In November 2016, one of the presumed founders of the game, a 21-year-old psychology student named Philipp Budeikin, was arrested on charges of instigation to suicide. In an interview, Budeikin refuted the numbers reported in the Novaya Gazeta survey—and confessed to having personally induced 17 of those people to suicide.
“There are people and then there [are] scum, in other words, people who bring absolutely no value to society and who only do harm. I have cleansed society of these people,” Budeikin said. “It began in 2013. I created F57—” one of the groups on VK in which the game came to life “—In order to see what would happen. I filled it with shocking content and it started to attract people. It was banned in 2014. For a while, I would laugh along as I watched while everyone tried to understand what ‘F57’ meant. It’s simple: F is for Philipp, my name, and 57 were the last digits of my telephone number at the time. I thought of this idea over the course of five years. You might say that I had prepared it. I thought the entire project up, the different levels and the different steps. It was necessary to separate the normal people from the scum.”