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🍌 How scammers are making up a new biography for Nikolai Durov
⚫️ Over the past few weeks, mentions of a mysterious AI project called VISION, supposedly linked to Nikolai Durov, have been popping up here and there. As part of our #antiscam series, we decided to take a closer look — and what we found is a pretty unusual example of just how far scammers are willing to go to make a fake project look legitimate.
⚫️ The story they picked is actually quite convincing. More than a year ago, Pavel Durov said that his brother was working on his own “thinking AI,” something different from conventional LLMs. No public details have surfaced since, and it looks like scammers decided to fill that information vacuum themselves.
⚫️ The “project” has its own website, while Nikolai Durov has effectively been given an entirely new online identity. There is a personal résumé-style page listing VISION as his latest project, a LinkedIn profile supposedly belonging to Durov with a matching bio, and — to make the whole thing look even more convincing — an 80-page whitepaper allegedly written by him.
⚫️ The document starts falling apart pretty quickly once you look at it closely. There are plenty of inconsistencies, while the most interesting part — how this new “thinking AI” is actually supposed to think — is described surprisingly superficially. Meanwhile, dozens of pages are spent on much more basic technical details, including hashes and various record formats. We also asked ChatGPT to review the technical side of the whitepaper separately, and its assessment was highly skeptical as well.
⚫️ The biography raises similar questions. As Full Metal Jetton reported last year, very little is known about Nikolai’s life today: he lives in Dubai, got married, and became a father. And given how private he has always been, it is pretty hard to imagine him suddenly setting up a personal landing page and actively promoting a new project online.
💡 The biggest red flag comes at the very end: the project’s website lets you connect a TON wallet and sign a transaction. Needless to say, do not do that. As always with #antiscam, the advice is simple: stay vigilant, verify what you see, and don’t trust something just because it looks convincing.
@thedailyton
