đď¸ I Found Epstein. I Just Didn't Realize it.
In 2019, I investigated a Russian-led influence-peddling operation. Last week, I found out who was behind it.
Welcome to the weekly installment of Dark Markets, a newsletter about technology and financial fraud. Iâm David Z. Morris, veteran tech and finance reporter, PhD historian of technology, and author of Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.
Welcome to all the new subscribers from Left Hook. To celebrate, Iâm offering the first discount ever on premium subscriptions - 20% off an annual signup. It will be valid for two weeks. I wonât hard sell you on the value of the subscription this week - thereâs just too much to get to.
Endurance Hunting
The thing about investigative journalism is, you canât win âem all.
At least, not right away.
In late 2018, I started work at Breaker Magazine, a small and ultimately short-lived startup publication focused on crypto. It was an incredible time, and I was able to fully unleash my investigative impulses. I collaborated several times with Larry Cermak, then writer at a small newsletter, but now CEO of The Block. Larry and I share both a nose for bullshit, and utter, raging contempt for fakes, liars, and cheats.
It was Larry who first spotted Jeffrey Epsteinâs malignant hand. But neither of us knew it at time.
In November of 2018, Larry sent this Tweet, calling out âthis obvious pay for play article,â written for the Forbes Contributor Network by a lawyer called Andrew Rossow. Larry was, with the vigor of youth, acting out of instinct. If it wasnât paid PR, he allowed, it was at least âincredibly lazy journalism.â
But I was soon able to confirm that the article, and much of Rossowâs work as a whole, was literally pay-to-play. Rossow, inexplicably, was publishing to the Forbes Contributor Network while publicly listed as a team member for a public relations firm called Crypto PR Lab.
Breaker had just published a totally badass expose by the incredible Corin Faife, showing how easy it was for a crypto project to buy what looked like news coverage. Unfortunately, Breakerâs archives are gone, but this followup piece summarizes Corinâs shocking findings: about half of crypto ânews outletsâ at the time were actually pay-for-play frauds.
It was and remains a huge problem across the crypto industry, and is effectively a tool for investment fraud. We pursued CryptoPRLab as part of that reporting, not because we had any inkling of the deeper connections behind it.
In fact, I didnât figure those out at all - until last week.
Even within the narrow scope of that investigation, I didnât ultimately get enough to satisfy my editors at Breaker, so we never published a story about Crypto PR Lab and M&A PR. Forbes never touched the specific article in question, which is an incredible time capsule - notably including an endorsement for Celsius, which turned out to be an abject fraud, run by Russian emigre Alex Mashinsky. While Forbes didnât pull the article, Rossowâs contributions notably halt precisely in November of 2018.
Like I said, you win some, you lose some.
But some may have noticed that Andrew Rossow wasnât the real story at all.
The latest tranche of Epstein emails included massive new revelations about Masha Prusakova, a former Russian Olympic Snowboarder - shown above as a cofounder of Crypto PR Lab.
Masha Prusakova was, before and during her work placing fraudulent news coverage about cryptocurrency, a large-scale international procurer of women and girls for Jeffrey Epstein.
A chronology assembled on Reddit suggests she was at least a strategically willing participant, starting in 2011, in Epsteinâs world. In one email, Prusakova refers to herself as Epsteinâs âMadam.â Iâve already seen her referred to as âThe Paris Ghislaine [Maxwell]â (apparently she was partly based there).
The above Reddit archive also links documents showing Epstein paying for Prusakovaâs housing at UC Berkeley when she attended law school circa 2016.
According to sources, Prusakova was for a time part of CoinTelegraph, a crypto news website owned by an anonymous Russian who claims to be an anti-Putin dissident. Strangely enough, CoinTelegraph tried to recruit myself and another member of the Breaker team after the startup folded in mid-2019. They flew us out to London and put us up in an insanely extravagant hotel, which was suspect even in crypto media. We had lunch with a very nice English fellow and a very beautiful but surreally overdone Russian woman.
We passed on the offer.
Prusakova later surfaced as head of events at Polygon, a legitimate company by crypto standards. She may also have run events for a firm called Aethircloud. (EDIT: I now have a second source confirming her role at Aethircloud.)
There were good reasons we didnât wind up publishing our findings at Breaker. But you can imagine I have some regrets about it.
Masha Drokova - from Epstein PR to Crypto Fraud to VC Mogul
And thatâs not all - not by a long shot.
The unpublished Breaker story also touched on a firm then operating as M&A PR Lab. We learned through an email accidentally sent to the editor of another crypto news site that M&A was paying ⌠the same Andrew Rossow for âcopy editingâ while he was writing articles as a journalist. We also found a Google Doc that showed Rossow actively collaborating with M&A PR on a story about one of their clients to be published under Rossowâs byline at a site called NullTX. Iâve archived that document here, though it no longer includes Rossowâs interactions.
It appears that M&A PR and Crypto PR Lab were in several senses a unified operation, with a shared network of writers equally willing to shill for crypto frauds ⌠and convicted pedophiles.
The head of M&A PR was a Russian nearly as nefarious as Prusakova: Masha Drokova, aka Masha Bucher. Drokova was known, even at the time of our investigation, as a former pro-Putin activist, who had starred in the documentary Putinâs Kiss.
That film in retrospect looks a bit like a sheep-dip operation to paint her as moving away from Putin so she could come to the U.S. clean, and there have been widespread doubts about Bucherâs actual allegiances. This seems partly confirmed by the latest Epstein emails, in which Bucher asks Epstein to introduce her to âadequate Russian oligarchsâ to fund her venture firm.
Hereâs Drokova hitting my personal email account in 2016 with an impressively stupid pitch for Pokemon Go insurance from Sbersbank. (Lol, lmao). She was seemingly operating solo at the time, without a corporate tag, for bargain-basement clients.
The next year, Jeffrey Epstein would hire Masha Drokova to attempt to scrub the internet of records of his crimes.
Working for Epstein was Drokovaâs first step towards becoming, seven years later, the semi-celebrated head of a firm called Day One VC, under the name Masha Bucher. âI would never create my fund without the ideas and knowledge you shared with me,â she wrote to Epstein in a 2019 text reported last week, ironically enough, by Forbes.
Day Oneâs portfolio firms includ Elon Muskâs xAI and Sam Altmanâs World (Formerly WorldCoin, a project almost as nakedly evil as Palantir.)
Unethical payments to Rossow were just one piece of evidence that Drokova and M&A PR were effectively behind the scenes partners with Crypto PR Lab. The two firms appear to have used a shared network of writers including Rossow, Rachel Wolfson, Sarah Austin (also above), and Josiah Motley, writing across a series of easily-gamed âcontributor networksâ including Forbes and Thrive Global, Ariana Huffingtonâs health thing.
One notorious instance of Epsteinâs PR efforts is this 2017 Next Web article from a writer going by Dylan Love. As is typical of this genre of chicanery, it didnât mention Epsteinâs conviction until it was later revised.
I can find no evidence of Dylan Loveâs current existence, aside from a blank home page. But an archive of the page hints at Russian connections.
Update Feb 17: The Cyrillic text above reads âMost of all I'm interested in working with clients from Russia!â
I also overlooked a direct mention of Dylan Love by Epstein, included in the big Forbes piece on Drosokova, which confirms she was the agent behind the Next Web article. Epstein writes: âRich [Epstein accountantâs Richard Kahn] send Masha 25k, Masha feel free to give some to Dylan.â
This confirms not only that Drokova was working directly for Epstein, but also that the writers were being paid by the PR shop while representing themselves as journalists to media outlets - clear and unambiguous fraud.
Thanks to Anna Baydakova at Control, Spy, Delete for the translation, and the pointer to the Forbes piece.
The latest email dump includes Jeffrey Epstein emailing himself a copy of a similar 2017 piece authored by Rachel Wolfson, praising Epsteinâs science funding. It seems very likely this was part of Drokova and/or Prussoâs services for him. (Hat tip to Jess Klein for this one.)
The propaganda network created puff pieces not just for Epstein and other clients, but about Drokova and Prusakova personally. This archived piece by Josiah Motley is particularly revealing, in a counterintuitive sense.
Note the strong emphasis on the uniqueness of women working in crypto. This lines up a little too neatly with Epsteinâs tactics, seen in things like his sponsoring of a Swedish âFemale Economist of the Yearâ award: he used promotion of women not just as a recruiting tool, but as PR chaff (and likely some sort of internal psychological self-defense).
Some of the self-promotional tactics were subtler. Sarah Austin wrote two different pieces for Thrive Global that sandwiched Crypto PR Lab into her coverage of Davos, along with hidden advertisements for a short-term Davos apartment rental site, davos-apartments.com. According to one source that used the service, Masha Prusakova ran those (reportedly sketchy) Davos rentals.
In a statement on Twitter/X, Austin has defended her association with Prusakova, writing: âWhile I was not staff, I am friends with Masha and Iâve helped her without pay as a mentor through ghostwriting and content ideas as a young woman in tech because I believe itâs important to send the ladder down. Epstein had thousands of publicists.â
Note again the pro-woman pablum thrown up as a sheild.
Thrive Global at some point may have noticed the deceptive links and content: both of those fraudulent articles have been removed.
How to Smell a Rat
Obviously in all this, Breaker and I didnât work our way up to Jeffrey Epstein. He was for much of the time in question already in jail in Manhattan - and by August of 2019, both he and Breaker were dead.
There are good reasons to believe Epstein at least influenced Prusakova and Drokovaâs paths, including Drokovaâs own statements. But the bigger question is whether there was any specific strategy to it. We know that Epstein was very interested in cryptocurrency, and the new emails show he networked with figures includuding Brock Pierce and Adam Back.
The M&A PR/Crypto PR Lab network seems to have been pursuing unethical but not unusual goals - a lot of their clients were effectively pump-and-dump âInitial Coin Offerings,â which were very popular on Ethereum at the time. They astroturfed fake coverage as a way to defraud would-be crypto investors.
But so did dozens, maybe even hundreds of small âCrypto PRâ shops at the time. There were and are ethical shops in the field who do it right, but Prusokova and Drosokova were among the dregs, happy to pay for coverage under the table and misrepresent their own motives. Their work, even on its own terms as accessories to fraud, was unconvincing and unimpressive.
Larry Cermak, after all, saw right through the initial Andrew Rossow article, with its lengthy, credulous praise of obvious low-rent frauds. In my conversations with various crypto industry types over the past 24 hours, Iâve heard again and again that Prusokova was weird, pushy, and half-competent in her various roles. People got bad vibes from her, and remembered it.
Drokova quickly rose above interacting with mere mortals, but I think the photos in her various profiles speak strange volumes. Thereâs something deeply frightened about her, an absence.
But more importantly, a critical mass of the media about both of them is detectably fake for people with a degree of 21st century media literacy. Itâs not just the fawning profiles in weird off-brand platforms like Thrive Global, but also the vapid âthink pieces,â itâs the faux-Davos fake Q+As on micro-follower Instagram accounts.
Itâs amazing training material. Survey all of this and see what it looks like when your entire life is astroturfed.
Sometimes it turns your soul plastic, too.
And sometimes - a lot of the time, in fact - a small evil is just part of a much, much bigger one.
"
There were and are ethical shops in the field who do it right
"
Curious for some examples, because, in my mind, ethical means honesty and transparency. Crypto PR is very rarely transparent about who's paying for the PR. And I doubt highly after the thousandth claim that /this/ crypto token is actually going to be the revolutionary one, that they believe most of what they write or say.
I'd say on a spectrum of dishonesty and duplicity, crypto PR shops (along with crypto influencers like Logan Paul) are barely a step up from crypto lobbyists, whom I loathe.
But let's face it, you can't just âbuild it and they will come.â Even in Fields of Dreams, where that line comes from, the main character was basically on assignment. He knew there was an existing, desiring market that sought him out directly (as ghosts, but still). Otherwise, you can't just build a baseball diamond in the middle of nowhere, tell no one, and expect anyone to come.
So how does one do crypto PR ethically? And possibly successfully?
One solution, I think, is double-blind task assignment and apparent, censorship-proof payment and assignment details using what crypto is best at, a visible and immutable ledger.
Now, to be double blind, that would actually require a pool of possible requestors and a pool of possible fulfillers.
Let's say the fulfiller pool isâoff the top of my headâDZM, SamCZSun, ZachXBT, Molly White, Gupta Mudit, Coffeezilla, Jeff Roberts, and Nathan Anderson. Each of these are respected names in cutting through finance BS, many specializing in crypto BS, and can probably command similar rates. (I've read something by all of them, except Coffeezilla, as I refuse to watch YouTube videos for information, except maybe how to assemble or disassemble something.) Rate for each person is fixed at $500 per hour. Not per word, but per hour. And the minimum job is $5000. Thus, the requester is guaranteed 10 hours of work if the job is acceptable. If the requester wants to offer longer jobs, that is fine, but that's up to the fulfillerâs discretion. If fulfillers want to spend extra, uncompensated time on the assignment, that's also up to them.
A github, or the like, will detail each fulfiller's crypto addresses for their work. But you cannot send funds directly to them. Instead you need to send the funds to an intermediary vault address. The transaction should include both the funds and instructions. The transaction must come from a âcleanâ address.
Since we're just talking about PR assignments, the OpSec does not need to be insane on âclean.â A clean address can be one that has never been used before except to get funded, e.g. by Coinbase or similar centralized exchange for example. If the requester wants to use something fancy like Railgun for the funding, that's fine. But if the proposed payment does not seem sufficiently anonymous, then the assignment can be rejected.
Similarly, the assignment details need to be sufficiently anonymous. A piece on, say, a single, specific crypto project may not be. If these were less scrupulous fulfillers, I'd say it absolutely wouldn't be. Because less scrupulous fulfillers would always write glowing praise, and thus the crypto projectâs proponents would be who is requesting the assignment. These as-far-as-I-know-scrupulous writers (for the most part they are writers) though are more likely to expose a project as BS than shovel glowing praise onto it, so the requester's identity is slightly obfuscated, as it could be a competitor requesting the profile. Still, there should be a rule that no actual specific projects should be named in the request. Instead the assignment should be more amorphous. A typical acceptable request might be a âtop 5 / 10 / 20â piece based on an uncontroversial metric. E.g. âTopic: Top 5 DePIN projects by Token Market Capâ or âTopic: Top 10 Stablecoin projects by Total Value Lockedâ.
So, funds get sent to the intermediary address, along with the instructions. The instructions can simply be included in the transaction details. A sentence or two shouldn't be too expensive for any major blockchain, and the instructions should be sparse. Then there's a one week cooling period where /any/ of the fulfillers can reject the request as not anonymous enough. They can also, via blockchain, request further information and the requester can provide it, until the week is over. At that point, unless the request was denied for not being anonymous enough (or possibly other ethical groundsâthough, these potential grounds should be described and posted in advanced), one of the fulfillers is randomly/programmatically selected and /has/ to do the assignment. That is, the selected person associated with the randomly selected wallet must spend those hours in good faith on the topic. That's the extent. They should be expected to âshow their workâ but that does not mean a finished, polished copy that meets the entirety of the request.
Then, once done, the work is published permanently and directly by the author/creator. Of course, again, I'd recommend using blockchain to capture the work, such as an NFT that is public to all, but sent to the requester's wallet. Now, for that, some chains will be far more expensive (Bitcoin), so the publishing should not require the same blockchain as the payment/assignment. It just needs to be a resource (blockchain) with a fair likelihood of longevity and anti-censorship.
As far as the rights of the requester or anyone as to what to do with the final NFT/content? What stipulations should be made regarding distribution, modification, and/or attribution by the requesterâor anyone? Well, my knee-jerk reaction is just have all content have a CC0 license. But how does a CC0 license fit into a world that might scrape your work, then shovel your work into an AI, then spit it out as a mangled unattributed mess, all while claiming attribution isn't possible, while ignoring that AI not preserving attribution was likely built that way specifically to hide IP theft?
Regardless, I'm sure the fulfillers can come up with sensible rules that aren't applied ad hoc and are detailed in advance.
But, yeah, ethical PR. Sounds hard.
[edit 5 minutes later. Oh and the Datafinnovation guys, they would be added to the group too. I started to read the next substack and remembered their excellent takedown of Barry Silbert.]