One of Russia's most sought-after investigative journalists, Andrei Zakharov began his career at Fontanka and RBC, where he published several stories revealing details of the "troll factory" organized by Yevgeny Prigozhin, which attempted to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. He then worked for Proekt, for which he wrote an investigation into Vladimir Putin's illegitimate daughter (Proekt was later designated an "undesirable organization" in Russia, and Zakharov himself was declared a "foreign agent"). From 2018 to 2022, he was a special correspondent for the BBC Russian Service and the author of several stories on the Russian data market. A five-time winner of the Editorial Board Award, a Paul Klebnikov Foundation fellow, he is the author of the book "Crypto: How Cypherpunks, Programmers, and Crooks Shackled Russia with Blockchain." Currently, he is the author of an independent Telegram channel and hosts original programs on the YouTube channel The Insider Live.