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At first glance, what happened to Yevgeny G. Kaseyev hardly seems like misfortune.

Without his knowledge, he says, unknown individuals set up multiple companies in his name and deposited tens of millions of dollars into those companies’ bank accounts.

“Sometimes it seems fun,” Mr. Kaseyev, a 34-year-old hairdresser, said with a shrug during an interview. “I’m a secret millionaire.”

Until the authorities came calling, that is, seeking $30 million in back taxes.

One of the people who did business with a company opened under Mr. Kaseyev’s stolen identity didn’t mean anything to him. But the name certainly caught the eye of investigators in the United States: Paul J. Manafort.

Mr. Manafort, who worked for a decade as a political consultant in Ukraine before becoming chairman of the Trump campaign in 2016, made a deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with the shell company under the hairdresser’s name. It was called Neocom Systems Limited, according to a Ukrainian lawmaker.

This was just one example of the kind of complex financial arrangements that caught the attention of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and led to Mr. Manafort pleading guilty to criminal charges on Friday in Federal District Court in Washington.

Looking into tax evasion by Mr. Manafort, Mr. Mueller’s investigators found a web of offshore companies, some of which had directors who, like Mr. Kaseyev, did not even know their identities were being used.

Mr. Manafort was convicted in August on eight counts of financial fraud and evading taxes on millions of dollars he earned as a consultant for pro-Russia political forces in Ukraine. He avoided a second federal trial by pleading guilty on Friday to conspiracy to defraud the United States, largely through the use of offshore companies, and conspiracy to obstruct of justice.

There is nothing new about Mr. Manafort’s use of shell companies to hide and launder money. Nor is it surprising that Mr. Manafort should seek to use the scheme of fake directors, say analysts of Ukrainian corruption. It is a common form of subterfuge in former Soviet states, though hardly unique to them.

But the role — and sometimes the plight — of the people whose identities were used has gone mostly unnoticed.

“It’s a frequent problem,” Daria Kalenyuk, chief of the Anticorruption Action Center here, said of the directors, who stand to take the fall if prosecutors investigate.

Sometimes the directors are lawyers or victims of identity theft, she said. But usually “it’s people who are either alcoholics or in poor health, and who simply sell their passports for about $20.”

One of the risks to this scheme is that the fake directors might try to claim the millions held in their names. But Ms. Kalenyuk could not recall one instance of such a claim.

“You need to have some knowledge and education to know how to do that,” she said, in the tax havens like Cyprus or the British Virgin Islands, where such companies are typically established.

“Usually, they don’t know how to do it,” she added. “And even if they did, it’s a risky business to take over a company from a powerful businessman engaged in corruption...”

Some homeless men have achieved a measure of fame among activists who track corruption in the former Soviet states because they pop up so often at the head of multimillion dollar companies.

One man identified in the Ukrainian media as a homeless Latvian named Erik Vanagels has been listed as the owner of hundreds of companies in Britain, Cyprus, Ireland, New Zealand, Panama and elsewhere. Companies in the network also helped finance the private zoo and sprawling estate of the former Ukrainian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was the main client of Mr. Manafort.