BIRN has identified Andreas Maul, a town councillor for Germany’s far-right AfD party, as the man behind a Serbian company sanctioned by the US for aiding a Russian alleged cybercrime service provider. A Belgrade firm sanctioned last year by the United States for aiding an alleged Russia-based cybercrime service provider was founded in 2022 by Kazakh-born German citizen Andreas Maul, who has since become a city councillor for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, AfD, BIRN can reveal. Maul, 38, opened Smart Digital Ideas D.O.O. in a dilapidated nineties-era shopping mall in the New Belgrade district of the Serbian capital in October 2022, according to the Serbian Business Register.
The company was registered as an IT retailer, but the US Treasury says its real activities are more sinister. On November 19 last year, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, OFAC, announced it had ‘designated’ Smart Digital Ideas for abetting Russia-based Aeza Group LLC, which was sanctioned four months earlier as a so-called ‘bulletproof hosting service provider’, a term used for companies that sell access to specialised servers and other IT infrastructure specifically designed to evade detection and conceal cybercrime activities. OFAC said Smart Digital Ideas had been utilised by Aeza “to evade sanctions and set up technical infrastructure that is not publicly associated with the Aeza brand”. Currently, the company has no registered employees and, according to Serbia’s central bank, has been unable to access its bank deposits since December 2025. The bank did not specify why.
via balkan insight: German AfD Figure Behind Alleged Serbian Node in Russian Cyber Meddling
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