The rift between Roman Novak and Pavel Durov has escalated into a scandal involving accusations of investor fraud.

Here’s a public comment from the "Chinese man":

On August 22, he (Novak) took a loan of $250,000 from me, putting up the usernames @hold and @fintopio as collateral, and assured me of weekly $10,000 interest payments.

On September 10, 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, didn’t pay the interest, and failed to repay the loan. This trust turned into a huge loss.

As the media discovered, during this same period, Roman Novak clearly had a falling out with Pavel Durov’s team.

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@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 29.

Roman Novak addressed both the sore points — the popularity 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.