Zhenya Tsvetnenko liked things fast.
There were the fast cars. Lots of them.
He talked fast. So fast it was like his mouth struggled to keep up with the ideas streaming out of his brain.
But, most of all, the Russian-born Perth man liked fast money.
And, inevitably, that was his downfall.
Almost six years after US authorities charged him with fraud and money laundering, this week he will learn his fate.
He will be sentenced in a New York court after pleading guilty to his part of a $US270 million ($389.6 million) text-messaging scam.
It was a scam that saw him personally pocket $US15.4 million, a scam that had origins in Perth and travelled across the world, stealing money from hundreds of thousands of people.
From Russia with not much
The early years of Zhenya Tsvetnenko’s life were modest — a far cry from the empire he’d go on to build.
In 1992, when he was 12, his parents emigrated to Perth, with “nothing more than a couple [of] suitcases”.
“We sold our apartment in Russia for $6,000. I remember that,” he told a Perth community television station in 2011.
“My parents moved here. We started from scratch.”
He went to a local high school and on to university to study electrical engineering, but later dropped out to make money — fast money — in something quite foreign for Perth: tech.
Surviving on two-minute noodles, in the early 2000s he whittled his bank account down to $200 as he developed code in his suburban bedroom.
“Don’t give up,” he said in the same 2011 interview. “If you’ve got an idea and it doesn’t work — [even] if you have to throw that idea away and think of something new — do it.”
