On Thursday, Ruja Ignatova became the first crypto fugitive to appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Her project, dubbed ‘OneCoin’, has become one of the biggest financial scams since Bernard Madoff.
He disappeared five years ago. The FBI decided on Thursday June 30 to make Ruja Ignatova one of its priority targets. Suspected of having organized the biggest scam in the history of cryptocurrencies and one of the most expensive for the victims, this 42-year-old Bulgarian, who called herself the “queen of cryptocurrencies”, was included in the famous list of the ten most wanted criminals in America.
The FBI offered up to $100,000 to help locate this woman. A month earlier, Europol had promised €5,000 to anyone who could provide information leading to her arrest.
The great promise of the cryptocurrency ‘OneCoin’
“She is one of the biggest criminals out there,” Jamie Bartlett, a British journalist who spent his last years trying to track down Ruja Ignatova, told the Vice site and even published “Queen of Crypto” for a year, a podcast for the British network BBC to talk about it.
For him, he has little to envy Bernard Madoff, the famous American financier-swindler who made the victims of his scam lose more than 60,000 million dollars at the end of the 2000s. Ruja Ignatova stole at least 4,000 million dollars to millions of victims in nearly 70 countries.
Its history is little known: at the time it operated, cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and the like were not part of the popular topics and were out of public opinion. However, his epic criminal scam, which began in 2014, involves other players, including Eastern European mafia groups.
Ruja Ignatova is the creator of ‘OneCoin’, one of countless cryptocurrencies that have sought to compete with Bitcoin over the past decade. Unlike 99% of other cryptocurrency competitors, ‘OneCoin’ managed to attract the interest of a wide audience, far beyond the traditional circle of insiders.
There is a vast literature of newspaper articles devoted to portraits of the victims, ranging from the suburbs of Glasgow to rural Uganda to the Franco-Belgian border.
In 2006, at the height of her fame, Ruja Ignatova could fill prestigious venues like London’s ‘Wembley Arena’ to publicize the virtues of her ‘OneCoin’, which was supposed to “replace bitcoin in less than two years”.
Through her personality, the scammer managed to convince around three million investors by 2016. Her strategy was to appear calm, self-confident, while showing off her law degree and her alleged work for the prestigious consulting firm ‘McKinsey’, points out the Wall StreetJournal.
Ruja Ignatova was also doing TV sales and appeared as one of the main promoters of an event sponsored by ‘The Economist’ magazine, which was actually 100% financed by ‘OneCoin’.
A small pyramid selling sect
Ignatova had also managed to attract specialists in multilevel sales, those pyramid sales systems that, in the end, only benefit economically those who are at the top of the pyramid.
That was the true nature of ‘OneCoin’. Ruja Ignatova only sold “crypto-vent” to members of her community. She asked them to buy, with real coins, the fake money that at that time was impossible to change into real currency.
As in all pyramid schemes, the “crypto queen” and her followers promised to compensate those who recruited new members of the “family”.
Because that’s how Ruja Ignatova referred to all the members of the ‘OneCoin’ “club”. A system that had “similarities with ancient sects,” Eileen Barker, a specialist in sectarian movements at the London School of Economics, told the BBC. “People think they’re part of a big project and invest in something that’s going to change the world, in the end, it’s almost impossible for them to admit they were wrong,” she explains.
And as in most cults, while the members at the “bottom” of the pyramid pay, the leaders at the “top” get rich. In 2018, French journalist Maxime Grimbert spent months following the financial trail to uncover hundreds of shell companies that allowed Ruja Ignatova and her relatives to purchase luxury real estate across Europe.
But as financial authorities in various countries, including Germany, Bulgaria and the UK, issued warnings about the ‘OneCoin’ business model, investors/victims began to demand answers. In particular, they wanted to know why it was not yet possible to convert their ‘OneCoin’ into dollars or euros.
Ruja Ignatova assured that the value of her cryptocurrency had skyrocketed thanks to the investments made… In reality, it was the project leaders who set the value of ‘OneCoin’ as they pleased.
sight loss in greece
During a big conference planned in Lisbon in October 2017, the scammer was expected to deliver some good financial news to her investors, who were increasingly impatient for their money. He never appeared on stage and from that moment on, she was never heard from again.
The FBI discovered that two weeks before announcing the conference in Portugal, he had taken a flight to Athens, where he appears to have disappeared. She would have discovered, by chance, that her fiancé at the time, whom she had spied on because she suspected she was cheating on him, was collaborating with the FBI, says the ‘Wall Street Journal’.
A discovery that would have propelled her to her feet as quickly as possible. Since then, rumors and conspiracies have been circulating: she would have been murdered by disgruntled investors, she would still be hiding in Greece or even in Dubai, she would have returned to Germany, where she grew up, or she would be protected in Bulgaria by mafia groups that she helped enrich.
His whereabouts are uncertain: what is a fact is the fall of the ‘OneCoin’ house of cards. After the disappearance of “the queen of cryptocurrencies”, it was her brother, Konstantin Ignatov, who took over the business before handing it over to his mother, who later gave it to other businesswomen. In the end they all disappeared.
It is not surprising that this story is of interest to Hollywood. The film studio MGM announced in 2020 the shooting of a film about ‘OneCoin’ called ‘Fake!’ . The role of Ruja Ignatova would be played by Kate Winslet, an actress who has debuted in feature films such as ‘Titanic’ or ‘Contagion’.
*Adapted from its original French version
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