Dear friends!

Since the year 2016 many members of HEMA society are under the massive cyberattacks. Among them are such well-known fencers and martial artists as Maestro Ton Puey (Spain), maestro Danilo Rossi (Italy), maestro Roberto Laura (Germany), Alessandro Fantini (Italy), Don Alfio Leocata (Italy), Dmitry Halin (Ukraine), Dmitry Chernosvitov (Czech Republic), Oleg Eliseev (Ukraine), Alessandro Grazioli (Italy)  and many many others in different countries: Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia, France, Latvia, USA, Russia, Ukraine etc.

Cybercriminals attacked not only the fencers themselves, but also members of their families. Especially, their elder loved ones and children.

This criminal group has a recognizable and distinctive style: it all starts with hacking emails and social networks accounts of the victims and members of their families. Then they use the stolen information – home addresses, phone numbers – for threats and blackmail. To leave the victim isolatedt they also unleash terror against friends, acquaintances and colleagues of the victim.

One of their favorite tricks- to use phone calls made with the help of a special prank call-spoofing software, which allows to make a calls from any number. For example, the president of TEMAF. Denis Cherevichnik received a calls from his close relatives numbers – people posing as doctors reported that his loved one had died. Bandits sent funeral wreaths to elderly parents of other victims. Many old people were hospitalized with heart attacks.

In 2016, the first cyber attacks against our Federation began. Only in 2016 there were several dozen of massive DDoS attacks. And in 2017, a cyber attack against the president of the Federation, Denis Cherevichnik began. Everything went according to the standard scenario of these cyber criminals: email hacks, identity theft, threats to family members. The criminals created dozens of fake and phishing websites and accounts on social networks: Facebook, Instagram, and so on. But their modus operandi is easy to find out: for attacks on a person’s reputation  mostly they use a pics of a sex-toys.

Also in 2017, they began to insert various fake pseudoscientific articles signed on the name of Denis Cherevichnik on Wikipedia. Of course these papers has not been without sex-toys, as well.

Due to the persistent cyber attacks, a police report to the Latvian State security service was filed against this gang. At the moment, there is an investigation of this cyber gang criminal activities.

According to the police, this criminal cyber group is based in Odessa (Ukraine). It is also known as the” Odessa Troll Factory”. The leader and all the gang members are already known to the Latvian State security service.

Due to the results of the investigation, the cause of the attack was the commercial interests of the Ukrainian criminal gang. Historical fencing is a fashionable, popular and fast-developing mainstream. Therefore, it attracts the attention of various criminal gangs.

The fact that the first attack on our Federation began immediately after we announced the opening of a representative office of the Spanish fencing school in Ukraine also confirms this information. And soon after that, a massive attack on the reputation of our representative in Ukraine, the master of martial arts, Ruslan Matveev, began on the Internet. It should be noted that Ruslan Matveev lives …. in Odessa!

We believe that the law will triumph, evil will be punished, and all the criminals who took part in these attacks will get what they deserve.