The first article usually arrives without warning. Within days there are a dozen more, on sites the target has never heard of, in countries they’ve never visited. They carry the same headline and the same accusation. People who have been through it describe something closer to a siege than a news story. A network of defamatory websites keeps it going, and they say it doesn’t stop just because the claims are false.
Twenty articles before a court date
A founder of a London investment firm, who spoke under a pseudonym, described more than 20 articles about him appearing within a single month. Many ran on sites based in countries he had never been to. He believes the timing was deliberate. He was due to give evidence in a fraud case, and he saw the campaign as an attempt to put him off. He testified anyway and won.
His case isn’t unusual. One reputation adviser said a client had 48 articles published about him in under 30 days.
A spreadsheet of more than 100 articles
Vladislav Smirnov runs a medical consultancy in Kyiv. He started logging the articles about himself and ended up with more than 100, each with a date and a translated summary. On a single day in January, the same story ran on 17 websites with identical formatting. A month later, another appeared on five more within a day.
The sites behind it share infrastructure. Court filings in a US case showed near-identical IP addresses across Antikor, Kompromat1, Ruskompromat and Antimafia. A technical review of more than 60 domains found shared SSL certificates and hosting fingerprints.
The domains below 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
Winning in court and still losing
For a business, the damage often lands with banks and partners rather than the public. One Ukrainian bank was the subject of 20 Antikor articles between 2017 and 2026, accusing it of laundering drug money. A court found the allegations false. The bank later lost its licence for unrelated reasons, and its lawyer has said he can’t draw a direct line between the two. He has also said that years of hostile coverage in a regulated sector are never neutral.
Court wins rarely end it. Mykhailo Labutin, director of Ukrspyrt, got a defamatory article removed through the courts. Three years later it was published again. In London, Uzbek financier Ovik Mkrtchyan was awarded more than £220,000 against the London Post and its listed owner. Neither turned up to court, and the article stayed online for weeks after the judgment.
The offer that follows
Targets often receive an offer to make it stop. A journalist posing as a client asked Antikor’s Telegram contact about removing an article. The reply was a $12,000 annual package in cryptocurrency, covering deletion, protection from new articles and two positive pieces. Antikor denies charging to publish or remove content.
Paying carries its own risk. If a removal can be bought, a republication can be sold, as Labutin’s case shows. Lawyers who work with targets advise against paying. They recommend building a record instead: court rulings, abuse reports to hosts and registrars, and complaints to data protection authorities where personal details have been published.
Why the targets don’t go away
The people hit by these campaigns say the hardest part is how long it lasts. An article can be fought, ruled false and taken down, and still come back on a new domain years later. Smirnov’s spreadsheet is still growing.
