07/1/2003 - 12:00 AM ET

The Viktoria (Vika) Zazoulina and Tatiana (Tanya) Kostiouk story, a Sports911 exclusive.

Christopher Costigan, Sports911.com

In the early 90’s a young intelligent Ukrainian woman named Viktoria Zazoulina and her husband Yury Zazouline immigrated to Canada and settled in the picturesque west coast city of Vancouver BC Canada. Viktoria or Vika as she was known to friends and coworkers was a hard working ambitious woman and though she had graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in Russia as a mining engineer, took up accounting as a profession in her new country. Yury, though diminutive, was an avid sportsman and martial artist and found work as an installer of an accounting software package called AccPac because of his strong technical abilities. Once in Vancouver the new immigrants networked through the Ukrainian and Russian community and soon became close friends with another recent immigrant family, Tatiana Kostiouk (Tanya to her friends) and her husband. Tanya was also a Ukrainian immigrant and was also studying to be a Canadian designated professional accountant and soon became inseparable friends with Vika.

Vika and Tanya at "work" - Fall 2002

In the mid 90’s Vika took a full time position with a company named Kazootek Technologies Ltd. Kazootek offered services to the online gaming sector, most famously BoDog Sportsbook & Casino, but also lesser-known brands such as (formerly) The Big Book & Casino. Vika started out as a junior accountant and was quickly noticed as an up and comer in the organization. She worked long hours and showed (on the surface) good judgment. Her superiors where so impressed that they not only advanced her quickly and increased her pay, but also took over paying for all her schooling towards her CGA designation (the Canadian equivalent of CPA). Within a few years she ran the entire accounting department and hired her best friend Tanya into Kazootek to be her second in command.

By the late 90’s Vika was also in charge of all eCommerce operations for Kazootek and both her and Tanya were signing officers of the many bank accounts they managed on behalf of others world wide and each of these accounts needed two signatures. In addition they were legal officers of most of the companies they managed the funds flow for. They both had the highest level of fiduciary duty that exists in law to the companies they worked for or managed and this was in addition to the contractual duties they owed under their employment agreements. At this time Vika, from a starting salary of around $30,000 was making over $100,000 a year after bonuses and getting flown to conferences all over the Americas and getting many other benefits such as a fully paid education. She was becoming a well-known executive in the on-line gaming industry that Kazootek offered services too. By all accounts this is the typical story of immigrant success, smart hard working immigrants land with nothing and in less than a decade are powerful and influential members of their adopted society.

However, in this case there was a dark and dirty secret in their lives that was destined to destroy them all, and a few of their friends and family in the process. Only they know how it actually started but this much is known for sure, on June 15th of 2001, Vika and Tanya signed what would be the first of many checks that embezzled money from their employers, the shareholders and their friends. At first they only took a bit every month by check. They probably thought that they deserved a bit extra, it's always easy to justify to yourself why you should have more. Vika and Tanya could not see how this could be discovered as they controlled everything and only took a bit relative to the amounts of money they managed. Initially the checks were payable to themselves, or Tanya’s ailing mother, Mariya Rozhak. In November 2001 they created a new company that they owned and with a name similar to real suppliers and put this company in between them and the accounts they stole from. When the checks came back after being cashed, Tanya would take the original out and shred it. They would code the transaction as a legitimate payment like a supplier of some sort so that reconciliation would balance and then it would be forgotten.

The money was used to finance a lavish lifestyle for both of them and their families. There was new furniture, new homes, new cars and trips to Las Vegas and Mexico together with their husbands. All of this coming out of the monies that would have gone to calculating the bonuses for their coworkers and building the business as they had committed. They lived a lie every day. They became very good at living the lie, it became normal and any guilt they may have felt soon disappeared. As the amount of money they managed grew, the amount they helped themselves to also grew and so did their ambitions. Sometime in the summer of 2002 a new and much more insidious plan was hatched. They would not only increase the amount of money they embezzled, but Vika and Tanya would set up their own group of companies in parallel to Kazootek that would use all the intellectual property they stole from Kazootek and offer it out to competitors of Kazootek’s clients. They would also use all the contacts they had developed while working for Kazootek and most dangerously of all, they decided to steal one of Kazootek’s major clients, The Big Book & Casino. In effect Kazootek was going to pay to finance its own assassination! This would be a huge blow to all of their direct coworkers if successful since many would undoubtedly lose their jobs, but nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of their ambitions, not even the well being of the ones around them who considered them to be close friends.

Vika partying it up in South America in the fall of 2002 and at the Kazootek Christmas 2002 staff party with Tanya.

The first thing they did was sell the plan to one of their assistants at Kazootek, a bright but highly unpopular and abrasive junior named Greg Tanner. Greg Tanner was fairly new to Kazootek. He had just finished university and this was his first serious job. He was highly ambitious and with few moral qualms about what was being proposed to him. Though only in his early 20’s, he agreed to become the founding President of the group of companies being set up in parallel to Kazootek and would quit Kazootek and work full time on this covert conspiracy.

He, with the help of Yury Zazoline and other immigrant personal friends of Vika’s including Vladimir (Walter) Ousatiouk and Oleksandr (Alex) Zarud, set up a company called Seymour Finance Ltd and also a website called vcheckexpress.com, which was essentially a knock off of the highly successful “Direct Bank Transfer” system which had been developed by coworkers at Kazootek and used to great success by one of their clients, BoDog Sportsbook & Casino. Though he had to have known about the embezzlement long before ---  after all, where was all the money coming from --- Yury showed himself to be particularly callus and equally as much of a sociopath as Vika and Tanya by attending Kazootek parties and functions at the same time as he was a direct coconspirator in embezzling funds and stealing other properties of Kazootek. He would show up and smile and swap small talk with all the same people he was shafting, while also eating and drinking all he could hold.

Vika and Yury at the Kazootek Christmas 2002 Party and other staff functions

While the others did this, Vika and Tanya would stay on at Kazootek and continue to bleed it for the benefit of their new illegal project, both financially and intellectually. Though essentially a second level conspirator, Greg Tanner earned the enmity of all when he sited ethical concerns with management at Kazootek as his reason for quitting, this at the same time as he was involved in a conspiracy that if successful would not only violate every duty he owed, but would quite likely wipe out the employment of all his coworkers. Its funny how often in life the guy pointing the finger at others is the real evil one in the crowd. Sadly, we see this so often in the online gaming industry!

Greg Tanner enjoying a day at sea courtesy of Kazootek's Top Management

Everything was progressing amazingly well. Nobody suspected anything and the plan was right on course, but mistakes were starting to be made. Vika and Tanya were so confident, after all they had been taking money for years with out problems, that they were starting to feel omni powerful. They controlled how all documents were filed with the government so instead of paying Greg a salary, they filed his employment documents as if he was laid off so that he could collect unemployment insurance from the Canadian Government. Now they were defrauding the government of Canada, not just their employer and friends. Additionally, since they did not want to pay for benefits, and since they controlled the benefits program of Kazootek, they just left Greg Tanner on Kazootek’s benefits program. They also started to take even more money only now they were wiring it directly to Seymour Finances company accounts in the US making Greg Tanner as the president of Seymour also a direct participant in the criminal embezzlement of funds from Kazootek. They shredded the actual bank wire documents, as they had the checks, only this time they created fake ones for the files, but it was getting harder and harder to find places to put the big transfers in the accounting system to keep them below the radar. They were now creating their own crime wave and there was no turning back.

This still never brought them down, but then they really stepped out. Vika secretly cut a deal with the owners of The Big Book & Casino, dragging them into the conspiracy. The plan was to pry the entire operation of The Big Book, including a full source code license to the software out of Kazootek’s management and over to their new company. Top management at Kazootek was in the middle of negotiating a new extension on the Joint Venture deal and could not understand how their joint venture partner seemed to know so much that should have been confidential. Additionally the partner now wanted to go out on their own even though they knew nothing about the industry or operation of an on-line gaming company. At this time Vika actually had the audacity to publicly support the cancellation of the joint venture to other members of management at Kazootek, even though this was something that was not in her jurisdiction and was uncharacteristic of her. Closed door meetings were held by top management and it was decided that, though nobody could believe Vika or Tanya would jeopardize what were incredibly good management positions, there was enough strange things happening that something had to be done. Other factors that were discussed was the significantly deteriorating job performance of both Vika and Tanya over the last few months, and the huge amount of extra management they all of a sudden demanded. A clandestine program of research into the activities of Vika and Tanya was initiated, with nobody coming even close to suspecting what this would turn into, and most thinking it was an over reaction.

It all came to a head when Vika walked into her direct superior's office Monday Feb. 17^th, 2003 and gave two weeks notice. This was only a few days after the investigation was initiated and was only a week before she would have gotten a rather large bonus check. Given this and that there is no way an accountant could have replaced the money she was getting paid at Kazootek on the current job market, warning bells went off all over the office. Her resignation was accepted, but not with her sitting around covering up any evidence for the next two weeks, she was escorted out of the office on the spot. Her computer and office were sealed and forensically audited. Tanya was fired shortly there after and had the same thing done to her computer and office. The entire accounting system was also forensically audited going back to source documents with Banks, not relying on anything in the files or accounting system. The whole conspiracy unraveled in real time from there forward and it is amazing how sloppy they truly were in hiding their trail. Their only hope of not getting discovered would have been for no one to bother to look. All the evidence of their years of duplicity came tumbling out and the more you pulled the longer the string got.

When the dust settled they had embezzled hundreds of thousand of dollars and had a nice but now useless office across town. They never were successful in getting a copy of the eCommerce system source code to set up the Big Book, which they needed for their initial cash flow so never generated any revenues. They are now facing the prospect of an impending serious criminal prosecution for the monies embezzled and are being investigated by the Canadian Government for Unemployment insurance fraud. In some ways the worst thing of all is the way they involved many of their loved ones in the criminal aspects of the conspiracy, making it possible that others including Yury Zazouline, Vika’s husband and Mariya Rozhak, Tanya’s mother might also end up in jail. Ironically, criminal charges for coconspiracy in the embezzlement may also be brought against the former owners of The Big Book once the investigation is complete.

The Big Book Joint venture has been terminated and it has now gone out of business. The owners will likely be forced to pay huge damages for their involvement in this mess. At the time of the writing of this investigative report, there is a suit filed against all parties to the action including the owners of (formerly) The Big Book & Casino for their coconspiracy in this sordid affair, and this could also be expanded to include anyone that has done any business with them and the illegal intellectual property they are using, including any clients and third party agents selling the use of the stolen Intellectual property. All the illegal websites have been pulled down and operations have been terminated and it is likely that all participants in addition to any criminal penalties will be liable for huge damages that will put them all into bankruptcy. CSIS, the Canadian equivalent of the CIA has also opened a file on this because of concerns of Canadian technology possibly being leaked to companies in the Ukraine or other areas of the former Soviet Union. They have been in discussion with Kazootek representatives and visited their offices on a number of occasions on this, and are studying their options. This is yet another tarnishing blow to the entire Ukrainian and Russian immigrant community in Vancouver, who are trying so hard to over come a number of high profile scandals over the last decade and show that they can become productive law abiding members of society in North America. As well all the ex-Kazootek employees involved in this criminality are also likely to be hit with an injunction stopping them from even being in the on-line gaming industry. Vika and Tanya in particular are now unemployable in the area they have trained over a decade for there is not much of a market for accountants that embezzle company monies entrusted to them and are destructive sociopathic liars. Tanya in particular would even fake tears and invent deaths in her family back in the Ukraine to cover up things they were doing.

BoDog Sportsbook & Casino has come forward and guaranteed the post up monies of all the players of the former Big Book & Casino and is no longer using the services of Kazootek. Kazootek the company is no longer offering services to the gaming industry and has no operations of any sort anymore, but will pursue all its options under the law to recover all damages. Vika and Tanya were in the gambling industry, but they were not supposed to gamble themselves, however they were the biggest gamblers of all, risking everything they held dear on one huge roll of the dice and as is so often the case, they lost. Basically all the conspirators in this story, through a combination of greed and incompetence, have blown themselves up in the most spectacular fashion .

Sports911.com will cover this scandal as it unfolds so check back for updates.

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