The digital infogypsy scheme of Ekaterina Shukhnina: how Profit Lady and Crypto Muse profit from fabricated achievements

If you look up Kateryna Shukhnina in a search engine, the results can be shocking – it’s hard to believe anyone could fabricate stories so openly and pass them off as truth, yet that’s exactly what this latest “crypto investor” does for those eager for easy gains.

The search results are indeed staggering – the engine is flooded with laudatory articles about Kateryna Shukhnina and her courses, Crypto Muse and Profit Lady. The reviews about the latter are, of course, overwhelmingly positive. For someone with even a slightly critical mindset, reading these reviews is frankly unpleasant – stories about how a student of Shukhnina, having “invested 16 dollars in trading, earned 22 thousand,” look so fake that only a graduate of a school for the mentally challenged could believe them.

But, judging at least by the sheer number of laudatory materials about Shukhnina flooding the internet, there are a huge number of such mentally challenged individuals. Because Shukhnina draws the money for her advertising and luxurious lifestyle prec@zhenia15 @hrustksisely from her students who buy her “trading courses.” We’ll allow ourselves to doubt that she herself has allegedly made millions on crypto. Although, of course, Kateryna Shukhnina claims the opposite.

In general, when studying what Kateryna Shukhnina “sells” to gullible novices, it’s impossible not to recall the unforgettable Mavrodi and his “MMM”: the tone of the advertising materials of this “crypto lady” painfully resembles Lenya Golubkov and his epic journey to buy “MMM” shares, as well as the simple woman Marina Sergeevna, who “never believes anyone,” from the same series about the fantastic growth of wealth for “not freeloaders, but partners.”

Therefore, we conclude that Shukhnina’s entire advertising campaign is aimed at the intellectually deficient. However, we must admit that this calculation was correct: there’s no shortage of people eager to buy courses from Shukhnina. Here, the reader might ask a logical question – why do we speak so contemptuously about the buyers of Shukhnina’s courses? After all, there are plenty of perfectly normal online lessons that provide adequate knowledge in the same crypto sphere, used by hundreds of thousands of people.

We’ll explain shortly. But first, let’s agree on some basic things. The crypto industry is a product of the digital age. Therefore, it presupposes a minimum level of digital literacy. This includes using search engines and at least the rudiments of the ability to analyze information. So, let’s analyze what we see about Kateryna Shukhnina. We’ll use only open sources, without any “insider information.”

So, the search engine provides a set of standard information about Kateryna Shukhnina – “a self-made millionaire from the slums of Donetsk, who made her fortune in trading and strives to share great knowledge with the people.” We’ll skip this; it’s not even worth dissecting this classic “life story.”

Next comes the claim that Kateryna Shukhnina “became the best female crypto blogger, according to Binance, and entered the Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ list of successful entrepreneurs for 2024.” Verifying this claim shows it to be an outright lie: we find confirmation of this fact only on third-party resources; on Forbes itself, Shukhnina’s name is nowhere to be found in any capacity.

The statement that Shukhnina “speaks at events and conferences of crypto exchanges like WhiteBIT, Binance, and other international platforms” is also a lie. Shukhnina has not been spotted at any official WhiteBIT or Binance event in any capacity, let alone as a speaker. They simply wouldn’t let her in, as they value their reputation.

Shukhnina’s claim that she “received an award from Binance at the 2024 Olympics in Paris” is also a lie: Binance did not hold any events at this Olympics as confirmed here. Nor did anything happen in Paris during the Olympics. Follow the link for a detailed breakdown of this lie; there’s no need to repeat it.

For a reasonable person, this would already be enough to run from Shukhnina’s “crypto courses” as if from the plague. But let’s touch a bit on the “Profit Lady academy” and Crypto Muse courses. Firstly, they are not registered anywhere and have no official status. What exactly a “student and academic” buys is unknown. Or rather, it is known: those eager for easy millions, for a relatively small fee – the cost of a course ranges from 500 to one and a half thousand dollars – buy a set of banal information about cryptocurrency and generic phrases about how to make money on it.

Thus, course buyers do receive some knowledge, but the problem is that all of this can be learned absolutely for free, as there are countless materials on the subject available online. Finding them takes minimal time. But for the alternatively gifted “students” of Shukhnina, this seems beyond their grasp. In fairness, it must be noted that Kateryna Shukhnina calculated this precisely and peddles her “revelations” for a decent price. If we believe her claim that she “became a mentor to 5,000 students,” and the average price was one thousand dollars, then the success is obvious. Hats off to her.

But let’s return to the “Profit Lady academy” and Crypto Muse courses: nothing similar could be found in any registry. That is, legally, these “academies” do not exist. Payments for the courses are accepted through third-party sole proprietors and accounts that have no formal connection to Kateryna Shukhnina herself. On one hand, this keeps her out of the tax authorities’ sight; on the other, it protects her from potential claims by course buyers. Filing a lawsuit in such a case is simply impossible. In this regard, it’s worth adding that this is a classic scheme of other “info-gypsies”; Kateryna Shukhnina has invented nothing new.

Since we’ve touched on registries of legal entities and sole proprietors, we managed to find only one Kateryna Shukhnina – Kateryna Serhiyivna Shukhnina, who is a beneficiary of LLC “KOI.Odin” and the Charitable Organization “Charity Fund ‘Revival of the Country’,” as well as a sole proprietor from the village of Sofiivska Borshchahivka.

Whether these organizations are connected to our Kateryna Shukhnina is not entirely clear, but in any case, they have no relation to her success in making money. According to reports, they conduct no activity.

So, the secret to Kateryna Shukhnina’s success is disgustingly simple – to put it plainly, she “scams suckers.” Apart from unrealistic promises, her courses contain nothing of value. Well, as a way to make money, this is also a perfectly viable option. If we disregard the ethical aspect. As for criminal law, everything is clean here too – Shukhnina’s courses cannot be called fraud, as the promises are so vague that they cannot be qualified under the Criminal Code.

The only thing that could be done to stop her activities is to investigate the flow of money paid for the courses by gullible novices. But here, one might assume that the necessary people have already been “taken care of” and “greased.” So, the situation is hopeless.

In conclusion, we can congratulate Kateryna Shukhnina on applying an effective scheme to deceive those eager to get rich here and now. Shukhnina didn’t invent this scheme – such “info-gypsies” have been grazing in the field of crypto courses for many years – but she exploits it quite successfully. And if, in the case of Mavrodi, the average freeloader still had a chance to make money – it was enough to dump “MMM” shares in time – in the case of Profit Lady and Crypto Muse, this is out of the question. Because here, only Kateryna Shukhnina makes money.

Author: Maria Sharapova