📖 Chapter I : Double face scammer (P1)

Part 1

There was a moment when we created an NFT collection (Soul Stones) and were looking for opportunities to promote it. And we stumbled upon @NFT_reality, which Malev represented. It is a mystery to me how this person became the ambassador of the TON Foundation when he scammed so many people in the ecosystem. But for now I want to talk specifically about our case.

As a team, we created the NFT collection and allocated a marketing budget for its promotion (around $1,500). And the most interesting place for us at that time seemed to be the @NFT_reality channel, because there were many subscribers and (as it seemed to me) the official representative of getgems - @malev (at that time I did not know that he was the owner of NFT_reality). Plus, he promoted it everywhere and led video activity on this channel. I decided to contact the channel marketing representative @dasha_matushinets, and find out about the cost of posts and how we can collaborate. To which I was sent information that the minimum price for a post is $600, plus there is the possibility of a $1000 podcast in which one of the "specialists" will talk about our project. (full correspondence with Daria)

We agreed to buy for $600, and to be honest, I was very happy with the deal. The performance of the group at that time was excellent:

📍 +120k followers 📍 +10k views on each post 📍 There is a getgems official (@malev) who maintains the official TON Foundation channel.

In anticipation of the post, I expected that we would have at least 1k subscribers added, and we would be able to slightly strengthen our collection in the TON ecosystem. But the reality turned out to be different. After the publication of the post, there was no traffic. Less than 40 people showed up, and to be honest, I'm not sure if all of them are from NFT_Reality.

As a result, if we translate into pure numbers, we get the following: 📍 Post in NFT target group with 120k followers 📍 More than 12k views per post (at the time) 📍 There are less than 40 people who have switched/subscribed to our channel 📍 Clicks from the group = 0.0003% ( 40 / 120k ) 📍 Clicks from a viewed post = 0.003% ( 40 / 12k ) 📍 CAC = 15$ per subscriber ( 600$ / 40subs )

Anyone who understands marketing at least a little, it is clear that this is a scam. For example, a week later we bought a post from the @iloveton2 channel, in which at the moment were about 23k subscribers, and more than 2k people came to us from it, and advertising cost several times less.

Everyone in the community knows that @NFT_Reality is a scam channel full of bots. And everyone knows that its founder is Malev, and for some reason everyone put up with the scam. But let's continue. I wrote to support @dasha_matushinets that this is complete nonsense and this cannot be right. And I asked for a refund, or do something about it. (Full correspondence here). But I received an answer that she spoke with the head management, and they decided to refuse to cooperate with us. And at that time, the leadership of the channel was Malev, who stubbornly hid it.

I also wrote to Elnara Petrova (@elnarapetrova). At that time, she hosted podcasts on NFT_reality. I asked her about who owns the channel, to which I was told that he hides his identity and blocked me in Telegram. But more interesting is that, before we agreed to publish a post on NFT_Reality, I talked with Malev about publishing our collection in the getgems channel. I told him that we are looking for ways to promote the collection and to which he recommended @NFT_reality to me (photo of the dialogue with him). At the same time, he himself was its owner and knew acactly that the traffic there was empty, consisting of bots. This is the kind of person we are dealing with.

Hypocrisy level - infinity / 10

Vudi (@kingyru) also wrote about similar cases on his channel - post

And now again and clearly: 📍Malev and his team of scammers created an empty channel consisting of bots 📍Used the reputation of the TON Foundation to monetize it 📍Sold ads to collections and projects in the TON ecosystem at prices of +600$ 📍Knew that the channel consists entirely of bots 📍Stole money from the budget personally from our team / scammed.