown” people post stupid videos about me and BLACKLIST.AERO.

The same account was registered on LinkedIn only to post links to these same articles and videos.

It’s hard to say whether Rinad himself “hit the bar” by sending this letter by mistake from the wrong mailbox, or whether he entrusted his PR-morons with such an important step. But he got caught, he outsmarted himself! Well, it happens!

Here I understood all these attempts to call me “Russian”, “pro-Russian”, etc. This is revenge for the fact that in my article I told about Rinad El-Rabaa’s Russian passport, which he carefully hides. He felt hurt and scared. For him, this is really a sore point! And do you know why? I learned this only recently from a Swiss lawyer, when I has consulted about the previously described falsifications of iFuel AG. Because in Switzerland, his company can simply be closed to hell because of this Russian passport! And Rinad knows it. That is why he spends a lot of money to shut me up in every possible way.

Of course, we immediately sent Rinad El-Rabaa a journalistic request to his official iFuel email address, copying the emails listed on their website. Later, I contacted Rinad El-Rabaa publicly. But he never responded publicly or by email. Why? Because despite all this aplomb and ostentatious bravado that he tries to show, paying on the one hand for laudatory articles about himself in one-day magazines, and on the other hand, paying for a black PR campaign against BLACKLIST.AERO, he is currently afraid to even “officially” fart on behalf of his own name.

How many threats of legal prosecution and promises to ruin business reputations have been heard by those many people who stopped working with him over the past five years. But no one even suspected how cowardly this creature is! With all his lawyers and PR advisers (Russian, by the way), he cannot even competently build a line of his behavior in relation to the public accusations that came from BLACKLIST.AERO! He tried to mumble something in one of the paid PR articles and immediately shut up. Considering how diligently his PR people try to push information about his “leadership” everywhere, this is more like the behavior of a rat. Rats are not afraid to climb through dumpsters in the dark, but they are very afraid of sunlight and being caught off guard by people.

4. INTERNATIONAL AVIATION ASSOCIATION OF DEFAULTERS AND FRAUDSTERS

(in short - #ME_TOO)

But this article about how aviation scammers are trying to falsify charges against BLACKLIST.AERO would be incomplete if I didn’t tell you how the people mentioned in my articles created an informal organized group whose sole purpose is to counter BLACKLIST.AERO and take revenge on me personally.

It should be mentioned that the idea of the ASSOCIATION OF SWINDLERS for carrying out revenge does not belong to Rinad. It was first tried by the former co-owner of the recently defunct JETLUX LTD company and another owner of a Russian passport (yes, yes, don’t be surprised) Viktor Cherednichenko. At that time, for his own revenge for my article about the debts of JETLUX.LTD, he did not really want to spend his own money (or rather, stolen from the company plus borrowed from friends). And then an old mate Talgat Zholdybaev from SUNKAR AIR came his way, who complained about me and BLACKLIST.AERO. And who was ready to pay money to take revenge. So, Viktor Cherednichenko was able to carry out the first information attacks, while spending practically nothing. And thus, he came up with the idea of contacting other “victims” and offering his services as an organizer of media campaigns against BLACKLIST.AERO.

I sent Viktor Cherednichenko a message asking him to provide an email address for a journalistic request. However, he, like Rinad El-Rabaa, preferred to hide in a hole.

However, today this gathering of crooks united by their hatred for me and BLACKLIST.AERO is accepting new members. Just a couple of months ago, co-owner of MERKUR HOLDING Halis Din bragged to me that his friend from another defaulter company shared with him links to the articles I was discussing.

“He thought that I was also a victim of BLACKLIST.AERO,” Halis said, obviously making it clear that he was “not like that.” Today, this guy is among the first to try to justify his debts in one single way – well, you know ;) At the same time, modestly keeping silent about the fact that IGA airports authority have already filed a lawsuit against Merkur, demanding not only to force the company to pay its debts, but also to revoke its license.

I know for sure that Halis’ “friend” was a top manager of KlasJet, which is also a defaulter. We also have confirmed information that Rinad El-Rabaa is closely connected by business relationships with one of the biggest crooks in the aviation (and not only) market, Abdullah Al-Sayed. I wrote about my adventures in Dubai in November 2023 thanks to the falsified accusations of this crook earlier.

Why are they doing this? Of course, first and foremost, revenge, venting anger and hatred. But they also need something to divert the attention of those who want to understand BLACKLIST.AERO’s accusations regarding their debts. Instead of giving any civilized arguments, they point their finger at these links and say: “Look who’s accusing us!”

This method was officially used by the lawyers of the company ELLINAIR when Greek journalists asked the company to comment on my article about the theft of the European Commission aid, which was allocated to restore the airline’s operations. In the year and a half that have passed since then, ELLIAIR still has not started to fly. The company’s debts have not been repaid. And the owners of the company use the EU money and complete impunity, thanks to their close ties with the Prime Minister. There are many such examples.

5. INSTEAD OF AN AFTERWORD

Not-dear crooks!

15 years ago, a tragedy happened in the lives of people close to me: it turned out that a foster father was giving his children into sexual slavery to his high-ranking friends. Three of these friends were politicians. When politicians from a rival party found out about it six months later, they did their best to make a political scandal out of the criminal case.

I was not prepared at that time for the rapist MPs to use my name to build their public defence, just because I was running a foundation linked to Boris Berezovsky (then Putin's main rival). THEN, 15 years ago, it was a hard blow to me.

Now you are again trying to falsify facts by turning things upside down in a story from 15 years ago. But NOW you can press this blister as much as you like - it doesn't hurt any more.

I see that your virtual International Aviation Association of Defaulters and Fraudsters increasingly resembles a gathering of the “bitten” by BLACKLIST.AERO or the #ME_TOO campaign.

But believe me, no matter how you try to demonize me by writing bad words on the fence, no matter how much Rinad El-Rabaa tries to pose as Angelina Jolie, Abdullah Al-Sayed as Gwyneth Paltrow, or Halis Din as Uma Thurman, I am not Harvey WeinsteinI. I do everything publicly. And in order to "approach" you, I do not need to rent a hotel room and do it secretly. All participants of the aviation market will see who, how many times and in what form I “approached”.