On December 4, 2020, social networks exploded with a story about how five of the 15 animators who reached the finals of the animation competition as part of the international Kinoproba festival fell ill with COVID-19, and two of them, young girls, died. The publication Fontanka.ru sorted out this story.

The Facebook post of Soyuzmultfilm studio editor-in-chief Sergei Kapkov went viral:

“A monstrous story, to the point of tears, to the point of goosebumps... Fifteen young people passed the selection process and were allowed to pitch animation projects at the Kinoproba festival.” Of the fifteen, five fell ill with COVID-19 (one in three!) a couple of weeks before the event. They promised to defend projects online, Natalia Egorova kept in touch with them. But... One of the girls - 21-year-old Shura Grushina - died. Her father was going to participate in her place, in her memory. For some reason, he stopped getting in touch, apparently realizing that there was no point in this anymore... But on the day of pitching, in the morning, it turned out that the infection had claimed the life of another young talented girl - 26-year-old Natasha Malgina. The statistics are terrifying!!! I’m already silent that contact with the other three sick people has also been lost, the phones are turned off, and letters are not answered. I really want to believe that they just changed their minds. Once again: five out of fifteen people are in different parts of the country! Two have died. Three - unknown... Young, purposeful, talented! Please take care of yourself! This is scary... Well, look at these girls who dreamed of devoting their lives to the kindest of arts..."

The publication was accompanied by photographs of the festival booklet - the faces of the deceased girls and short biographies:

Of course, such a series of events could not but cause shock, and the message began to be actively reposted. The reposts were followed by publications in some Media. However, objections also emerged. In particular, former television journalist Sergei Kuropov drew the author’s attention to a lot of inconsistencies in Grushina’s booklet biography: the university and faculty are called differently, the girl is not on the list of graduates. In addition, the profiles of both finalists could not be found on social networks.

However, Kapkov, up to a certain point, strongly objected to the skeptics, and the reason for this was the presence of first-hand information: the curator of the animation section of the festival, Natalia Egorova, told him the story. She was involved in the selection of projects and communicated first with the girls (online), and then with their relatives, who told the terrible news. Moreover, Egorova promised to connect the Fontanka correspondent with Malgina’s relatives so that an article could be written about the talented girl.

At the same time, Fontanka began its own journalistic investigation, which showed that Natalya Malgina and Shura Grushina never had a home address or telephone number, did not buy plane or train tickets, and did not share their creativity on the Internet. An additional reason to suspect something was wrong was the mirrored photo of Natalya in the booklet - this was noticeable from the inscription on the T-shirt. Well, the obvious fact of plagiarism was the icing on the cake. The characters from Malgina’s competition entry turned out to be heroes of a comic strip by artist Daria Borsuk, and the characters from Grushina’s entry turned out to be heroes from another artist from the same community.

Having compared some information about the two artists, Fontanka journalists contacted their colleague from Lipetsk, Dmitry Zarnitsky. The 29-year-old animator stood out in that his project work “Enchantment” was also among the coveted 15 applications for the “Screen Test”, which went to the pitching stage, that is, the official presentation in order to find investors. In addition, Zarnitsky presented another work for “his friend” Kirill Antonov.

A young man working in a nursing home with a salary of 10,000 rubles quickly admitted that the suspicious applications were his doing. Dmitry always dreamed of opening his own animation studio, but did not have any financial opportunity. The winner of the animation competition “Screen Tests” was entitled to a prize of 50,000 rubles, which could be used to promote their series. Zarnitsky decided to increase his chances of success and added work on behalf of Kirill Antonov (a colleague with whom he had quarreled a year earlier) to his application. But he didn’t stop there and sent five more applications, and all seven of his “creations” were shortlisted for the competition.

After the time came to defend the work at the pitching (this could be done online), the authors of the applications suddenly began to disappear. Her “father” wrote about the death of Shura Grushina, “sister Olga” reported the sad news about Natalya Malgina, and then a message came about the death of another finalist, Vladimir Vershkov. Two more participants stopped communicating, and their phones were blocked.

The five dummy participants, according to Zarnitsky, were a kind of Frankenstein: a photograph of one acquaintance, a biography of another, a project of a third. In all the projects, according to the hoaxer, he took part in one capacity or another and was going to attract their authors to work in the animation studio of his dreams. Moreover, he was confident that the story of deaths from COVID-19 would not go beyond the festival.

And although Zarnitsky sincerely repents of what he did and calls it a “prank,” the story continued not only in the moral and ethical plane. Director of the Kinoproba festival Liliya Nemchenko said that forgery of applications and speculation on the topic of death are crimes that should receive legal status. In addition, one of the authors who became a victim of plagiarism was noted directly in the comments to the Fontanka publication. He accused Zarnitsky of theft and drew attention to the fact that he, through the mouth of “sister Malgina,” gave the festival all the rights to someone else’s story after the girl disappeared. And in a publication on the social network “VKontakte“, dedicated to the high-profile incident, noted almost all those who suffered from Zarnitsky’s actions. They illustrated their claims with screenshots of their own works, as well as correspondence with the main character of the hoax, known among animators under the nickname Zardim.

Fortunately, the story of the death of two (and, given a later report, three) young people from COVID-19 turned out to be fake. However, it should serve as a lesson. Life in the era of quarantine dictates its own rules, and people began to participate in events of various levels online, and often simply by correspondence. Therefore, organizers of any events that, for one reason or another, may be of interest to potential scammers should consider an adequate mechanism for personal identification.