This April, a strange story broke across the internet about a young, Mandarin-speaking Russian man known as “Lelush” who’d spent months on a Chinese reality television show, apparently against his will.

The show, Produce Camp 2021, was the fourth season of a franchise that first began in South Korea in 2016 and has now expanded to Japan as well. The premise is familiar terrain for reality show fans: aspiring pop stars jostle for the chance to form a boy or girl band (each season is gender-segregated), with participants whittled away through competitive song-and-dance routines. Each week’s survivors are decided by audience vote.

Lelush, born Vladislav Sidorov, ended up on Produce Camp — so the story goes — because he had been hired as a behind-the-scenes translator for the show’s international contestants. A producer, taken with his good looks, put him in front of the camera instead, and Lelush — having realized too late that boy band boot camp was not his jam — began to intentionally sabotage his chances of victory.