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where do you see that they are Russian? they seem to have a bunch of US Patents, a Delaware postal HQ, and an office in the UK

Most of the staff looks to be Russian: https://www.linkedin.com/company/flipper-devices/people/

The top "Where they live" is UK.

the original team is Russian, but they downplay that a lot now (until you buy one and the promo stickers are in Russian). yes, they're registered in Delaware, almost every company that operates in the US is, including foreign companies.

whew. that's a relief

The company makes Flipper Zero as well. When they launched that product, the same topic came up [0]. The strongest argument given seems to hinge on the former nationality/residence of many of the original team. Obviously, different people will weight that above or below the UK address / USA incorporation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32168388

“Enable various forms of cybercrime” seems like a stretch.

If flipper does, so does Nmap and metasploit and Linux and soldering irons.

They all do too to varying degrees. You can say "X enables cybercrime" and "Y enables more cybercrime than X" and both could be true for any given X and Y.

For instance, someone buying a flipper is far more likely to do something illegal with it than someone buying a soldering iron. Both could be used only for legal purposes too, of course.

For every news story you can find of someone doing a legal thing with a flipper I can find you at least 10 stories of someone doing something illegal with it. Same for metasploit, nmap is borderline, and soldering irons not so much.

For every news story you can find of someone driving down the highway, I can find you at least 10 stories of someone crashing and burning in a multi-car pileup.