VChK-OGPU and Rucriminal.info continue to publish their investigation into the murder of Pavel Durov's friend and partner, the founder of Fintopio, who was part of the inner circle of Telegram founder Roman Novak. We have learned that shortly before the kidnapping, a split occurred within the team close to the messenger's creator. Roman Novak began sharply criticizing projects and Pavel Durov personally, after which he was killed.
BACKGROUND: Roman Novak
Roman Aleksandrovich Novak (née Yavorsky, born 1987 in St. Petersburg) is a developer and crypto entrepreneur, previously convicted of embezzling funds from investors for the Transcrypt project. After his release in 2023, he moved to the UAE, where he launched the crypto project Fintopio, positioned as part of the Telegram/TON ecosystem, together with Pavel Durov's right-hand man, scammer and bot operator Roxman. He had a "secret" username, @deluxe, and had direct ties to Durov's inner circle and himself.
In October 2025, Roman Novak and his wife, Anna, were kidnapped and brutally murdered in the UAE. They were allegedly kidnapped under the pretext of a meeting with investors, dismembered, and their remains disposed of. The day before, Roman Novak was accused of embezzling half a billion dollars in investments, and was vilified in the media, labeled a fraudster who allegedly posed as a trusted Telegram representative and took money from someone close to Pavel Durov himself.
As we've already written, attempts to make Roman Novak's fraudulent actions seem absurd, claiming he invented the patronage of Telegram's founder, are actually quite grounded. There's ample evidence of Roman Novak's connections to Pavel Durov and his circle. Novak, aka @deluxe, was a fixture in the Durovites' circle: he exchanged gifts, shared insider information, and even visited the Telegram founder in Baku in August 2024. From there, Pavel Durov flew to France, where he was detained.
Furthermore, Roman Novak was very close to Roxman, Pavel Durov's right-hand man, who runs the most toxic scam projects at Telegram/Ton. So close that they co-founded the Fintopio bubble wallet. Roxman previously wrote in his blog bios that he is a co-owner of the project. Fintopio recently went bust, causing quite a stir with searches in Moscow City. Officially, operations ceased in October, with both DeFi and CeFi wallets suspended and closed.
NOTE: Roxman (aka @roxman, @borz)
Roxman is one of the key players in the Telegram/TON ecosystem closest to Pavel Durov, publicly referred to by Durov himself as a "27-year-old entrepreneur." According to Ghost in the Block investigations, this pseudonym is actually Abdurokhman, a native of Chechnya based in Munich. He participated in the development and promotion of a number of "gray" Telegram mini-apps, bot farms, and crypto projects (including Fintopio and MAJOR). His accounts and projects have been shown to have artificially inflated subscriptions and activity, indicating systematic botnet use.
Previously, the Cheka-OGPU and Rucriminal uncovered the identity of another Chechen close to Roxman and Pavel Durov: Ramzan Shakhbiev (@ram, @grozny), who registered domains for the bot infrastructure (bots.pw, tgrm.xyz, channels.pw, etc.). Both regularly appeared in public chats, at events, and in Durov's mentions, overseeing the technical and financial aspects of TON projects.
Millions of dollars were raised under Fintopio, and Pavel Durov himself was named as a guarantor when attracting investors. And this wasn't, as is now being reported, Roman Novak's own initiative. As eyewitnesses who visited the Fintopio office recall, the company was located near the headquarters of TON and Telegram in Dubai, and no one ever hid the fact that they were one and the same.
Despite the project's recent hard times, Roman Novak continued to live his normal life. He posted about supercars, helicopter rides, trips to Indonesia and Italy, and participated in discussions in themed chats, such as the "Wall" chat, well-known to everyone in the know (admins of channels dedicated to Ton and anyone interested in the topic), with a link to "Durov's Wall" on VKontakte. Roman Novak administered this group.
However, as it now emerges, shortly before Fintopio was shut down, Roman Novak began asking friends for loans. He borrowed from some, then borrowed more from others so he could pay back first. And he actually did pay back—Novak's friends are now concluding that it was a local Ponzi scheme. The sums kept growing. The reasons given for the loans were the same: to intercept money to pay people for work, or a story about Roman Novak getting stuck in the mountains of Oman and urgently needing money, even sending video evidence (we're publishing it), and simply borrowing at interest. Thus, the pyramid grew to $280,000. The victim who ended it all was @fuhao, a well-known figure in Telegram and cryptocurrency circles.
Here's a public comment from the "Chinese man":
"On August 22, he (Novak) borrowed $250,000 from me, using two He used the usernames @hold and @fintopio as collateral and promised to pay me $10,000 in interest weekly.
And on September 10th, he borrowed another $30,000 from me, using pepe#7 as collateral. The total debt he owed me was $280,000.
But he wasn't online for 15 days and didn't pay the interest or repay the loan.
This trust turned into a huge loss. "
As the Cheka-OGPU and the editorial staff of Rucriminal.info have discovered, during this same period, Roman Novak clearly had a rift with Pavel Durov's team. @deluxe lashed out at Telegram, the Ton-party, and Pavel Durov personally. (We are publishing excerpts from the Fintopio chat, where he wrote until September 29th.)
Roman Novak addressed both the sore point of Pavel Durov's brainchild and the millions of useless bots, including those in his joint project with Durov's close associate, Roxman, Fintopio. He then publicly announced that he would move forward independently. This could have seriously upset many. Perhaps there were some unfulfilled obligations between the partners. It's entirely possible that someone's financial expectations weren't met. Or perhaps someone simply screwed someone over: for example, Novak, when he realized he would be held accountable for the scam, underpaid his senior partners part of the money stolen from investors.
Roman Novak wrote that he had no plans to shut down the project. He explicitly stated in the Fintopio chat on September 27 that he would rebuild the product from scratch "without notcoin, major (Roxman's brainchild)," and leave the scam and ragpool (fraud) to the Ton crowd. Novak wrote that he (@delux) was becoming the project's ambassador, hinting that Durov and his friends had scammed the product. Now he'll be "at the helm."
Meanwhile, Roman Novak cut himself off in one of the chats: he wrote that he'd already said too much.
It's worth noting that all of these harsh messages from Roman Novak were deleted in the Fintopio chat. They can be found in a bot that specializes in parsing messages from public Telegram chats.
Under pressure from the news and circumstances, Roxman commented very cautiously on the situation, distancing himself from his friend and partner:
"Regarding @novak, who was on our wall and told us various stories, I'll also add a few words of my own.
A little over a year ago, we met in a chat for number and username holders. Then I offered him the username @miniapp—he'd already bought @webapp and others before, and that's how we started talking.
Later, he told me about the wallet he was building, how he'd brought @stevemilton from Binance into the project, shared his plans to create something world-class on Telegram, and other ideas. That's how I started helping the @fintopio wallet as an advisor. We communicated well until September of last year, but after the launch of @major, I had less time for the wallet, and I left the project.
I don't know how true the story is about the investors he allegedly defrauded. Among my Telegram contacts, besides fuhao, to whom he pawned usernames, and Pepka, I haven't met anyone he defrauded.
I thought everything would be cleared up when he returned, but apparently he hasn't been in touch—it's been a couple of weeks since that news. As far as I know, a missing persons case has been opened in Dubai for @novak. No one knows his whereabouts.
@stevemilton is currently the only person monitoring the wallet. Thanks to him, we were able to avoid the loss of user funds and quietly shut down the project."
The rest of the team, including Durov himself, haven't even commented on the fact that Roman Novak has disappeared, and now, as it turns out, was murdered along with his wife. They continue to discuss events to which Roxman promises to "invite Pal Valerich," promote fake events, and talk about their travels. Incidentally, these events coincided with early October.
Both Pavel Durov and Roxman arrived in the UAE around the time Roman Novak was kidnapped. They were in Dubai for just a few days when the kidnapping and murder occurred.
To be continued...
