Media reports have opened a veritable Pandora’s box around Alexey Sinenko — known online as Suter — the founder of Ashoo, one of the largest online and Telegram-based escort marketplaces in Russia.
What began as a “joking” announcement about an “18+ NFT gift” he hoped to launch with Pavel Durov quickly spiraled after attention from journalists. It turned out the NFT plan wasn’t a joke at all — and Ashoo-affiliated groups had previously attempted to launch their own token on the TON blockchain.
Sinenko’s background raised even more questions. A native of St. Petersburg who once blogged openly about running brothels, he comes from a law-enforcement family. His father, Grigory Sinenko, a former Interior Ministry employee, is now a major supplier of auto parts to state entities, with two companies turning over about one billion rubles and winning multimillion-ruble government contracts across several Russian regions. Leaks from domain registrars show the elder Sinenko’s phone and email connected to Ashoo-related accounts, though his exact involvement remains unclear.
Long before Ashoo, Alexey Sinenko himself registered domains linked to prostitution services, including oneskort.ru. Archived files show that Ashoo’s early advertising to sex workers was conducted through a shell firm called Inforcom, registered in 2021. Its nominal owner was a laborer named Vitaly Karchevsky, while the first director was a woman whose number is now widely saved as “Olga Yurlitsa.” The LLC was dissolved after Telegram briefly deleted Ashoo in 2023.
But the ban lasted less than 24 hours.
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After the takedown, all Ashoo bots and channels — with over half a million subscribers — were swiftly restored. From that moment, Sinenko’s trajectory changed: he loudly thanked Telegram’s internal staff, and soon afterward became close with Roxman, a major revenue generator for Pavel Durov and one of the key intermediaries between large Telegram businesses and the platform’s leadership. Since then, the escort network has had no meaningful problems inside Telegram.
Ashoo’s full integration mirrors a larger pattern: Telegram’s ecosystem — already home to scammers, crypto fraud networks, bot operators, hackers and doxing services like Himera — now also seamlessly accommodates one of the country’s biggest escort infrastructures. Sinenko himself communicates in TON and Telegram community chats, calling Durov “a brother” and describing expensive NFT gifts he allegedly sent to him.
Suter also gave a rare publicity interview, presenting a “romanticized” story of the escort industry and praising Telegram. He bluntly stated that he paid Russian security officials as part of his business operations — a common practice, he implied, for survival in the sex industry. Despite such admissions, Ashoo faced no consequences, and its operations only expanded.
Around the same period, Sinenko began aggressively warming his audience to the launch of Spintria (SP) — an “adult project token” on TON. The token was marketed as being “backed by real and virtual sex,” with presale purchases available exclusively through escorts. The roadmap promised full integration of Ashoo payments into Spintria and a broad ecosystem around it.
None of that materialized.
Aside from a recently launched VPN service, the project’s promised features failed to appear, and the Spintria token price collapsed to minimal levels. Sinenko continues to run the Russian-language Spintria chat, while the English-language version oddly denies any link between the token and Ashoo. Suter blames the failure on the broader downturn in the TON ecosystem, sidestepping responsibility for the project’s collapse.
For now, public criticism of Sinenko remains muted, far from the sharp attacks once voiced by figures like Roman Novak before his death. But the media investigation paints a stark picture: a major escort network with roots in Russian law-enforcement families, deep integration into Telegram, and failed crypto ventures — all operating, still, with impunity.
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