A 60-year-old Pompano Beach man and a 49-year-old Hollywood man are facing federal mail fraud and money laundering charges after postal inspectors say they helped run a multimillion-dollar counterfeit coupon operation that shipped fake discount coupons across the country. Nikolay Saukov and Andrei Zaretski were arrested Thursday, September 3, in South Florida and were being held at the Broward Sheriff's Office main jail on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service ahead of a scheduled appearance in Fort Lauderdale federal court Friday.
How the Alleged Scheme Worked
According to WPLG Local 10, postal inspectors accuse Saukov and Zaretski of participating in an alleged criminal conspiracy known as The Weekly Coupon Service, which sent customers marketing emails linking to e-commerce sites selling counterfeit coupons with drastically inflated values. Investigators say the coupons carried a discount value of at least $6 each, and customers paid for them through PayPal. A third co-defendant, Oleskiy Holikov, who lived in the Detroit suburbs and allegedly ran a portion of the scheme there, though his custody status was unclear as of the report.
Investigators determined that 12 coupons could be printed per sheet, and the station's report notes that the separate four-box paper shipment obtained on March 19-20, 2026, could produce roughly 480,000 coupons, representing an estimated $2,880,000 in fraudulent coupon value. In July 2024, authorities intercepted a 30-pound FedEx package sent from Pompano Beach that reportedly contained thousands of coupons. Investigators say they identified the FedEx account used by the shipper and traced Zaretski through phone toll records, with investigators saying he appeared to be the man seen shipping boxes to Michigan and elsewhere.
Tracing the Money and the Paper Trail
Authorities say they identified Saukov by tracing 15 shell companies linked to PayPal accounts. Per the same account, Saukov deposited dozens of checks drawn on those shell company accounts and withdrew $1,500 from three separate shell company accounts at bank ATMs in Boca Raton. He also allegedly deposited cash directly into Holikov's bank account and received multiple small packages from a FedEx account investigators say was controlled by Zaretski, who primarily shipped boxes from a FedEx store in Hollywood.
A paper company reportedly prepared four 55-pound boxes of paper on March 19, 2026, for shipment to a Miami Gardens Drive mailbox, and the account tied to that address had ordered paper multiple times since 2022, receiving approximately 87 shipments there in total. Zaretski allegedly picked up that paper shipment the following day and brought it inside a property on Pembroke Road, where he reportedly spent hours alone. In March 2026, investigators say they found a printer toner cartridge, shipping boxes, glossy-paper boxes, paper clippings, gloves and shipping labels at that property. Zaretski, who lived on Evergreen Terrace, was also linked to a Broward Sheriff's Office alarm call at the Pembroke Road property.
The Michigan Connection
Federal investigators traced Holikov to West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, where postal inspectors monitored him dropping fake coupon mailings into collection boxes at a post office in Walled Lake, according to WPLG Local 10. Postal inspectors say they linked Holikov through PayPal and bank records in 2024 before conducting physical surveillance. Authorities delivered a repackaged parcel to a UPS store in Southfield, Michigan, where Holikov allegedly picked it up, and he reportedly left fingerprints on some of the counterfeit coupon parcels. In July 2025, FDLE investigators conducted a trash pull at Zaretski's Hollywood home that turned up FedEx tracking numbers and paper clippings that appeared connected to PayPal, according to the report.
Saukov and Zaretski are being prosecuted in Detroit federal court, though the precise timeline for their extradition to Michigan remains unclear, and Holikov did not appear in Federal Bureau of Prisons records as of the report. Mail fraud charges under federal law carry a statutory maximum of up to 20 years in prison and substantial fines per count, according to the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, and mail fraud statutes apply whenever interstate mail or commercial carriers such as FedEx and UPS are used to carry out a scheme to defraud. Federal wire and mail fraud conspiracies involving interstate money transfers can carry prison penalties, while money laundering charges in similar cases often stem from illicit proceeds run through shell company accounts and withdrawn in cash at ATMs.
A Pattern Federal Prosecutors Know Well
Coupon counterfeiting rings have drawn increasingly aggressive federal prosecution in recent years. In one of the largest cases on record, Virginia Beach resident Lori Ann Talens was sentenced in September 2021 to 12 years in federal prison for operating a counterfeit coupon ring in Virginia Beach that caused approximately $31.8 million in losses, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Hoodline reported on that case's final chapter in June, when prosecutors sentenced top bulk customer Sherise Williams to 41 months in prison and ordered $966,067 in restitution after she bought counterfeit coupons hundreds of times, generating nearly $1 million in retail losses. Whether prosecutors will similarly pursue bulk buyers who purchased coupons from The Weekly Coupon Service remains an open question in the Broward case. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, a separate Virginia Beach couple's nationwide counterfeit-coupon scheme defrauded businesses out of more than $31 million.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, a San Antonio woman arrested on 28-Aug-2024 was accused of selling counterfeit coupons linked to approximately $18 million in losses at 156 retail stores and manufacturers. The U.S. Department of Justice also said Serena Reamy Hedden manufactured nearly 3.5 million counterfeit coupons between August 23, 2017, and September 17, 2019, in a case announced on 11-Feb-2026.
The Coupon Information Corporation, an industry investigator, has helped alert authorities about counterfeiting rings. Court filings in the Broward case note that industry trade groups had been actively tracking The Weekly Coupon Service before postal inspectors began physical and financial surveillance. Researchers with the Center on Shadow Economics estimated that counterfeit coupons caused more than $165.7 million in direct losses to retailers and manufacturers over a three-year period, with losses rippling across supply chains and ultimately affecting consumer prices. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's PRO IP Act Annual Report FY 2015, a counterfeit-coupon scheme documented by the agency affected more than 50 American businesses. According to the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General's Spring 2025 report, investigations over the previous five years returned over $2.6 billion to the federal government, including over $400 million to USPS. The United States Postal Inspection Service says Postal Inspectors arrested almost 9,300 suspects for theft from 2019-2024, underscoring the agency's broader enforcement role involving the mail.
