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Comment by firtoz | Hacker News Reader

TIL they're Turkish

The original author and also creator of the RAR format, Eugene Roshal, is Russian. I think he moved to the US way back in the day, but not sure about that. He has been very private with his life.

The company doing the software distribution, is located in Berlin. The Managing Directors for that company seem to have Turkish names, but I don't know if they're Turkish.

BTW, Looking for some info I just found a website [0], clearly AI generated (but not necessarily meaning the content is false) claiming Eugene Roshal had severe kidney failure this past month, and he's waiting for surgery. They're asking for donations. There are some names on who's theoretically behind it [1] but they don't link to any LinkedIn profile or personal site. I can't find any other references. The BTC wallet they're using for donations hasn't seen any traffic ever. BE WARY, SMELLS FISHY.

  0: https://eugeneroshal.org/
  1: https://eugeneroshal.org/about/

A donation site that takes only bitcoin as payment is very suspicious, surely there are alot of services like GoFundMe who would accept him if it was genuine. I think this is a fake scam

edit: can you write in brackets after the URL that it may be scam. I think alot of people may just go to the URL without reading your warning

WHOIS information for the domain shows it's registered in the Philippines. The name of the owner does not show up in any of the about section people. So I think those are fake.

In addition to what the other comments said ("WHOIS information for the domain shows it's registered in the Philippines"[0] etc), the "hospital bed" picture is blatantly AI-generated. If you zoom on his face, you can see that it looks extremely unnatural.

I suspect that someone's running a script that looks for public (-ish, Eugene has a Wikipedia page at least) figures without active social media presence and creates fake donation websites with AI-generated texts and pictures.

If my suspicion is correct, this is one of the most evil scams I can imagine.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801838

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