FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Two South Florida men were arrested on federal mail fraud and money laundering charges Thursday after postal inspectors said they were part of a multimillion-dollar nationwide fraud scheme involving counterfeit coupons.
Court documents show the cases against Nikolay Saukov, 60, of Pompano Beach, and Andrei Zaretski, 49, of Hollywood, are being prosecuted in Detroit federal court. Authorities said a third co-defendant, Oleskiy Holikov, lives in and ran a portion of the scheme in the Detroit suburbs.
Coupon ring hits feds’ radar
According to a federal criminal complaint, the three got on authorities’ radar as part of an investigation into The Weekly Coupon Service, or WCS.
Investigators described WCS as “a criminal conspiracy involving the production and sale of highly realistic, but counterfeit, consumer goods coupons with drastically inflated values,” which are “so inflated that they result in a significant loss to product manufacturers and, at times, the stores at which those goods are sold.”
WCS sent out emails to customers with links to “e-commerce websites where users can select coupons for purchase and pay for them via PayPal,” authorities said, with the coupons then being mailed out nationwide. Industry trade groups had been monitoring the service, they said.
Shipments investigated
Postal inspectors said they first identified Holikov, of West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, in 2024 through PayPal and bank records. Authorities said they surveilled a post office in nearby Walled Lake and saw Holikov dropping numerous counterfeit coupon packages into collection boxes; his fingerprints appeared on some of the parcels.
Authorities said they intercepted a 30-pound FedEx package sent from Pompano Beach in July 2024 that “contained thousands of coupons.” They said they photographed and repackaged the items and allowed them to be delivered to a UPS Store in Southfield, Michigan, where Holikov later picked the item up.
According to the complaint, investigators were able to identify the shipper’s FedEx account and got multiple surveillance videos of shipments, which showed a man shipping boxes to Michigan and elsewhere, primarily from a FedEx store in Hollywood. Authorities said they later determined that the person in the videos “appeared to be Zaretski.”
South Florida suspect identified
Authorities said they were able to trace Zaretski after “obtain(ing) call tolls of phone numbers belonging to individuals identified in this investigation.”
One of those numbers was associated with a Broward Sheriff’s Office alarm call at a property on Pembroke Road. A keyholder phone number provided by the alarm company, they said, had a phone number that later traced back to Zaretski.
They said Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigators later saw Zaretski, driving a BMW seen in previous surveillance footage, at the Hollywood FedEx store.
According to the complaint, Zaretski lived on Evergreen Terrace, within walking distance of the Pembroke Road property. Law enforcement surveillance showed that Zaretski “spent hours alone inside” the latter property.
Paper trails, trash pulls in Broward, Miami-Dade
Authorities said in July 2025, FDLE investigators “conducted a trash pull” at Zaretski’s Hollywood home “and located FedEx tracking numbers and paper clippings that appeared to be connected with PayPal.”
After more surveillance, another trash pull at the Pembroke Road property ― conducted this March ― revealed a printer toner cartridge, shipping boxes and boxes for glossy paper, “construction-sized bags filled mostly with paper clippings,” gloves and shipping labels, the complaint states.
Authorities said on March 19, they spoke to a paper company “regarding shipments to a mailbox” on Miami Gardens Drive. According to the complaint, company representatives said they had a shipment of four, 55-pound boxes of paper set to go out that day to the address and the account “ordered paper multiple times since 2022, with approximately 87 shipments delivered to ‘Andy Zaret, Lingo Systems’” at the address.
On March 20, the complaint states “Zaretski was observed picking up the paper from (the) Miami Gardens Drive address in his BMW” and undercover investigators saw him bring the shipments inside the Pembroke Road building.
Authorities said a reconstruction of paper clippings from a subsequent trash pull “align(ed) with the fraudulent coupons” and investigators determined that 12 coupons could be printed per sheet, meaning Zaretski could “print approximately 480,000 coupons” from that shipment alone.
“Most of the coupons identified thus far carry a discount value of at least $6.00, meaning 480,000 coupons would represent roughly $2,880,000 in fraudulent coupon value,” the complaint states.
More South Florida ties
Authorities said they identified Saukov after tracing 15 shell companies linked to PayPal accounts used in the scheme.
They said surveillance video showed Saukov withdrawing $1,500 from three separate shell company accounts at bank ATMs in Boca Raton and later making cash deposits in Holikov’s bank account.
“He has also deposited dozens of checks drawn on the shell companies’ accounts into various bank accounts and has received multiple small packages from a FedEx account controlled by Zaretski,” agents concluded.
Following their arrests on Thursday, Saukov and Zaretski were being held in the BSO Main Jail on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service.
Court records show they had been scheduled to appear in Fort Lauderdale federal court on Friday morning. The records didn’t state whether the two made those appearances as of Friday afternoon.
It also wasn’t immediately clear when Saukov and Zaretski will be extradited to Michigan, nor was it clear whether Holikov was in custody.
Holikov did not appear in Federal Bureau of Prisons records and a Local 10 News search of jail records across three counties in metropolitan Detroit also yielded no results Friday.
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