Where the Hell Is the Cryptoqueen?
Ruja Ignatova went into hiding after running a multi-billion dollar scam. Here's the story.
Ruja Ignatova, OneCoin: two names that mean very little to most people, unless they are cryptocurrency enthusiasts. Ruja Ignatova appears on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list, and for a good reason: she was the main architect of a large-scale fraud amounting to at least $4 billion, and even up to $15 billion, according to some sources.
The fraud came to light in 2019, but many events occurred afterwards. Here are the major highlights of a case that has yet to be settled.
The Guru of Cryptocurrency
On June 11, 2016, 5,000 people gathered at Wembley Arena, London, to cheer Ruja Ignatova, the head of a highly sought-after company at the time: OneCoin. Ignatova looked like a princess with her elegant ball gown and long diamond earrings. She told the Wembley audience that OneCoin would become the “Bitcoin Killer”.
“In two years, no one will be talking about Bitcoin anymore!”, she shouted to the crowd, which was hit by a wave of euphoria. A crowd that seemed unaware that information had already pointed to potential fraud from OneCoin's management a year before.
The craze for OneCoin that was sweeping over London was not superficial. Documents leaked by BBC show that the British alone spent nearly 30 million euros on this cryptocurrency in the first six months of 2016, including 2 million in one week.
OneCoin was founded in Bulgaria in 2014 by Ruja Ignatova and another notorious con artist: Sebastian Greenwood. Two unpredictable characters who, along with trusted men and women, created a company with a pyramid-like structure that consisted of investing in the “future” of cryptocurrency while recruiting other investors.
Ignatova was taught the tricks of the trade with her father. Both once ran a metalworking company in Waltenhofen, Germany, which Ignatova quickly drove into bankruptcy. According to the company’s employees’ union, she allegedly swindled them out of six million euros. Prosecuted for misappropriating funds, she got away with a simple promise to repay some of the parties affected by the losses. The fake businesswoman had also been charged with ripping off her suppliers to the tune of 120,000 euros.
A Gold Mine That Reeks of Fraud
Just three months after the infamous June 11 convention in London, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) issued a warning on its website: “We believe consumers should be wary of dealing with OneCoin”, it said. “We are concerned about the potential risk this poses to UK consumers”.
Surprisingly, the FCA removed the warning from its website less than a year later. It was then easy for OneCoin’s promoters to interpret this U-turn as a free pass from the British authorities, which, from then on, seemed to view their company as a legitimate investment.
Yet, on May 27, 2015, a leading news website on crypto-technology, Cointelegraph, published an article about the Bulgarian company. The tone was set: OneCoin, it was written, “is suspected to be a pyramid scheme with no verifiable evidence to back up any of its business claims.”
In fact, it was in 2015 that things started to go wrong for the company while a certain amount of financial institutions closed its bank accounts.
Why these suspicions? The answer came from an expert who almost fell into the scam himself. At the beginning of October 2016, Bjorn Bjercke had been approached by a recruitment agent who had piqued his curiosity. The man told Bjercke that a Bulgarian cryptocurrency start-up was searching for a chief technical officer. Bjercke would get an apartment, a car and an annual salary of around £250,000. But he refused to join the project.
It turns out that Bjercke is a blockchain specialist and knew from the outset that OneCoin did not have any. The numbers displayed on the intranet of the company’s website made no sense at all. They were manipulated by employees who did what they were ordered to do.
The Noose Tightens
OneCoin aroused suspicion among experts as early as May 2015, only one year after its creation. But this was just the beginning of a movement that would lead to the disappearance of its co-founder. In 2016, Ignatova’s business was investigated by German financial authorities. Despite all, OneCoin’s activities continued at maximum speed.
In Europe, OneCoin’s capital inflows were drying up at the end of 2017, but in Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, where the populations had heard little about the problems the company was facing, investors stood in line to take advantage of this new market.
Meanwhile, Ruja Ignatova was blowing her fortune, buying multi-million dollar properties in Sofia, Dubai and London. In her spare time, she threw parties on her luxurious yacht, the Davina, where American pop star Bebe Rexha performed in July 2017.
But everything eventually collapsed. OneCoin’s cofounder Sebastian Greenwood was arrested in Thailand in 2018 and extradited to the United States. In China, authorities went on the offensive against the company while investigations were opened in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, and elsewhere. On January 17 and 18, 2018, the Bulgarian and German judicial police, assisted by Europol, raided the offices and servers of OneCoin in Sofia.
Greenwood was sentenced to a 20-year federal prison term (minus 5 years already served) in September 2023 by a New York Federal court. In January 2024, Mark Scott, an American lawyer, was sentenced to ten years in prison for laundering $400 million in funds from this scam.
In April 2024, William Morro was arrested for fraud in connection with the OneCoin affair. Prosecutors accused him of transferring $35 million of funds belonging to OneCoin to an account in Hong Kong, in 2016. He also allegedly transferred $6 million from Hong Kong to a personal account in the United States. Again in April 2024, Irina Dilkinska, OneCoin’s legal manager, was sentenced to 4 years in prison.
Where the Hell Is the Cryptoqueen?
By the end of summer 2017, investors were already worried about OneCoin managers’ mindset. With growing impatience, many expected answers to their concerns at a large gathering of European promoters in Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2017. But when the day came, Ignatova never showed up. FBI files show that on October 25, 2017, the former OneCoin CEO took a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens. She then went off the radar.
Strangely enough, on August 7, 2019, she posted a cover photo dated October 2015 on her Facebook page. The previous messages had been posted on January 2, 2017. Did Ignatova change the picture herself? Or was it done by someone having access to her identification codes?
Again in 2019, Ignatova’s real estate company, Oceana Properties, finalized the sale of her luxurious Dubai flat. And a 2023 BBC article reveals that the Cryptoqueen had bought a £12.5m penthouse in 2016 in London, UK, which was put back on the market in January 2023. Apart from these latter activities, the con woman has been quite discreet.
Igor Alberts, a former investor who lost a fortune in the debacle, said that rumors had it that Ignatova was traveling back and forth between Russia and Dubai using Russian and Ukrainian passports. It was also suggested that the businesswoman had undergone plastic surgery and was hiding somewhere, possibly in Bulgaria. Private investigators claimed she had been seen regularly at a restaurant in Athens until the first quarter of 2019. Some told BBC reporters she was living in Bucharest, others in Frankfurt.
Another rumor slipped between the branches, this one more disturbing: Ignatova would have been murdered by powerful people who were obviously not very happy to have lost their shirts. Among those powerful people is Hristoforos Amanatidis, one of the major drug lords in Bulgaria, who allegedly ordered the murder. Ignatova's body is said to have been dismembered and thrown into the Ionian Sea. But this news has never been confirmed.
Business as Usual
Such a fraud mill draws its share of characters from the underworld. Ruja Ignatova's brother, Konstantin Ignatov, has partnered with “significant players in Eastern European organized crime.”
After the disappearance of his sister, Ignatov took over OneCoin's management, but he was arrested on March 6, 2019, at Los Angeles airport as he was about to board a plane for a return flight to Bulgaria. He was released in March 2024 after 34 months in jail. At around the same time, his sister was charged in absentia by U.S. authorities with fraud and money laundering.
But even after these legal proceedings, OneCoin remained active, its coffers receiving funds from naive investors. How is it possible? Simple: OneCoin's fate was put in the hands of one Veska Ignatova, Konstantin’s and Ruja's mother. It is Veska’s signature that was most often seen on official documents, even before the vanishing of her daughter. These documents clearly showed a complex structure involving many companies established in tax havens. OneCoin, therefore, represented only the facade of an imposing building.
Veska Ignatova first appeared in public in the summer of 2020 at a promotional event for OneCoin. And just like her daughter did a few years earlier, she made a series of promises in front of an audience that took her at her word.
Sources
ABC News, BBC #1, #2, Behind MLM, Bitcoin.com #1, #2, Blockchain France, Bloomberg, Cointelegraph #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, Cointribune, Cryptoast, ICIJ, Le Monde, Sreet Press #1, #2, #3, The Kasaan Times