Publikujemy angielską wersję tekstu Anny Mierzyńskiej „Wybory w Rumunii. Agencja marketingowa miała związki z Rosją i biura w Warszawie [ŚLEDZTWO OKO.PRESS]”, opublikowanego w OKO.press 13 grudnia 2024 r.

FA Agency is one of the companies involved in buying Romania influencers. It commissioned web personalities, among others, to post videos on TikTok promoting the pro-Russian extreme right wing candidate, Călin Georgescu (pictured above).

The agency posted information on its website that it is a South African company operating in South Africa. However, journalists from the French daily Le Monde established that the agency actually has offices in Warsaw and employs Polish and Ukrainian marketing specialists (this is based on commercial deals made with online influencers).

OKO.press has also discovered another element in connection with FA Agency. Although the company has been recently actively covering its tracks in Internet, its website is still up and running.

• The source code of FA Agency’s website contains comments written in Russian.

Furthermore, the programmer did not use off-the-shelf software. The code was written specifically for this website. The use of Russian in this process means that the programmer (or rather, the web developer) was a Russian speaker. This is a strong suggestion that Russia was involved in this operation.

Scandal in Romania

The first round of the presidential elections was held in Romania on 24 November 2024. The pro-Russian far-right candidate Călin Georgescu won that round. A scandal broke out shortly afterwards, because it transpired that an online operation conducted primarily in TikTok probably contributed to his victory.

As Paulina Pacuła wrote in OKO.press: ‘More than 25,000 TikTok accounts went online in a coordinated manner in mid-November 2024. (…) The 797 most active accounts constituted the core of the network. (…) All of them were dormant until they went online – like clockwork – on 11 November, posting content about Georgescu or boosting and spreading content that he had posted. The result? Millions of views of posts and the candidate’s very high level of visibility on social media, which significantly contributed to his victory in the first round of the presidential elections on 24 November.’

The activities on TikTok were coordinated via Telegram. TikTok accounts posted videos with the same hashtags supporting Georgescu. They even used the same string of emoticons. These actions made the videos become highly visible on the platform. However, the campaign did not use bots, namely automated accounts. Instead, online influencers, who were paid to circulate these materials, were used.

The elections in Romania were ultimately invalidated. The electoral process in that country had been seriously disrupted.

An unknown programmer from South Africa was paying

The influence operation was disclosed by the Romanian secret services. Their report was declassified.

It was emphasized in the documents that only a ‘state player’ could perform such activities. And the state that could have been especially interested in Georgescu’s election was precisely Russia. Ultimately, the first round of the presidential elections in Romania was invalidated.

It arises from the Romanian report that the online activities supporting the pro-Russian candidate were paid for by Bogdan Peșchir, an unknown programmer of Romanian descent, who currently lives in South Africa.

‘Peșchir allegedly paid almost a million euros towards Georgescu’s campaign, of which TikTok itself took €380,000. These funds were allegedly used to pay the Romanian influencers for their contribution to the promotion of Georgescu. The South African company, FA Agency, established contact with them. The agency offered €1,000 for circulating a video promoting Georgescu. Payments were made via FameUP,’ wrote Paulina Pacuła.

The Polish thread and the offices in Warsaw

A Polish thread appeared in connection with FA Agency. Earlier this week, the French daily, Le Monde, established that

Its employees were allegedly Poles and Ukrainians, affiliate marketing specialists. Le Monde identified them because they were mentioning in their Instagram accounts that they were working for FA Agency. These same people also had LinkedIn accounts, but they did not boast about their affiliation with FA Agency there.

Le Monde did not publish the names of these people or the address of the agency’s office. Therefore, it is currently difficult to verify its information. All the more so that FA Agency had started to cover its tracks at that time. The accounts of the employees disappeared from Instagram, as did other online connections with the agency.

All that remains is a website launched several months ago, to which no external links. The agency does not have any social media accounts, nor does anyone mention it. There is also no trace of a company registered under that name.

Purging the web is one thing, but the lack of citations, flags and links suggests that FA Agency was probably just a front for a real, secret operation.

What's in the site’s code?

Despite the online purging, OKO.press discovered a significant element that could become an important part of the findings about the influencing operation in Romania. The faagency.org website contains comments written in Russian in the source code. This is an unusual situation. Programmers world-wide use English. However, they sometimes add explanations to the commands in another language, when they use their native language. This was probably what happened in this case.

We have presented a screenshot with some of them. The translations of the Russian phrases that can be seen there are:

• ‘Предотвращаем стандартное поведение отправки формы’ – translation: ‘Prevent default form submission behaviour’.
• ‘Отключаем кнопку на время отправки’ – translation: ‘Disable the button while sending.
• ‘Включаем кнопку в случае ошибки’ – translation: ‘Enable the button in case of an error’.

‘These phrases are not part of the script, but comments from the code’s author. It happens that web developers add such comments to make it easier to later understand what a given part of the code is used for,’ explained one of the IT experts we consulted (he asked to remain anonymous).

FA Agency and the Russian language

The expert also pointed out that the site is not based on any commonly available content management system (such as Wordpress). This is a simple site that the programmer wrote himself. All the more reason to conclude that

Another hypothesis that would explain the Russian phrases in the code is the use of code that was written for another project, which was also related to Russia or addressed to a Russian-speaking market, while developing the website.

However, each of these explanations shows that Russian-speaking people were involved in the development of the website. In view of the context of the elections in Romania, it should be acknowledged that this is one of the first pieces of evidence that enables a connection to be established between Russia and FA Agency. And, therefore, also to the organization of the cooperation with the influencers during the election campaign in Romania. However, the Russian connections of the TikTok accounts had been written up earlier by Romanian journalists from context.ro.

Warsaw as a ‘foreign flag’?

This does not simultaneously rule out Le Monde’s findings that FA Agency was operating from Warsaw and was employing mainly Ukrainians. One of the methods used by Russians in their influencing activities is to perform the operations under a foreign flag. This means that, although the operation is actually being managed, for example, by the Russian secret services, everything is conducted in such a way that the physical clues lead to other countries, private companies or people not associated with Russia.

Russia already wanted to use influencers in influencing operations earlier. In 2021, the marketing agency, Fazze, which is just as mysterious as FA Agency, offered a deal to influencers from Germany and France for taking part in a vaccine campaign. Fazze was then offering €2,000 for sharing the materials supplied by the agency on YouTube. They contained disinformation that the mortality rate after administering the Pfizer vaccine is three times higher than after administering AstraZeneca's vaccine, which was unpopular at that time.

It was then that journalists from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty established that Fazze was part of the AdNow marketing agency, which was simultaneously operating from the UK and Russia. It was headed by Yulia Serebryanskaya.

AdNow and Romanian influencers

This similarity in methods of operation might not only suggest that they are used by the same country. An investigation conducted by the Intelligence Online portal and the Romanian medium, Snoop, revealed that Serebryanskaya’s agency was also involved in Romania. AdNow has been working with Romania TV (RTV) – the most popular local TV channel in Romania – for years. Almost €100,000 transited from AdNow to Romania TV’s companies between 2016 and 2020. Over the past few years, AdNow has been making regular payments of € 7,000 to RTV.

AdNow also financed Romanian influencers. One of them spread disinformation on health; another ran a conspiracy theory portal. Others spread disinformation on alternative medicine.

In 2021, the AdNow campaign in Germany and France failed because the influencers disclosed the deal they had been offered. Serebryanskaya and her principals probably learned from this failure. In 2024, the Romanian web surfers fulfilled the order without any problems. Although it may have officially come from offices in Warsaw, it had probably come from Russia.

Translated by: Roman Wojtasz