Before his death, Roman Novak accused Durov’s circle of taking over Fintopio

09 November 2025 , 23:37

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Before his death, Roman Novak accused Durov’s circle of taking over Fintopio

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...

David Wilson

Politics Editor