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Side note to people reading this: in general, when suspecting a scam, don't blindly trust anyone who says "I'm ... and I confirm this is OK". This may be the same very person who you're suspecting of original scam ;). Not a theory, I have cases looks this every other week in my dayjob.

In this case I believe the post is legit.

It might ring better for the cypherpunks here that zhovner has verified their HN account ownership with their keybase GPG key, which can only be done by editing an account's profile description to include a specific signature (or by defacing HN / breaching the account). And the same key is also used to prove ownership of their Github account and website.

More important note to people reading this: use your brain. Is it likely that a scammer will create an extremely professional website and product, and then their scam is that ride the coat tails of another brand and try to keep that scam up with Hacker News comments?

(I think lots of HN people have issues with reality so just in case the answer is: absolutely not.)

Or he's been playing the long game and fake-submitted the Show HN post for flipper zero four years ago just to be ready for this day. ;-)

(or the account was compromised, of course)

Yes, actually. Well, everything except the last point. If you're unfamiliar with UFO 50, it's a recent collection of games inspired by 80s-esque computer game design. The reason why I bring this up is because there's a website (ufo50.net) which is actually fake and completely unrelated to the actual ufo50 site (50games.fun) which is designed to be SEO-bait so that it can absorb traffic from search engines.

Even sneakier - he designed and built an entire company around the Flipper Zero just to be able to fake this. For real.

Idea of Flipper Zero was to lower our guard and trust their company with security, while actually shipping hardware with backdoors -- which the Flipper Zero will, for some reason, not be able to detect.

Same, except the last point, I feel like I've seen that pattern multiple times. And it's not like it's expensive to do (presumably unless you get sued or something).

Well that's not the same is it? They aren't creating a whole new extremely professional product and just saying "made by OtherBrand"; they just cloned a website (probably using an LLM).

So yes except for the last point, and also the other points...

Ahh... I wish Keybase had taken off and not been gobbled up by Zoom. It had so much promise with things like this.

The Flipper Zero is the backdoor, on the Day of Reckoning everyone's Flipper will emit a signal that will drive people into a murderous rage and detonate all nukes while "zhovner", if that is his real name, hides in a mountain lair with a selection of hand-picked people that he has Chosen to repopulate the earth with. Once the billions have perished, his buddy Musk will launch his fleet of Starships full of handpicked seed ships to spread throughout the solar system and galaxy to spread humanity across the universe like a disease.

or something.

Yes. Someone had their iphone stolen. They got a text message on their partner's phone from Apple saying that their phone had been located; they followed the link and ended up on a professional, Apple designed website, showing a map pointing to a distant country where the phone was located, and they prompted the user to type in the phone's pin code in order to lock the phone or something like that.

They only caught themselves while halfway filling in the code, and I'm sure that was captured too.

Don't underestimate organized crime.

Hi, I am the CEO of Keybase and i can assure you we are working on features that will make this a reality

LOL

Interesting, but totally unrelated.