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Gen Z swears by these viral TikTok codes. They Shouldn't.

They know his last name —Grabovoi — but not his full name, and not his story.

Millions of TikTok users trace his number sequences onto their wrists like charm bracelets, believing 5207418 will drop an unexpected influx of cash money their way and 318798 will conjure a superfluity of affluence and plenty.

They call them “Grabovoi codes” with reverence, as if invoking an ancient all-knowing wisdom whispered from a single tree rooted deep within the Peruvian Amazon.

What they don’t know is that their prophet, Grigori Grabovi, is a convicted swindler who once promised grieving mothers he’d resurrect their murdered children — for $1,200.

@the.keri.johnson

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In 1960s Soviet Kazakhstan, Grigori Grabovoi was a quiet, solitary boy obsessed with numbers he’d endlessly sequence in the margins of his notebooks. His mathematical gifts earned him a place at Tashkent State Polytechnic University, where he graduated in 1986 with credentials that should have led to a life of steady Soviet engineering.

Instead, while inspecting aircraft in Uzbekistan, Grabovoi launched his first con: claiming he could detect structural faults without opening planes, seeing through metal hulls with psychic vision.

No independent verification was ever produced. But it hardly mattered. As the Soviet Union crumbled and faith in rational materialism collapsed, people hungered for something beyond the failing state. Grabovoi sensed that hunger — and fed it.

The Perfect Con for Chaotic Times

By the 1990s, Grabovoi had moved to Moscow and recast himself as a spiritual entrepreneur. His breakthrough was seductively simple: every number sequence carried a precise vibrational frequency. Concentrate on the right digits, and you could retune reality itself. Want health? There was a code. Wealth? Another. Even terminal illness could, he claimed, be reversed through mathematical meditation.

The genius of the con lay in its logic. Numbers don’t lie. In the chaos of post-Soviet collapse — inflation soaring, crime rampant, institutions crumbling — digits offered cold, mathematical certainty. If the world was breaking down, perhaps it could be rebuilt one sequence at a time.

Grabovoi wrapped his snake oil in the language of science, registering patents for devices that would “focus human thought to control events.” He wasn’t just another mystic; he was a scientist-prophet, his claims audacious but cloaked in mathematical neutrality. Desperate people paid fortunes they didn’t have for the illusion of control.

An Unforgivable Promise

Then came September 2004 and the Beslan school siege. When armed Chechen rebels stormed a school and killed more than 300 people — most of them children — Grabovoi made the most unconscionable promise of his career: he could bring them back.

Mothers, broken by unimaginable loss, paid him up to €1,300 each, clinging to his number sequences like direct lines to God, believing mathematical incantations might restore what bullets had taken from them, and return their murdered children home—healthy and whole.

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