Roman & Anna Novak: Lured to a Fake Investor Meeting and Murdered in Dubai

On 2 October 2025 a driver dropped Roman and Anna Novak at a car park near a lake in Hatta, a hilly corner of the emirate of Dubai close to the border with Oman. They had come, they believed, to meet potential investors. According to Russia's Investigative Committee, the couple got out and climbed into another car. Their driver never saw them again.

Roman Novak was 38. Anna, his wife of 17 years, wrote a blog about spiritual practices and appeared in his social media posts as "his muse". They had two daughters. Within five weeks, Russian investigators were treating the case as a double murder, and three men from St Petersburg and Kazakhstan were in custody, accused of killing the couple because they wanted his cryptocurrency. According to the reporting that followed, the wallet they forced him to open was empty.

Who Roman Novak was

Novak was not a stranger to courtrooms. In 2020 a St Petersburg court sentenced him to six years in a general-regime prison colony for large-scale fraud. According to the court, as reported by the Russian channel RTVI, he had taken more than 7.3 million roubles from two investors using fake contracts and fake employees. Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that he was released early on parole and moved to the United Arab Emirates.

In Dubai he launched Fintopio in 2023, an app for fast cryptocurrency transfers that he pitched as a rival to the wallet built into the Telegram messenger. A crypto wallet is an account that holds digital coins, the equivalent of a brokerage account that only its owner's secret password can open. Novak often introduced himself to investors as a friend of Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder. Durov never confirmed knowing him, the independent Russian outlet Meduza reported.

Meduza and Novaya Gazeta Europe both reported that Fintopio raised about $500 million, and that investors, including business people from China and the Middle East, lost their money while staff went unpaid. Those figures come from press reports, not from any court. Novak was never charged over Fintopio. But the size of the number mattered, because it is what made him look like a man with a fortune within reach.

The trip to Hatta

According to the St Petersburg news site Fontanka, the man who met the Novaks at the lake said he was only a hired employee and offered to take them to his employers at a rented villa. Once there, Fontanka's sources said, the "investors" demanded the keys to Novak's crypto wallet. He handed them over. The wallet held nothing.

Relatives in Russia, unable to reach the couple, went to the authorities. The Investigative Committee in St Petersburg opened a case on their disappearance and investigated it as murder. Its spokeswoman, Svetlana Petrenko, later confirmed that the couple's remains had been dismembered and buried in a desert area of the UAE, and that the attackers and the people who rented their house and cars had thrown away the knives and the victims' belongings in different emirates.

The captors also tried to make the couple look alive. The couple's phones were detected first around Hatta and then in Cape Town, South Africa, before going silent, Finance Magnates reported. The Russian Telegram channel Mash, quoted by RTVI, reported that investigators believe one of the accused flew to Cape Town after the killing and switched on Novak's phone there.

The accused

On 6 November 2025 Russian police detained suspects in St Petersburg and the Krasnodar and Stavropol regions, Interior Ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said. The next day the Oktyabrsky District Court in St Petersburg ordered three men held in custody, charged with the murder of two people by a group, for gain, an offence that carries up to life imprisonment.

They were Konstantin Shakht, 53, a former senior detective in a St Petersburg police homicide unit who, according to RT and other Russian media, had served 12 years of a 15-year sentence for drug dealing and changed his surname after his release; Yuri Sharypov, 46, born in Leningrad; and Vladimir Dalekin, 45, from Temirtau in Kazakhstan. Russian media reported that Sharypov and Dalekin had fought in Russia's war in Ukraine and been discharged on health grounds. At the custody hearing Dalekin admitted the charge, Sharypov admitted it in part and Shakht denied it.

Fontanka reported that eight people were detained in all. Besides the three accused of the killing, its sources said, four others had rented the cars and the villa, bought knives and dealt with the couple. Novaya Gazeta Europe described them as intermediaries in money transfers.

In May 2026 the Russian state channel Vesti, quoting an investigator, reported that Shakht had shown investigators a safe deposit box containing $500,000, and that Dalekin had told them he and his accomplices flew to Dubai three times to follow Novak, at $10,000 a trip from whoever hired them. That client has not been publicly identified. In February 2026 the Israeli broadcaster N12, citing the newsletter Intelligence Online, reported that a Thailand-based Israeli private investigator, Michael Greenberg, also known as Mike Green, had been detained in Dubai some three months earlier over alleged links to the suspects. He was not suspected of the killings themselves, and no charge against him has been made public.

Buried together, and a death in custody

The couple's remains were flown home to St Petersburg at the start of January 2026, three months after they disappeared. On 8 March 2026 they were buried in a single grave at the Smolensky Orthodox Cemetery, in a private ceremony with no press, the news service OSN reported, citing a source close to the family.

On 16 October 2026 the investigator in charge, Yuri Yashkov, told the state news agency RIA Novosti that Vladimir Dalekin had died in a pre-trial detention centre after a long illness. Yashkov said the investigation into Yuri Sharypov was complete and that his case, with an approved indictment, would go to court shortly, and that all three accused had admitted guilt. That last point differs from the custody hearing a year earlier, when Shakht denied the charge. No trial date had been announced.

The case sits at the far end of what the industry calls wrench attacks: violence used to force someone to hand over crypto, because no security system can stop a password being handed over under threat. The Novaks had no bodyguard and, in the end, no money in the wallet that brought the men to Hatta.