Here’s how I got scammed for $157 000 for trying to revive my favorite videogame
The story began in September 2024. I was sorting through my software archive when I accidentally ran into an ancient Windows Mobile trove back from 2008. There is was, my favorite game of that time: Palm Kingdoms. It’s a clone of the legendary Heroes of Might and Magic II then made by several students from Russia. The impossible 320×240 of turn-based goodness, the crisp pixel graphics, the all-nighters (and often all-classes) I spent chasing dragons – it just swept all over me.
In a fit of nostalgy, I reached for Google. I discovered that the team has fallen apart in the decades that followed, but an old group in the Russian social network (VK) was still active. Scanning for admins, I found just one public account that had contacts on it.
That was how I uncovered the vice of the world disguised under the name of Andrey Kiryushkin and his embodiment of fraud: HackThePublisher OÜ.
This is an unlikely tale of my own stupidity, Kiryushkin’s dream team of scam and a few unfortunate coinscidences. Ultimately, I lost $157 000 in what was meant to be a reincarnation of Palm Kingdoms but mostly went straight into the pockets of Andrey, Arseniy and Valentine – his loyal accomplices.
But let us start from the very beginning.
HackThePublisher OÜ
My first point of contact with Andrey Kiryushkin was his Telegram account, @hedin_hiervard. We’ve had a nice chat. He’s 39 years old. Confident. Appealing. Unyielding just to the right degree.
Palm Kingdoms? Oh, he remembers: Moscow, 2006. Game development? How fortunate: he’s actually running this little studio registered in Estonia. (He’s from Switzerland himself. Likes the climate more.) They’ve already released two games (Dwarven Skykeep and Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint) and the third game (Centum) is going gold right as we speak. Just look at that palatable pixel art graphics. Revive Palm Kingdoms? Heck yeah, why not?
Oh, and here’s his photo:
Manly, trustable… and false. His real look is way different now.
Smoking weed, kidnapping kid from devorsed wife, whimpering about unbearable stress level, visiting his lonely mom in Bulgaria when his next landlord kicks him out for non-payment – this is the real him. But I didn’t know it back then.
Back then, Andrey sported an impressive team of artists, a VCMI contributor as a cofounder (Arseniy Shestakov; VCMI is a famous Heroes III rewrite) and even the original game designer of Palm Kingdoms. The team full of stars.
Here’s a screenshot of PK for your viewing pleasure:
The next day, my inbox sagged under the weight of Andrey’s proposal for the development of what we have unsurprisingly called “Palm Kingdoms 3”, or just “PK3” for short.
The finished beta would be ready in 12 months. The total budget was $393 000, and each of us was to invest $196 500. Revenue split 50/50. But, he said, there was one hard condition: I had to deposit half of my budget’s share (around $98k) before the project kicks off.
His motivation seemed reasonable: since the international situation made it impossible for us to draw a formal contract, in case of my no-show at later stages he’d have to cover up to the remaining 75%. Here’s an excerpt from his email (translated, as everything else in this post):
As I was told later, never in his life had Andrey that much money. In fact, he told his employees the entire budget for the game was just $100k, and it was coming from me alone.
I must confess: I’m a complete noob when it comes to gamedev. If there were any red flags, I couldn’t really see them. My intention was to glimpse into the videogame industry, to stir up my nostalgy while watching the game reborn 20 years later, perhaps to earn something should the fate permit.
After all, Frauds don’t usually feature in credit rolls of your favorite games. Frauds rarely own game development studios. It’s frauds that find you, not the other way around.
Yet there I was, in the cobweb of not just a humbug but also his shady support team.
At first, things went pretty smooth. After several rounds of discussions (to the official company’s email – flame.beholder@gmail.com), we settled on a gentleman’s agreement and I began preparing the payment in crypto.
As any sensible person would think (and I’m not among them), sending $100k in crypto to some dude in Switzerland sounded like a bad idea. No, a very bad idea.
I don’t want to get into political details of my situation back then, although they’re trivial to infer. Suffice to say that I judged the odds of losing money this way were less than the implications arising from “doing it right”.
And, in a way, I was correct.
To seal the agreement, I asked Andrey to put up its SHA256 digest on his studio’s website, Hack-The-Publisher.com: https://archive.ph/F50WN (it’s near the very bottom).
Then, I transferred the first $100 000, got onboarded by Andrey onto the company’s resources (Discord, GitLab and Trello) and the project got off.
Or did it really?
February 2025
Fast forward by half a year. It so happened that exactly during this period my personal life became extremely heated, preventing me from indulging in the gamedev affairs as I initially wanted. But, looking back, I understand there was not much to dive into anyway: for some reason, the project had just two and a half people constantly engaged, not 8-12 as planned. Those were the programmer, the game designer and, occasionally, Arseniy. Later it was revealed that the remaining team was busy working on a secret project (Rooked) that Andrey has launched right after my first transfer. A coinscidence?
Still, the two people that really worked did a remarkable job: they managed to round up the GDD (game design document, describes gameplay mechanics and other stuff) and a very shaky yet functional prototype in Unity.
This took them four months. Then Andrey came back to me on the subject of money. Started to imitate boisterous activity in Trello and GitLab. Declared that “the guys are forestalling the plan” – notwithstanding his own “lack of attention to the project”. Turns out his father has died. Mind you, he didn’t lie, he just forgot to mention it happened 3 years ago. Strangely, when that happened in Bulgaria, his mother failed to notify Russian authorities and continues to receive his pension to this day. Like mother, like son, as they say…
But life’s getting normal, he said: just my monetary approval, so to speak, was needed before he would “start bringing out the artists”. That’s it, I thought. I suppose that’s how things work in gamedev. First, the prototype, then reinforced development. And, just as planned, I transferred another $57 000.
Curiously, right after my transfer Andrey played another trick, this time on his poor ex-wife: he kidnapped his own daughter from the kindergarden while her mother was at work. Seriously. And after she called the police, he banned her from the company’s Discord server. She was the studio’s project manager (that same PM Andrey has mentioned in his first email).
That was March 2025.
May 2025
Future investigations unreveled that the new money were not even planned for paying PK3’s existing programmer and game designer, let alone a slew of new artists (who continued to work on Rooked, blissfully oblivios to the machinations of their tops). Already in December, Andrey stopped paying out wages to those two, citing per-month nature of the investment and delays in pushing through another tranche. (Why they were as ingenuous as myself to keep working and never voice concerns in public remains a mystery.) My last transfer covered the held-up payments, fueled the development until the end of March, and then… the project just came to a stop.
There were no money left.
At least, not for Palm Kingdoms 3.
Now, what does Andrey do in this predicament? Put simply, he reaches out for a publisher (Hooded Horse) and asks for $300 000 more.
He also pushes back the delivery date by one year – not bothering to keep it secret from me anymore.
Do you see the investor, i.e. me, somewhere in this grand new order of things?
You don’t. Neither did I.
The investor was no longer a necessity but a burden.
So the investor had to go.
Arseniy Shestakov
Talking about HackThePublisher, one must be sure to speak of its covert accountant and the main beneficiary of the hoax (who has grown richer by about half of my funding). Meet the man, Arseniy Shestakov:
You can check out his website: ArseniyShestakov.com, or drop a line in his Telegram account: @arseniyshestakov. Oh, and he did really commit into VCMI, no hoax here: https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi/commits?author=arseniyshestakov
Arseniy is very modest. He’s coming from Russia, like other heroes in our little narrative. He’s just turned 34 years of age, yet he stands proud as a formal cofounder and CTO of HackThePublisher OÜ. He loves Vietnam but isn’t shy of taking a ride across Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia or Singapore, though his beloved parents live in London, making him visit them sometimes. He started with Turkey in 2022 but considered it too hot for his liking (later were Cyprus, Georgia, Lithuania, Portugal… but, it’s hard to compete against the Eastern allure – now, I can understand that!).
In a nutshell, Arseniy is a man at peace with the world. He takes pride in certain kinds of weed also, making his bonding with Andrey special. He doesn’t make it too public though – like I said, he’s very modest. Shy, even.
He’s also a talented bookkeeper. Look at how swiftly he has solved his company’s liquidity problem in 2024. The last game they’ve released, Centum, was simply promoted from $9 000 to $200 000 worth, generating a stunning revenue of $191 000 overnight.
But Arseniy’s truly celestial modesty shines when the investor starts nagging him with embarrassing questions:
For a reason that is not entirely clear to me, eventually this and other chats lost messages written by Arseniy. I am certainly far from blaming him for cleaning up his mess. I am positive this was just a hardware failure. Luckily for us, I have made backups.
Secret Track: Arseniy the (Yandex) Hacker
Accounting fraud isn’t Arseniy’s only shady kink. He also has a distinguished darkweb career.
It started with the hack of Palm Kingdoms’ website when he was 19. He generated some license keys, then got in touch with the developers for a bit of a brag. And ended up in the company.
His targets became more ambitious with time. In 2022, Russia saw a breach of the national food delivery service (Yandex.Food’s leak of 50 million orders). This was less than a week after Arseniy had fled to Istanbul. He felt vulnerable. Old trusted comrades were on the line. He spilled it.
The comrades were impressed but thereafter stopped launching any programs Arseniy sent their way. And they don’t recommend you to launch VCMI either. Just in case.
Let’s keep it a secret though. Arseniy prefers not to reiterate on that moment of weakness.
Pavel-Valentine Makhin-Shishka
Finally, a fairly weird guy with an even more weird name. Last of the three people in charge of HackThePublisher. He was supposed to be an art director in PK3, but his work was re-directed (pun intended) to the all-enduring game designer. Too bad the management forgot to redirect Valentine’s salary to him as well, but I’ve seen stranger things happening in this company.
So, Pavel @hndsmvalentine Makhin, aka HNDSM_Valentine. Known to most as Valentine Shishka. A young (26), promising photomodel for a… particular genre (hint: HNDSM → handsome). I was confused with him at first: his name could be read as both male and female but ear-rings on his avatar prompted me to think he’s a girl. I still don’t know why he’s depicted that way, but luckily he never talked on the PK3 server so I happily lived with my delusion until I was sacked.
By the way, as you can see here, his wife, Elvira Belyaeva, also played along in this cozy, family scam:
In the defense of Valentine, I can attest he is one person not addicted to weed.
Which, I think, is a good thing given his social circle.
When Shit Hit the Fan
There’s a limit to even my fabolous stupidity. Seeing that no artists came in, that the entire Discord server had 14 messages in April and 15 in May, that the last commit in GitLab was on 7th April – I started to sense something fishy.
This is hilarious, I know.
It’s obvious that me, the investor, was the prime victim of the Andrey-Arseniy-Valentine collective fraud. But, by the twist of fate, next victims were the very people who did the honest work on the project: the programmer Vasiliy and the game designer Eugene. Given a monthly wage of $2 000 (highly at odds with their skills, I tell you), working hand in hand for 5 months they managed to produce an editor and a solid demo showcasing the combat screen, world map and a bunch of quests. See for yourself:
Get the demo here (Windows): 7971993444397-pk-3-win-64-160.zip
Source code: pk3git.zip
Of course, Andrey couldn’t overlook such a perfect occasion to immor(t)alize himself before the potential publishers:
Once shit hit the fan, both sloggers got laid off (right after me), apparently with some of what they’ve earned retained for crisis management. Inexplicably yet, some of their converstaion history was also… retained, disappearing into the void.
But, to top this off, just a month later, in July 2025, Valentine has published the PK3 page on Steam.
They plan on selling it after everything that has happened.
Touche.