In the summer of 2016, Ruja Ignatova walked on stage at Wembley Arena to greet thousands of fans. “She was dressed as usual in an expensive ballgown”, says The Sunday Times. But her message was modern: OneCoin, “Dr Ruja” told the cheering audience, was the “bitcoin killer” set to become the world’s largest digital currency. Scarcely a year later, she had vanished, leaving behind a trail of destruction.
The missing “cryptoqueen” has never been seen since. It transpired that OneCoin was essentially a Ponzi scheme disguised as a cryptocurrency – there was no blockchain base, and buyers were offered commission to sell the currency on to others. Several made multi-million-dollar fortunes themselves from an asset whose “price” Ignatova effectively fabricated.
Although OneCoin’s “suckers” were offered seemingly absurd returns – sometimes running to “hundreds of percent a year” – the timing of the scam, which ran from 2014 to 2017, was perfect since it capitalised on the frenzied speculation taking off elsewhere in the crypto world.
The victims, around one million people in 175 countries, collectively lost “somewhere between €3bn and €10bn euros” of their savings, says The Sunday Telegraph. When Bulgarian-born Ignatova disappeared in October 2017 – having quietly boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens – she took $500m of investors’ cash with her, according to her brother, who was arrested in 2019.
Last week, the FBI…
