Zhenya Tsvetnenko liked things fast.

There were the fast cars. Lots of them.

He talked fast. So fast it was like his mouth struggled to keep up with the ideas streaming out of his brain.

But, most of all, the Russian-born Perth man liked fast money.

And, inevitably, that was his downfall.

Almost six years after US authorities charged him with fraud and money laundering, this week he will learn his fate.  

He will be sentenced in a New York court after pleading guilty to his part of a $US270 million text-messaging scam. 

It was a scam that saw him personally pocket $US15.4 million, a scam that had origins in Perth and travelled across the world, stealing money from hundreds of thousands of people.

From Russia with not much

The early years of Zhenya Tsvetnenko’s life were modest — a far cry from the empire he’d go on to build. 

In 1992, when he was 12, his parents emigrated to Perth, with “nothing more than a couple [of] suitcases”.

“We sold our apartment in Russia for $6,000. I remember that,” he told a Perth community television station in 2011.

“My parents moved here. We started from scratch.”

He went to a local high school and on to university to study electrical engineering, but later dropped out to make money — fast money — in something quite foreign for Perth: tech.

Surviving on two-minute noodles, in the early 2000s he whittled his bank account down to $200 as he developed code in his suburban bedroom.

“Don’t give up,” he said in the same 2011 interview. “If you’ve got an idea and it doesn’t work — [even] if you have to throw that idea away and think of something new — do it.”

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The “idea” for Tsvetnenko was automated SMS technology.

Launched in the pre-smartphone era of the mid-2000s, his unique computer program delivered bulk text messages to mobile phone users, offering subscriptions services such as horoscopes or weather forecasts.

It grew rapidly, and money started streaming in.

So much so, he told The West Australian in 2009 — whilst posing in front of two Lamborghinis, a Ferrari and a Hummer — that he’d made so much money so quick he “hadn’t had time to count it”.

At the time, the BRW Young Rich List estimated his wealth at about $107 million.  

But, even then, authorities were watching, and rumblings of impropriety were getting louder.   

A corporate adviser who worked with Tsvetnenko at the time told the ABC: “No one had any real idea how he was making his money, but he was splashing it around and investing a lot in Perth tech companies. 

Flash with cash 

In Perth at that time everyone knew — or knew of — Zhenya Tsvetnenko.

He was the epitome of excess, a “Perthonality” in every sense. Even in a state emerging out of once-in-a-generation mining boom, the Russian-born tech tycoon stood out above the rest.

Tsvetnenko celebrated his 29th birthday party with US rapper Snoop Dogg in LA, spent $600,000 on his wedding, invested in nightclubs and had almost weekly appearances in Perth’s social pages — and he was very happy to flaunt his cash.

Western Australia has had its “cashed-up bogans”, but flashiness was the antithesis of Perth’s more-reserved — and older — mining-backed business circles, where it was generally frowned upon. 

However, after becoming a father, Tsvetnenko pulled back on the partying and tried to re-shape his image, leaving behind the SMS technology and launching an ASX-listed company focused on bitcoin. 

Perth-based tech investor Howard Digby worked with Tsvetnenko during the 2010s. 

“I knew his story. [I’d] seen his photos in the paper,” he said. “And my immediate thoughts were, ‘Jeez, I wouldn’t be so flashy, mate’,” Mr Digby said. 

“But then I met him and he was humble, very keen on probity — and, perhaps, that was hindsight coming into play.      

“I do remember the day he told me the full story about his previous company [the SMS company]. I just thought to myself, ‘Mate, did you ever ask yourself why you were making so much money so quickly? Why is it going so well?'”   

And, eventually, this past — and the fast money — would catch up with him. 

The scam

As much as the scam itself was complex, at its core it was relatively simple. 

According to US Department of Justice documents seen by the ABC, from 2012 to 2013, Tsvetnenko and his co-conspirators, defrauded hundreds of thousands of mobile phone consumers in the United States by placing unauthorised charges on their mobile phone bills.  

The practice — known as “auto-subscribing” — saw US consumers billed $US9.99 a month for services such as “horoscopes, celebrity gossip or trivia facts” without their knowledge or consent.

Often the bills would recur monthly unless consumers actively told their phone company they wanted out of the service. 

Tsvetnenko was brought into the scam by self-described “entrepreneur and Hollywood producer” Darcy Wedd, also from Perth.

Wedd, who knew Tsvetnenko from his time in Western Australia, oversaw the whole scheme. In 2018, Wedd was sentenced to 10 years’ jail in the US for his role. 

According to the US Department of Justice, Tsvetnenko played a “direct, active, and indispensable role” using what it described as his “history of engaging in deceptive and suspicious practices, including auto-subscription” to help the conglomerate defraud consumers of $41 million.

All-in-all, seven people have been charged and sentenced for various roles in the scam, resulting in jail terms from six months to 10 years. 

Although Tsvetnenko wasn’t the ringleader, his personal 70 per cent cut of the criminal proceeds — more than $15.4 million — was the largest by far.

Jennifer Beidel worked as a US attorney in the Southern District of New York’s complex fraud and cybercrime unit, the unit that mounted the case. 

She told the ABC the unit worked with US law enforcement after it spent many years pulling together the complex case against against Tsvetnenko and his co-conspirators.

That included “search warrants, subpoenas and developing cooperating witnesses”, she said. 

It also involved breaking down the various shell companies the scammers had used to try to hide the money from authorities.    

“The issue with this case was individual victims had a low loss amount,” she said. 

“And so, sometimes, criminals can get away with this kind of conduct because each individual victim only lost say $10 or $20.