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Unsure about Novikov’s sincerity, Karpenko declined. Novikov kept in touch with Karpenko and eventually made a six-figure offer for WorldBox.

He introduced himself as an investor in JustMoby, a mobile app publishing company based in the southwestern Russian city of Tolyatti. Novikov stood out because he was wearing a suit in a space where t-shirts, jeans, and hoodies were a far more common sight. Karpenko remembered meeting Aleksandr Novikov, a mobile game executive affiliated with Stavrio Ltd., at a game industry conference in Minsk, Belarus, a year earlier. “I panicked and cancelled the trip, went back home … and started looking for lawyers,” Karpenko told OCCRP and its Estonian partner, Eesti Ekspress. had quietly replicated the game and was offering it on mobile app stores under its own name. Now it looked as though he might lose everything overnight. Karpenko had spent eight years developing WorldBox, which had been downloaded millions of times.

Stavrio Ltd., a little-known company in the U.K., had just filed for a trademark to Karpenko’s most prized work, WorldBox, a “god simulator” mobile game that allows users to create and nurture virtual civilizations. In October 2020, Maxim Karpenko, an independent Russian mobile game developer, was sitting on a train about to go on vacation when a friend messaged him with troubling news. Adeco, JustMoby, and related publishers published at least 200 apps on Google Play, where they were downloaded more than 76 million times.