He presented himself as Baoer Kechatie, a Russian soldier embedded in the Chechen special forces fighting in Ukraine. “Now we are fighting to the death against the Ukrainian army,” he said in Mandarin, gun in hand, in one of the clips that he uploaded to his Douyin account, the Chinese version of TikTok. He had 400,000 followers and had been hanging for nine months videos supposedly recorded from the front line of combat.
In one of them, up on a hill and with an industrial landscape in the background, he tells that he is in front of a nuclear plant that the Russian army has just taken over. In another video, hidden in some bushes, Kechatie says he has fought against US Marines. He even recorded himself in front of a white limousine, assuring that it was one of President Volodimir Zelenski’s official vehicles, which his brigade had seized.
Despite the improbability of his testimony, easily removable, his account did not stop attracting more followers who applauded his “courage”. As a final touch, in the last two months, with the increase in his popularity on the social network, the tiktoker Soldier linked in each video a link that led to an e-commerce store in which he sold Russian products, from vodka to milk.
In the end, everything he said was so crude that his own followers ended up uncovering the scam: Baoer Kechatie was the pseudonym used by aA Chinese man from the central province of Henan who had made a new face for himself -that of a bald man with a bushy beard- with deepfake software: a system that, driven by artificial intelligence, can reproduce or clone, based on real images and videos, the face and voice of a person.
Douyin users, pulling the IP address of the account, discovered that it was located in Henan and not in Ukraine. The scenarios in which she set the montages of his were recorded in China. It was all a scam to sell products imported from Russia -he had sold at least 210 items- posing as a soldier who fought alongside the Kremlin mobs, who are sympathetic to the most nationalist current that moves through Chinese social networks and devours all Moscow propaganda. The guns that Kechatie showed in his videos were toy guns.