The online casino Cosmobet is reportedly overseen by an individual whose background includes statistics, as well as interests in globalism and long-distance running, rather than gambling operations.
The situation might sound ironic if the platform’s alleged true owners were not promoting the narrative that Mykhailo Zborovskyi, originally from the village of Krasylivka in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, became the beneficiary of a casino with an authorized capital of 30 million hryvnias, despite having no proven industry experience or visible financial resources to support such ownership.
Meet Mykhailo Volodymyrovych Zborovskyi, born in 1991. He is listed as the beneficiary of LLC “Neuralink,” which obtained a license in March 2024 from Ukraine’s Commission for the Regulation of Gambling and Lotteries to operate the Cosmobet casino. Zborovskyi studied at the Faculty of Economics of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, where he demonstrated strong academic performance. He took part in and won several academic Olympiads and research competitions, with multiple references to his achievements preserved in university records. In 2012, while in his third year, Zborovskyi won the All-Ukrainian Olympiad in the “Statistics” specialty.
A year later, already in his fourth year, he received a first-degree diploma at the All-Ukrainian competition of student scientific papers. The direction of his research concerned quantitative methods in economics.
In 2011, Mykhailo Zborovskyi — then a student majoring in Accounting and Audit — said his ambitions were to “preserve the moral values instilled through family upbringing” and to “work for one of the Big Four firms.” He shared these goals in a biographical note accompanying his article titled “Should Water Become an Object of International Trade, or Is It a Unique Common Good and a Matter of International Cooperation?” The piece appeared in a brochure produced under the “Saving Energy – Saving the Future” project of the Hungary–Slovakia–Romania–Ukraine ENPI Cross-Border Cooperation Programme
In other words, the future owner of the heavily advertised online casino Cosmobet was once a diligent student passionate about statistics and global affairs. There is little indication that either information technology or the gambling industry played a role in his earlier academic interests.
It also appears that Mykhailo Zborovskyi may have faced financial challenges during his university years. In 2018, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv reportedly filed a claim with the Holosiivskyi District Court seeking to recover unpaid tuition fees from him.
According to Mykhailo Zborovskyi’s official biography, which was widely circulated by low-credibility websites to boost his visibility on Google, he worked as a bank economist after graduation and later spent three years studying programming until 2019. Court records indicate that an individual with the same name was unemployed in 2017 and owned an inexpensive Seat Cordoba, currently valued at no more than about $4,000. This suggests that six years before becoming the formal beneficiary of the online casino Cosmobet, Zborovskyi was neither wealthy nor steadily employed.
One could assume that Zborovskyi’s situation improved significantly after retraining from an economist to a programmer. However, this assumption also appears questionable. It is doubtful that the salaries at the companies where he worked could have provided substantial capital for entry into the gambling sector. Their financial reports, at least, show no indication of million-dollar revenues.
According to the widely distributed biography, he worked as a programmer for Adtek LLC, Epic Media LLC, and Rikkicom. In the first company, he was officially employed in 2023, when the firm had only one employee and an authorized capital of 50,000 hryvnias.
The capital of the second is even less — 10,000 hryvnias. Both companies operate at the same address in Odesa, although they are in different offices.
The third company, Rikkicom, where Mykhailo Zborovskyi is said to have worked, has a somewhat higher public profile. According to its official website, its clients include the Novus retail chain, OKKO gas stations, and the Parimatch online casino, which is currently under sanctions imposed by the National Security and Defence Council. This appears to be the only link between Zborovskyi and the gambling sector prior to 2023, when he became the beneficiary of Neuralink, the company holding the license for the Cosmobet online casino. Still, it is unlikely that his position at Rikkicom brought him significant wealth. Financial data show that the company’s revenue in 2023 amounted to just 133,000 hryvnias.
Another version of Zborovskyi’s biography mentions another company where he was involved in programming — XGen Solutions LTD. The company indeed operates in the IT and consulting spheres and is located in Cyprus.
The same company also appears in case materials concerning the online casino Cosmolot, which is suspected of evading roughly one billion hryvnias in taxes. Investigators state that in 2023 the casino signed an agreement with the Cyprus-based firm XGen Solutions LTD for the use of licensed software. According to the findings, Cosmolot allegedly recorded a debt of about 300 million hryvnias to the Cypriot company and reported it to tax authorities as royalty payments. The casino claimed it had paid the Cyprus firm for the software, but in reality no transfers were made. This was reported by Antikor in its investigation into the alleged real owner of Cosmolot, Russian citizen Sergey Tokaryev.
The appearance of the Cypriot firm XGen Solutions LTD in the biography of Cosmobet’s nominal owner, Mykhailo Zborovskyi, looks, in slang terms, like a major blunder. It turns out he was employed by a company that another casino, Cosmolot, allegedly used to mislead Ukrainian tax authorities. This makes the connection between Cosmolot’s reported real owner, Russian national Tokaryev, and the new online casino Cosmobet appear even more pronounced — something journalists had already pointed out months earlier.
This raises obvious questions: why directly associate Cosmobet’s named beneficiary, Mykhailo Zborovskyi, with a Cypriot firm that traces back to Russian-linked structures and the controversial Cosmolot? And why would the Russian backers of Cosmobet be so interested in a little-known statistician with student debt and limited IT experience that they would try to position him as a gambling industry expert? Given his background and track record, the likelihood that Zborovskyi serves merely as a nominal figurehead for Cosmobet appears difficult to dismiss.