Every tip you make. DonationAlerts, the popular platform for streamer donations, shared payment data with Russian security services

A 39-year-old Russian man is facing a possible life sentence after making four donations worth a combined $27.17 to a political blogger through DonationAlerts, the most widely used tip service for streamers across Russia and the former Soviet states. Court proceedings revealed that the platform’s payment infrastructure provided investigators with detailed transaction records, including the donor’s IP address and email, that now form the evidence in a “terrorism”-financing case.

Andrei Khoroshko, a resident of Lyubertsy, a Moscow town, went on trial on March 25 at the 2nd Western District Military Court.

He is charged with membership of a terrorist organisation and financing terrorism. The charges stem from four transfers totalling 2,201 roubles to the DonationAlerts account of Vyacheslav Maltsev, an opposition figure and YouTube blogger.

Maltsev, a politician from the city of Saratov, ran a channel called “Artpodgotovka” in which he called for a “revolution” and named November 5, 2017 as the date. He left Russia shortly before it. The Russian authorities have since designated “Artpodgotovka” both an “extremist” and a “terrorist” organisation, and his supporters in Russia continue to be prosecuted years later.

At the first hearing, the prosecutor disclosed that the case file contains a restricted-access memorandum from Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial intelligence unit, naming Khoroshko and one other person as having sent money to Maltsev via DonationAlerts. A company called RNKO VK Payment Solutions (a Bank of Russia–licensed firm that provides VK Pay, a fintech service built into the VK social network) handed investigators a DVD containing every transfer ever made to Maltsev’s DonationAlerts account. A spreadsheet on the disc lists Khoroshko’s four payments alongside his IP address and email. The timing of the transfers matches records obtained from Sberbank.

No direct public link between VK Payment Solutions and DonationAlerts had previously been reported. DonationAlerts’ ownership has changed hands repeatedly: it belonged to Mail.ru Group from 2017, was sold in 2022 to Alexander Chachava, founder of the Leta Capital venture fund, and in 2024 was reportedly sold again to Cypriot businessman Pavel Kharaneki. The platform’s website now lists its owner as Zaya Solutions Limited, registered in Hong Kong. None of this offshore reshuffling appears to have placed its Russian transaction data beyond the reach of domestic law enforcement.

Russians have been punished for DonationAlerts donations before. In February 2026, a court in Surgut, western Siberia, fined a man five thousand roubles for participation in an “undesirable” organisation after citing detailed DonationAlerts records of his donations, made between 2021 and 2023, to a Ukrainian ministry of the Charismatic movement. The court ruling reproduced granular data about the transfers, though it remains unclear from the text how the authorities obtained it.

To test what ordinary users can see, Mediazona sent a rouble donation to its own DonationAlerts account via T-Bank, then checked the bank statement. The records showed only that a payment had been made to DonationAlerts as a service, with no mention of the specific recipient. The detailed data surfacing in court, then—the IP addresses, the email accounts, the identities of individual streamers receiving each payment—could only have come from DonationAlerts’ own systems or the payment infrastructure sitting behind them.