Contract killing of Roman Novak: what connects the founder of Fintopio to Pavel Durov’s inner circle

13:51, 11.11.2025

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Contract killing of Roman Novak: what connects the founder of Fintopio to Pavel Durov’s inner circle

A Split in Pavel Durov’s Scam Team.

Roman Novak Was Killed After Revealing How a Billion-Dollar Scam Works Within Telegram

The mass media reported 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 discovered that shortly before the kidnapping, a split occurred within the team close to the messenger’s creator. Roman Novak began sharply criticizing the 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.