In Moscow, the administrator of the New Age telegram channel, Alexander Gusov, was detained in an extortion case.

In Moscow, the administrator of the New Age telegram channel, PR specialist Alexander Gusov, was detained, the press service of the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow told Mediazona.

The investigation filed a petition for his arrest until April 2, judge Olga Solopova granted it.

Gusov is suspected of extortion of property on an especially large scale, the court clarified (clause “b” of Part 3 of Article 163 of the Criminal Code). According to TASS, the second person involved in the case is Rosbalt journalist Alexander Shvarev, who left the country, and was arrested in absentia in Russia in the case of defamation of billionaire Alisher Usmanov and extortion from him.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs published a video of the search of Gusov and the plot of the case. According to investigators , Gusov and the “organizer of the criminal scheme” located abroad received 12 million rubles from a “Russian businessman and philanthropist” over “several years” by threatening him to publish “fictitious” incriminating evidence. In early February, he wrote a statement to the police.

creator The victim is Yota Albert Avdolyan, TASS, REN TV and Baza claim . TASS, citing a source, also named Gusov as the founder of the anonymous telegram channel “VChK-OGPU”, which writes about the work of special services and law enforcement agencies.

The channel’s authors subsequently released a post in which they denied the PR specialist’s involvement in their work. According to Forbes , Gusov was the founder of the PR agency "Development"; in 2020, Baza also linked him to the anonymous telegram channel “Cello Case” that publishes incriminating evidence.

In 2023, Baza wrote that from January 25 to 27, Gusov and PR manager Carlo Machavariani stopped communicating, and the New Century channel was not updated. The publication's sources said that both men were searched and taken for questioning. At the same time, two days later, Gusov and Machavariani recorded a video from the cafe and reported that “they are free” and “everything is fine with them.”

In the fall, the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported on the detention and arrest of several creators of Telegram channels. According to the police, “fake stories” about top managers and high-ranking officials were published there, and in exchange for deleting the information, the administrators “offered victims to transfer large sums of money using crypto wallets.”

In August, the court arrested journalist Life and administrator of the Hellish Grandmothers telegram channel Alexandra Bayazitova and two public managers Olga Arkharova and Inna Churilova. They are accused of extorting 1.2 million rubles from the vice president of Promsvyazbank. At the end of October, a court in Moscow sent to pre-trial detention the commercial director of presenter Ksenia Sobchak Kirill Sukhanov, former editor-in-chief of Tatler Arian Romanovsky and former Life employee Tamerlan Bigaev .

All three are accused of extorting 11 million rubles - a criminal case was opened after a statement by the head of Rostec, Sergei Chemezov. Sobchak later apologized to him for the actions of her colleagues. In addition, in December, was accused of extorting 150 thousand rubles from the director for special assignments of the Rostec state corporation, Vasily Brovko. Anatoly Spirin, the administrator of the Ulyanovsk telegram channel “Somehow Like This,”

Updated at 18:36 . Information from the court's press service about Gusov's arrest has been added.