learning that 5 minute crafts is a russian mafia operation wasn't on my 2026 bingo card but also doesn't really surprise me
its what
russian mafia operation
Hey what
oh. iβm sure its fine and normal that a video investigating the massive bot farm/slop channel shell company connections to the russian mafia and youtubeβs own implication by allowing it to continue for profit has mysteriously vanished with no word from op.
Original (now taken down) video of CHUPPL exposing SoulPublishing and 5 Min Crafts networkAn ExposΓ© of the weirdest channel on the internetG
internet archive link
Key points:
What's been known for a long time it seems is that the parent company is owned by two Russians, based in Cyprus, and that it owns a cloud of youtube and other media channels, most of them dedicated to mindless content churning like 5 minutes crafts and a few others having done Russian propaganda such as slanted history articles.
The vid author ran a tracker that looked up the age of the commenters' *account*
This is a normal range for account ages in youtube comments:
And this is the age range for the commenter *accounts* on the 5 Minutes Craft channel: they are all newly created accounts and a majority of them are one second old.
It identifies major bot activity with the aim of creating an artificial audience, which in turns generates a huge ads revenue. This trafic and ads revenue is why the channel has a contract as an official partner with YouTube (-> massive revenue theft !)
Financially, the company is organised in offshore shell holdings that are based in money laundering countries (Seychelles, Virgin Islands). The founders were also named in the Pandora papers.
In 2020, the company, alongside other Russian Cyprus-based it companies, made a public donation that the vid author cross-referenced against a 2025 cybersecurity report, Deniability by Design, that alledged that the donation was connected to a criminal network, Vain Viper, that does ad fraud and cyberattacks.
One actor in that network was physically close to the company (office neighbirs and same lawyers) and appears to have been implicated in the hack of the Democratic National Committee.
