66K views, 1.6K likes, 214 loves, 348 comments, 854 shares, Facebook Watch Videos from Cryptoqueen: I would like to share some very personal and exciting news with you. 'Haters' - Bitcoiners are 'haters'. That I don't know what they're thinking. Didn't seem to be the contents of the famous 3rd floor cash room :) Looked as if the company is moving out, but who knows pic.twitter.com/vH0XzMFef0. But to me it symbolises something else too. And his targets were public libraries in America where he would masquerade as a "jolly," well-educated professor and ultimately pillage rare books to the tune of more than half a million dollars. They have persuaded their friends and families to invest in OneCoin. On the run since 2017, Dr Ruja Ignat But towards the end of the year Jen McAdam was contacted by a stranger on the internet. And even then, the question remained, where had she gone next? Ignatovas associates havent been as lucky. Big companies like Amway and Herbalife use these techniques. Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is one of five financial routes Ignatova has known connections to. The smallest package cost 140, but they went all the way up to 118,000. I didn't even know what is a blockchain What doubt can I have?". He claims he has made 100m over the last 30 years. Europol told the BBC it was looking into the matter, adding: "This complex scenario with many stakeholders makes it difficult to assess where and how such an incident might have occurred.". Daniel is one of thousands of Ugandans who've bought into Dr Ruja's fake cryptocurrency - and the OneCoin financial documents leaked to the BBC reveal that as time went on, investors like him became increasingly important to OneCoin. They thought I ate their money.". Another lead comes our way when we pay a visit to a bizarre OneCoin beauty pageant in Bucharest. There, she recruited members to promote OneCoin and sell to their friends and relatives. "In my opinion, for what it's worth, she's moving around the Mediterranean," he says. How a con man duped struggling farmers into a pigeon breeding scheme that had fraud written all over it. Ruja Ignatova is wanted for her alleged participation in a large-scale fraud scheme. He takes the first one on the list and looks it up on the Companies House website. The problem, he explains, is that following the money isn't as easy as it sounds, because criminals structure their companies and bank accounts in such a way that their assets seem to disappear. Beginning in . She was dressed, as usual, in an expensive. Then he got into network marketing, or multi-level marketing (MLM) as it is often known, and started making money. "And he said: 'Well, first of all, they need a blockchain. When we started planning the Missing Cryptoqueen podcast in late 2018, no-one really had a clue what happened to Dr Ruja after her disappearance. Do you know who to complain to when you are a victim of a Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme? One Property was owned by another company called Risk Ltd. Risk Ltd was owned by Ruja, but was then transferred to some unnamed Panamanians, but it was still managed by another company called Peragon. It suggests she is still alive, and there are documents out there somewhere which contain vital clues as to her recent whereabouts. [5][6], Since 2017, Ignatova has been on the run from various international law enforcement agencies. Investors might not have understood the technology, but they could see her talking to huge audiences, or at the Economist conference. You think, 'Wait a bit longer. Human error to blame for train crash - Greek PM, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece. "Particularly if you have invested something, not only money, but belief, reputation, intelligence. "I've never told her directly that it's not going to work - that there is no more money, there's no more hope," he tells me. 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc. All Rights Reserved. It said the Missing Cryptoqueen podcast "will not present any truthful information and cannot be considered objective, nor unbiased". Georgia suggests we tell Daniel's mother that we are journalists, and that we are investigating OneCoin because a lot of people aren't getting their money. he recalls. "I did the calculation how many coins we needed to become the richest person on the planet," Igor says. Around the same time, the US authorities charged Dr Ruja in absentia for wire fraud, security fraud and money laundering. They have filed no financial information at all." In November 2019, a jury in Manhattan found Mark Scott, a lawyer for OneCoin, guilty of conspiracy to commit money laundering and fraud of $400 million by concealing the ownership and source of the funds. HubPages is a registered trademark of The Arena Platform, Inc. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. It turned out to be a shouting match, but it would send McAdam's life in a new direction. Yet a typical recruiting event would include no education, but plenty of discussion about investing in cryptocurrency. It took McAdam three months to go through it all, but questions were starting to form. Together with Daniel, Georgia and I travel south to meet his mother. "I thought, 'What???' Dr Ruja identified several of society's weak spots and exploited them. This is clearly a question for a professional, which is why Georgia and I went to see private investigator Alan McLean. Over the next several weeks, Curry sent a stream of information about how cryptocurrencies work: links, articles, YouTube videos. Why have so many people continued to believe in OneCoin, despite all the evidence? Lots of money. [20], Afterward, the North Rhine-Westphalia Police and German Federal Criminal Police Office announced that Ignatova is sought for fraud charges. Video, At the crash site of 'no hope' - BBC reporter in Greece, Record numbers of guide dog volunteers after BBC story. Between August 2014 and March 2017 more than 4bn was invested in dozens of countries. In early June 2016 a 36-year-old businesswoman called Dr Ruja Ignatova walked on stage at Wembley Arena in front of thousands of adoring fans. In court, US prosecutors alleged in 2019 that Mr Schneider was the one who provided her with confidential police information, although it is not clear if the allegations relate specifically to the leaked files seen by the podcast. I felt proud of her.". she shouted. In May 2015, already a very successful MLM seller, Igor Alberts was invited to a OneCoin event in Dubai, where he met lots of people, all apparently making fortunes with this new currency. He thought OneCoin would give cryptocurrencies a bad name, and he told McAdam bluntly that it was a scam - "the biggest scam in the [expletive] world". Dr Ruja Ignatova called her creation the 'Bitcoin killer' - and her hype duped a million investors. Taking seriously Alan McLean's advice about studying Dr Ruja's life before OneCoin, Georgia and I turn to the internet, which fortunately never forgets anything. Over the next hour or so she listened carefully to people talking enthusiastically about this exciting new cryptocurrency - how it could transform her fortunes. "I'm somehow hiding myself. And then in 2017, the ownership of Artefix was sold to an unknown man in his 20s. Those events were packed and organized like rock concerts. A postman thought he recognised the name, but couldn't be sure. The FCA said it had been up for long enough, but OneCoin promoters presented this as proof that the UK authorities considered OneCoin a legitimate investment. She is thought to have undergone several plastic surgeries in order to alter her appearance. pic.twitter.com/Qv2nNE8Mwf. "If you have any negativity you should not be in this group," she was told. From the very beginning, she was a gifted child and always at the top of her class. It's no surprise, then, that OneCoin's corporate structure is incredibly complicated. It wasn't just a fake cryptocurrency, it was an old-fashioned pyramid scheme, with the fake coin as its "product". Before too long they had passed 100,000 - a 10-fold return. OneCoin is no longer operational, with the token unusable and the website inactive. Sitting at her computer, the Glaswegian clicked on a link and joined a OneCoin webinar. Then he tries checking the company's owners. [10][2] Claims that she may have studied at University of Oxford in England give no details of college, course, or date of matriculation. [16] In 2014, she founded a pyramid scheme called OneCoin. We should try to get the tracker off it, he says, and he doesn't appear to be joking. [18] In 2019, her brother Konstantin Ignatov pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering in connection with the scheme. Cryptocurrency as an idea was just entering the mainstream. One of the main OneCoin offices in Kampala is attached to a church. So she decided to invest her savings and the money from her inheritance from her father into OneCoin. A change in the rules of Companies House the UK equivalent of ASIC forced Ignatova out of hiding, as she had to be named in full rather than just her shell company. "We made in our first month almost 90,000 out of nothing. Thanks for contacting us. Police have warned that she has likely had plastic surgery to change her appearance, with hopes low that she would ever be caught. "She was on her way. ", I ask him why not. It is a tale of 'greed and folly' perhaps even more scandalous than Holmes' billion-dollar Theranos bust-up. The Bulgarian woman, believed to be in her 40s, is wanted for her alleged. [13], In 2012, she was convicted of fraud in Germany in connection with her and her father Plamen Ignatov's acquisition of a company that shortly afterwards was declared bankrupt in dubious circumstances; she was given a suspended sentence of 14 months' imprisonment. Officers from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Dubai and Bulgaria were also present. "I said to Andreea, 'We need to build it up to 100 million coins, because when this coin goes to 100 and we have 100 million, we are richer than Bill Gates.' ", Some action at the OneCoin HQ at last. Ruja's ambition was to create a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin for the ordinary person who was not an experienced investor, but who could invest a smaller amount of money and make a considerable profit. Born on May 30, 1980, in Bulgaria, Ignatova moved to Germany with her family when she was 10 years old. The only way to exchange these OneCoins for any other currency was through an internal marketplaceOneCoin Exchange, known as xcoinx. Ignatova started to refer to herself as the Cryptoqueen. "One Life!" We called the lawyer who is (or was) married to her, and he didn't want to talk. She was condemned to 14 months suspended jail sentence. Frankfurt probably isn't the only place she goes - it might be one of several places, including perhaps Dubai and Russia. They keep postponing this. Her collaborators started getting arrested on securities and fraud charges and money laundering. "We are very proud of this in this country," he says. In this legal case, it is claimed that Ignatova acquired about 230,000 bitcoins, the largest known transaction for bitcoins, worth $48.5 million, from an Emirati royal in 2015. For several months, a French journalist called Maxime Grimbert tried to unpick OneCoin's corporate workings, collecting as many company names and bank account details as he could. She spotted that society's defence against OneCoin - the law-makers, the police, and also us in the media would struggle to understand what was happening. It's also been suggested that there are powerful people who might protect her in her native Bulgaria - and that she could hide in plain sight because of plastic surgery that makes her unrecognisable. On the other hand, Ruja and her collaborators amassed millions, which provided them with an affluent lifestyle: they bought luxury yachts, expensive jewelery and exclusive properties. "What was her lifestyle? She started her own company, OneCoin, in 2014 with her brother Konstantin Ignatov, which was touted as a lucrative rival to the leading . So much for following the money. She started asking the leaders of her OneCoin group if there was a blockchain. [2][7], Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, in 1980,[8] to a Romani family. She would have known that we were looking for her, he added, and she would have laughed at us. Sky Germany, the U.K.'s Channel 4 and super-indie Fremantle are backing a three-part doc series about the con, which was spearheaded by the mysterious Dr. Ruja Ignatova, who is still on the run . Find out who her friends were, what her lifestyle was like, her family.". By contrast, Jen McAdam says she bears a heavy burden of guilt. [26], According to a report published by Bulgarian investigative reporting site Bird, Ignatova was murdered in November 2018 on the orders of a Bulgarian drug lord, Hristoforos Amanatidis, also known as "Taki". While in Waltenhofen, we learned that she had a German husband, a lawyer for the well-known firm, Linklaters. "Where's the support? Both companies were founded by Ignatova and Greenwood. It was easy: you purchased OneCoin tokens, and these then generated coins, which went into your account. "And in that sense it's cultic.". She can't bring herself to tell them the truth. ", "Manhattan U.S. Attorney Announces Charges Against Leaders Of "OneCoin," A Multibillion-Dollar Pyramid Scheme Involving The Sale Of A Fraudulent Cryptocurrency", "BKA - Fahndung nach Personen - Ruja IGNATOVA", https://moneyweek.com/economy/people/605142/ruja-ignatova-profile-crooked-cryptoqueen, "The Outrageous Case of OneCoin, the Billion Dollar Scam Sold as a "Bitcoin Killer", "Cryptoqueen: How this woman scammed the world, then vanished", "OneCoin Took In Billions. Ruja's brother Constantin Ignatov, whom she placed in charge of the company after leaving in 2017, was arrested in March 2019. Then a few days later we received a call from a trusted source we cannot identify. Charles Ponzi is remembered for creating the Ponzi scheme. He told us we were right - Frankfurt is indeed where she spends much of her time. It is believed that more than a million investors from 175 countries were defrauded into investing in OneCoin. The company went bankrupt shortly after its acquisition. He has denied obtaining the documents and said: "When the Bulgarians participated at certain Europol meetings, it only took hours for her to get a complete rundown and get the minutes of what was said in those meetings. "You can still use them to buy things, you can still use them to buy political influence and nice houses and yachts. One spring day a few months earlier, Jen McAdam received a message from a friend about an unmissable investment opportunity. Another tip he gives us is to find out where she has been on her yacht. If you believe you have been a victim of fraud in relation to OneCoin or you suspect someone of actively marketing OneCoin, please come forward and report it to Action Fraud online.". When Georgia and I called them ourselves to check, they confirmed it. In June 2022, she was added to the FBI's 10 most wanted list. Like this one at Wembley Arena in London in 2016. According to Bjercke, Dr Ruja never expected OneCoin to grow so big. The. 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