ALERT!

BEWARE THE UKRAINE CARTOON CAPER

June 27, 2023 -Durt Fibo

Screenshot from the series

A few months ago, an animated series began appearing, seemingly structured around no other storyline beyond how horrendous life in Ukraine is. The cartoons are bespangled with virtually identical assertions to those repeated in the Russian media, including showing Volodymyr Zelenskyi as drug addicted, maniacal loser who force-feeds his countrymen into a giant meat grinder. The series is only identified as “Ukraine Inc.”, and is promoted as being produced by a French studio.

No such “French studio” has been found. The sites playing (or purporting to be) the cartoons are simply named Ukraine Inc. and beautysupplies direct.com. The former site has absolutely no information regarding who or what they are, and the latter is merely a full screen of written random run-on words -also with no reference to who or what it is. What is known is that the cartoon series is almost exclusively promoted in Russia, and to strongly pro-Russian media targets elsewhere.

Insofar as the phantom French studio’s activities can be traced in the west, Ukraine Inc. only appears as ukraine-inc.info, a domain which is registered to PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com. This PDR Ltd (etc.) is an an anonymity-protection domain registrar, which as of this writing claims to be “a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Endurance International Group, Inc.”, which is itself a defunct corporation that -just one year after after its 2018 $8 million fine by the SEC for fraud- sold itself to Clearlake Capital Group. A soon disgruntled Clearlake stuffed its Endurance junk into a drawer called Newfold Digital. Newfold is at present registered by Network Solutions, LLC in Virginia. The actual hosting appears to be by Newfold Digital, Inc., in Florida, a company with an odoriferous history of monopoly buying and monopoly reselling of names, sites, and ‘services’ in addition to being a haven for scams. Beautysuppliesdirect is also registered anonymously, but by the GoDaddy offshoot Domains By Proxy, LLC, a troublesome registrar in Arizona regularly accused of hosting sites engaged in illegal activities (fraud, marketing non-existent merchandise, copyright violations, ad infinitum).

Due to the backgrounds -such as they are- of the sites and links, I would hesitate to risk clicking on any of them. The poorly done, computerized animated series was last seen (minutes ago) being well promoted on Facebook by, among others, Goji berries, which turns out to be a page self-described as an “AIDS Resource Center” with 3 followers. It is also being run in paid Facebook ads. This article, coincidentally, was blocked from Facebook.