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.