Am I really the only person in this thread who thinks this reeks of fraud?
What is the specific fraudulent business plan that this smells of?
It's not clear to me that that's a sensible question to respond with. It's certainly not conventionally the case that one is expected to be able to describe a precise fraudulent business plan when one's inbuilt other-people-evaluator flags a proposition as being dodgy as hell. Positing that as being a reasonable expectation strikes me as setting other people up for exploitation.
Focusing on the specifics is a step that I find helps a lot in narrowing down the source of people's discomfort. (I work in tech support.) However the way I phrased that was probably not the best. Are there any specific fraudulent business plans you are aware of in your experience that pattern-match to what this guy is doing? Various famous cons are well documented on wikipedia. I would guess that if this is a fraud it is unlikely to be an original new kind of fraud.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2012/07/human-immortality-could-be-possible-by-2045-say-russian-scientists.html
The nice thing about Russians (I'm from that neighborhood originally) is that they are absolutely crazy and will try just about anything. They also probably have/had second-best science culture behind US (though they suffered significant brain drain as huge numbers of educated Jews left in the last 25 years). They have less regulation and quite a few rich people with ideas. Seems like a worthwhile group to keep in touch with.