For the past few days, a video has been sharing online showing money in boxes allegedly found during the NABU searches of former head of the defense procurement agency Arsen Zhumadilov. In fact, the video was generated by artificial intelligence (AI), and was first distributed by a clone-forgery on the Ukrainian media NV.
It can be understood that the source was a fake site from the domain — the original NV has “nv.ua”, while the fake uses the domain “nvukraine.com”.
On September 23, a fake website published an article with the headline: "$140 million found in boxes under refrigerators marked ʼfor the ʼServant of the Peopleʼ: NABU searches the ex-head of defense procurement."
The “news” reported that law enforcement officers had allegedly seized over $140 million in cash, packed in several boxes from under refrigerators, one of which was labeled “for the ʼServant of the People”.
As confirmation, a fake video of the “searches” was added to the text. Both the news and the video are dubbed in English, which suggests that this fake was also targeted at a foreign audience.
The fake news and video were subsequently used in their posts by a number of pro-Russian Telegram channels. According to Babelʼs analysis, as of the morning of September 25, these posts had garnered almost 370 000 views.
NABU itself reported that this video is fake. Zhumadilov also reacted to the situation and called the video a “Russian IPSO” that “affects some people”.
- Zhumadilov was the head of the Defense Procurement Agency (DPA) from March 2025 to August 2026. He terminated his contract early.
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