A recent Blockchain Sports Ponzi promo event in Belarus has seen local media ask uncomfortable questions.

Supposedly at the root of Belarus’ government embracing crypto Ponzi fraud is Chinese debt.

Back in October residents of Gomel, a city in Belarus, woke to cars being “drifted” by drivers from Japan, Australia, the Netherlands, Thailand and Brazil.

The promo was a marketing campaign for Blockchain Sports, an MLM crypto Ponzi run by convicted fraudster Dmitriy Saksonov.

When BehindMLM first looked into Blockchain Sports earlier this year, Saksonov represented he was based out of Brazil. Saksonov appears to have since relocated to the UAE.

Blockchain Sports initially launched in 2023. The original Ponzi was built around SPORTS and FTBLL tokens.

After the first Ponzi collapsed, an NFT grift reboot was launched as part of the collapsed Daisy Global Ponzi scheme.

With Daisy Global collapsing for a third and final time in December 2023, Saksonov and Blockchain Sports then came up with an AI drifting marketing ruse around mid 2024.

BelTA, Belarus’ state-owned news agency, is reported to have relentlessly pitched Blockchain Sports’ recent marketing event to locals.

Foreign pilots in professional drift cars collect data for an AI-controlled car by conducting races on special stages, and the best Belarusian drifters hospitably show off the most picturesque places in the country.

A November 17th investigative report from Nasha Niva states these claims “do not stand up to criticism”.

If you brush away the dust in your eyes, the outlines of another murky story around Shanter Hill, Shakutin’s long-term construction project near Drozdy, appear.

Brushing aside drifting as a motor racing subculture with no mainstream appeal, Hawa Hiba reports most of Blockchain Sports’ drivers “are minor figures whose names are absent from the tournament tables of serious drift leagues”.

The cars used in Blockchain Sports’ event were owned by three Belarusian drivers. None of the drifting “stars” Blockchain Sports’ touted appeared in any driving footage.

It is not clear exactly how long the guests were allowed to hold the steering wheel; they do not appear in the video reports inside the cars; they mostly bow to the press.

BelTA published comical photos of the “guest stars” sitting as extras and shaking their heads on the second floor of a tourist bus, around which Belarusians are dancing.

And one of the Japanese admits that this is the first time he has dealt with a left-hand drive drift car (in Japan, traffic is on the left side).

Supposedly Blockchain Sports’ event was held to gather data to feed into an AI model that would eventually drift cars on its own.

As Nasha Niva points out though, AI controlled drifting was performed successfully nine years ago in the US.

In case it wasn’t obvious, Blockchain Sports’ “AI drifting” ruse isn’t supposed to make sense. It’s a simple gateway to a “Drift Pool” fraudulent investment scheme.

As a result of prior scamming, Dmitriy Saskanov was sentenced to four years in prison at the end of 2018.

Upon release Saskanov went right back to scamming, this time through cryptocurrency.

In the lead up to Blockchain Sports’ Belarus marketing event;

In September 2024, Saksonov organized a joint photo shoot with a pseudo-investment fund, claiming that he was being allocated three billion dollars allegedly in Saudi Arabia.

At the same time, he sent out “news” to Belarusian media that his company X-Labs Inc. was being allocated (by whom – unknown) Shakutin’s unfinished Shanter Hill facility for advanced IT developments.

The claims turned out, not surprisingly, to be bogus. But the Shanter Hill facility did feature in Blockchain Sports’ Belarus marketing campaign.

The final location around which the drifters were doing their advertising turns was… “Shanter Hill”!

In no way remarkable, against the backdrop of historical landmarks, a place – an empty, unfinished building. Unless you consider that it is about to slip out of the hands of the owner, who does not have enough money to complete the project.

They drove cameras under the facade, laid a red carpet to the deserted building, lit up the spotlights over the heads of the extras.

They kicked the expired star Til Schweiger out of the car. They recorded it on video and dispersed.

Saskanov’s ties to the Belarusian government are reported to be through Dmitry Baskov, a Belarusian senator.

Baskov was originally pitched on Blockchain Sports’ first football themed crypto Ponzi scheme.

The founder of the Blockchain Sports Ecosystem project, Dmitry Saksonov, approached me with an initiative to develop football,” the Senator’s website reports .

“As a member of the Council of the Republic responsible for sports, I could not refuse him. This is a truly interesting project that deserves attention and support. […]

Such projects make classic sports more attractive to a young audience, so I hope that with the help of the Blockchain Sports Ecosystem we will attract many boys to sports […].”

Blockchain Sports’ initial football ruse Ponzi led to a “football carnival” held at the Dinamo Stadium in Minsk.

The bottom line from these two weeks? Tons of content with Blockchain Sports banners in recognizable locations across the country.

The exact nature of the business relationship between Blockchain Sports’ Saskanov and Alexander Shakutin, the owner of the stalled Shanter Hill facility and a family friend of President Alexander Lukashenko, is unclear.

Nasha Niva reports what has been built of Shanter Hill was done so with money borrowed from Chinese lenders.

The publication opines that Saskanov may be looking to attract naive investors in the UAE to pay off Shakutin’s debt.

Til Schweiger was drafted in to step out of his car and into the void of Shanter Hill, which was unfinished with unpaid Chinese money.

One could also suspect Senator Baskov, who is greedy for problematic assets (here we mean the battery plant in Brest and the solar station in Chechersk), of playing with others’ hands, deceiving the state with fairy tales and avoiding direct conflict with Shakutin. But there are few facts for this version, time will tell.

The most extravagant version we heard is that, while talking about blockchain, Shakutin himself is trying to find money where it is – in Arab venture funds. This could help solve his problem. A magic wand.

If we manage to find non-critical investors and instill in them the image of a Belarusian blockchain paradise, then the legally obtained funds could be used to pay off the Chinese loan, and as for the fate of the startups themselves, we can shrug our shoulders – it didn’t work out, it didn’t work out.

And Saksonov ended up at Shakutin’s fingertips and, with his competencies, looks like an ideal candidate for finding suckers?

Sitting here with hindsight, it’s not unreasonable to suggest the original plan was to have gullible Daisy Global Ponzi investors pay off Shakutin’s debt and then disappear.

That fell through with Daisy Global collapsing. And so now we have the AI drift circus, evidently being desperately pitched to potential UAE investors.

As of October 2024, SimilarWeb tracked ~10,000 monthly visits to Blockchain Sports’ website. This is up from just ~5700 monthly visits in September.

Speaking to Blockchain Sports’ drift marketing event in Belarus, top sources of traffic to Blockchain Sports’ website are Belarus (56%), the US (16%) and Brazil (15%).

To the extent Belarusians might be falling for Blockchain Sports and investing as retail consumers, one would hope local authorities take action.

In reality though, what with the Belarusian government helping to promote Blockchain Sports, that sadly seems unlikely.