A Belarusian blogger set up a fake bank and launched a meme token as a joke and was stunned when it made him a millionaire in under a week, the Nexta Telegram channel reported on January 19.

Ilya, known by his online pseudonym Nowkie, created a fictional bank as a parody that it even said on its home page is a fake bank, and then launched a cryptocurrency token that to his surprise rapidly attracted investors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Last October, Nowkie created a logo for a bank named Fufelschmertz Pakost Incorporated (FPI Bank) – a name loosely translating to “filth” in Russian – and littered the bank’s website with absurd slogans, ridiculous names for the purported staff and outrageous services, Nexta reports.

Readers of the website were told by the bank that "Your finances will never be safe", "Trust us, and we'll fix everything... somehow" and "Unexpected fees and disappearing funds, unpredictable charges are all part of our service".

The bank issues cards named "Financial Trap" and "Trouble". In the reviews submitted by business partners and users include comments by companies that supposedly said: "don’t trust this bank” and praised the bank for constant negative balances and "trouble-filled contracts".

Amongst the employees of the bank listed on the webpage are staff members called Podvokhov (Deceiver), Kapkanov (Trapsetter), Obmanov (Fraudster) and Vrednikova (Troublemaker), accompanied by photos of Nowkie’s friends.

Nowkie then decided to launch a cryptocurrency token for the FPI Bank on the TON Blockchain via the Blum Mini-App on Telegram and invested $1,900 of his own money to register and list the coin, calling himself a “crypto-loser” in the registration process.

On the first day of trading the value of the token rose to $13,700 with a trading volume of $4,700 after 60 invested in the coin. By the third day the number of investors had risen to 82 and the value of the token to $15,900. A month after the bank was launched a reported 363,000 people had visited the site and user videos began to appear on TikTok.

FPI Bank even got a mascot – a dog – and the token was included in the vote for the “most trendy memecoin” in the Blum Memepad channel with 5mn subscribers. It won first place.

Then he started getting advice from the heavy hitters. The managing partner, Evgeny Gordeev, of Russian Ventures, a leading privately owned technology investment fund, wrote to him, saying he wanted to "explain what to do to make activity effective".

“You are going in the wrong direction. You have a token on TON, and it has no audience in either X or Reddit. You need to pollinate another market," Gordeev said, reports Binance Square.

Nowkie invited Gordeev to do a podcast with him for his subscribers, but the Russian refused.

In his latest video, Nowkie reports the token was worth $262,200 and that he has enough to buy a car or an apartment, although he admits the token would crash if he tried to sell it and “cheat everyone.” As of January 17, there were 5,926 investors into the token, which has a trading volume of $3.8mn and a total market capitalisation of $2.9mn.

Now Nowkie is distributing tokens to fan art creators and continues to advise people not to invest into the token. Nevertheless, he has no plans to shut down the project and promises to share updates on the bank’s growth in the future.