Durov personally promotes a scam auction featuring “gifts” from Khabib, the scheme brings in millions.

Pavel Durov has launched an auction in Telegram offering “gifts” from Khabib Nurmagomedov — digital NFT squares that users can pin to their profiles. Despite having no real value, these items were sold for massive sums. This was reported by blogger Oleg Artyomyev.

The starting bid was 2,910 stars (approximately 45 dollars), but the first lot sold for 30,000 dollars. Durov personally took part in the bidding and helped drive up the prices, indicating his direct involvement in promoting the scheme. Additionally, a promotional banner for the auction appeared in Telegram’s search, further highlighting the platform’s official support for the project.

As a result, the sale of these digital “gifts” brought in 293 million stars — roughly 347 million rubles, or nearly 4 million dollars. In effect, this revenue went directly to the Telegram ecosystem, meaning Durov and his platform profited from it.

In essence, users were being sold “worthless tokens” — NFT items with no practical value. People were paying tens of thousands of dollars for a simple digital square on their profile. That’s why the scheme raises serious questions: who is willing to spend this kind of money, and why is Durov so actively promoting a mechanism that appears to be outright fraudulent?