Exposing Duran: how Molfar investigators found out the artist’s identity
Based in St. Petersburg, Duran is the former Soviet Union’s most notorious anonymous artist, who rose to prominence with ironic minimalistic comics he has been posting on social media since 2009. People compare him to Christopher Nolan for the plot twists he invents, and his multi-level jokes have spawned endless memes. His public pages have an 800,000-strong following, and there’s even a short inspired by his comic about the girl, who becomes a walking Wi-Fi hotspot as a result of a scientific experiment. Duran himself has never revealed his identity, remaining anonymous for over ten years.
Investigators from the Molfar group removed the ‘anonymous’ label from this artist in mere 48 hours, and AIN.UA was the first media outlet to reveal who Duran really is.
Below, we provide a detailed description of how the Molfar team found out the identity of Duran. Based on the data from open sources and the artist’s public pages as well as information acquired through OSINT techniques, this story has been prepared by Artem Starosek, the CEO of OSINT company Molfar.
Finding Duran
We started with the official contact email shown on Duran’s public page — artbyduran@gmail.com. And this very first step gave us the following owner name leads.
- According to our Telegram bot, the emails were signed by ‘Rglor Bair’ and ‘Radnaev Bair’.
- Lampyre got us two leads, too: there was an ask.fm account registered by some Dmitriy Vinnichenko, and a Foursquare account with the name of Joffrey Baratheon.
- In the WHOIS catalogue, the duran-art.com domain was shown as registered in autumn of 2011 by Vladimir Batozhabovich Radnaev.
We thus had two last name hits — Radnaev — and the first name ones — Bair.
Searching for St. Petersburg residents that went by the name Bair Radnaev, we found two persons of interest: Bair Batozhabovich Radnaev and Bair Bairovich Radnaev. The latter indicated on his social media fine arts, video games and Christopher Nolan films as his interests — much like Duran. As it turned out, Bair Bairovich was a DevOps Engineering contractor. He liked drawing, but his style looked nothing like Duran’s. Besides, Duran organized a personal exhibition in St. Petersburg in December 2014, while Bair Bairovich was yet to move to St. Petersburg at that time because he studied in Tomsk. So, it was a dead end.
We went back to Bair Batozhabovich. Connected to Duran’s page was the telephone number 79*******37. We traced it back to Bair and his St. Petersburg address and got another email hit: de*********ny@gmail.com. In a leaked password database, ‘ufvfnm65’ — the password for the de*********ny@gmail.com email — was listed as the password for bair.radnaev@gmail.com as well. Typed in Russian layout, ‘ufvfnm65’ became ‘гамать65’ (‘play video games 65’ in English), a reference to video games. The number 65 would come in handy later on.
According to our Telegram bot, the bair.radnaev@gmail.com email was attached to a deleted account with the name Bair Radnaev, on which pictures similar in style to Duran’s comics were posted. In his interview, Duran admitted having had two VK accounts: a personal one for friends, which he deleted, and a public one, which was still maintained.
He deleted his personal account on VK, but not on Facebook. And the phone number connected to that profile was 79*******42. On entering Duran’s email artbyduran@gmail.com when prompted to restore access to the Facebook page, two-factor authentication kicked in, offering to send an SMS to a phone number ending in 42. It also worked the other way around: when attempting to restore the account by phone number, we got a prompt with an email starting with the letter ‘a’.
Welcome to the jungle
In the Duran’s Shop (Магазинчик Дюрана) merchandise album, there were T-shirts with Sex & Violence (Секс и насилие) prints. This is what Duran called his early artistic period: in 2008, his comics included depictions of violence, sex, and drug use. Duran had been selling his merch through a Printdirect account — kipling65. The same nickname was used on Bair Batozhabovich’s LiveJournal page, which had bair.radnaev@gmail.com as a registration email. Both Duran and Bair put the number 65 we saw earlier at the end of their passwords.
In 2009, Bair posted a piece titled Stains (Пятна) on LiveJournal. Two years later, Duran posted the same piece on his VK page. Bair worked in advertising, which aligned well with what Duran was doing.
We obtained a certified copy of the taxpayer registry entry for Bair Batozhabovich Radnaev — born in Buryatia on 24 September 1986, he was the only person with that name registered in Russia. Bair’s and Duran’s Badoo profiles listed the same age — 39 years — 5 years older than actual.
Investigating further, we managed to learn more about Bair’s education and career as well as to find common friends of Bair and Duran. We pulled data from the individual income statement, colleagues’ Facebook posts, and creative team descriptions from Bair’s projects.
Bair Radnaev
Born in 1986 in Zaigrayevo urban locality, Buryatia, he graduated from the Novosibirsk State University in 2008 and moved to St. Petersburg in 2013.
In 2013–2015, he worked for the Smetana advertising agency as a copywriter. The agency’s founder Andrey Buzyna and former copywriter Alexander Dobrokotov are among Duran’s friends on VK and Bair’s on Facebook.
In 2015–2017 he was a creative director with Great, a digital advertising agency, and participated in the projects of advertising agency Roskreativ.
Among Duran’s and Bair’s mutual friends are Maria Lapuk, the founder of PR-agency Vinci Agency, Maria Nikoforova, Head of Content and a developer of freelance translator platform SmartCat, and Evgenia Solontseva, formerly an Art Director with Aromaco Russia, an aroma marketing company.
According to his interview, Radnaev has had no permanent employment since 2018, doing project work in advertising and maintaining his public pages. In 2018, Duran drew a scientific research comic for Skoltech (Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology). According to his individual income declaration, Bair was paid by Skoltech in January 2019.
We contacted Duran under the guise of advertisers and found out that the creation and posting of a comic on public pages cost RUB 180,000 as of November 2020. We found nine advertising comics published since early 2020. Therefore, he has earned at least RUB 1.6 million or USD 21,000 from comics since the beginning of 2020.
In Duran’s comic ‘Endless Joke’, the protagonist ends up in a joke universe. When the joke ends, its central character disintegrates into laughs. To survive and find his way back to reality, he needs to spoil all the jokes, e.g., by warning a cheating wife that her husband will return from the trip earlier than promised. Not to become exposed, people that want to stay anonymous have to ‘spoil’ their digital footprints, often all of them. Duran failed to spoil the ‘anonymity joke’ that’s for sure.
Afterword
On January 12, 2021 Molfar published this article on the Ukrainian IT portal AIN and reached Duran to show digital traces that disclosed the artist’s identity. At first Duran denied that he was Bair Radnaev, but a week later he revealed his identity in Russian mass media. In an interview with Meduza, Bair called Duran’s deanonymization a work of the Ukrainian secret services, but this was not true. The investigation of Duran’s identity is an experimental project of Molfar, which shows how much information about a person and a business can be found in open sources.
Mass media that posted about the uncovering of Duran’s identity:
AIN.UA, https://ain.ua/2021/01/12/deanon-dyuran/
Meduza, https://meduza.io/feature/2021/01/24/poyavlyaetsya-chuvstvo-chto-za-moey-spinoy-vse-bolshe-glaz
Lenta.ru, https://lenta.ru/news/2021/01/19/duran/
Sobaka.ru, https://www.sobaka.ru/entertainment/art/122755
Бумага, https://paperpaper.ru/papernews/2021/01/19/anonimnyj-hudozhnik-duran-nazval-svoe-imya-p/
Author: Artem Starosek, CEO of Molfar, an OSINT company.
