Ruja Ignatova: FBI's most wanted Cryptoqueen vanished with $500m of investors’ cash | OneCoin Scam

Ruja Ignatova ‘the cryptoqueen’ earned notoriety after running the biggest scam in the world, before vanishing without a trace in 2017. The FBI now has her on its top ten most wanted fugitives list. How did she make millions off unsuspecting investors across the globe?

FBI has named one of the most notorious fraudsters, among its top 10 fugitives – Ruja Ignatova ‘the cryptoqueen’.

It has been a bad year so far for crypto, but most investors know where they are putting their money, as opposed to early adopters of the digital coins, who hopped onto the crypto bandwagon, and were easy to fool with get-rich-quick schemes. And that is exactly what Ruja Ignatova did.

After running the biggest scam in the history of crypto in 2016, she disappeared without a trace the following year, when the bubble finally burst.

She left with billions of dollars in Bitcoins, the rival currency she promised to kill, and that has probably helped her stay hidden all these years.

What was OneCoin?

Ruja operated her scam by selling people the idea of OneCoin, a rival cryptocurrency to Bitcoin which was just rising at the time in 2016. People knew very little about cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology, that maintains a transparent and immutable record of transaction, eliminating the need for a central bank to regulate the coins.

As Ruja swept people off their feet, with her impressive presence in ballgowns and diamonds, and a resume that boasted of an Oxford education, and a stint at McKinsey and Co, scores of people signed up for OneCoin.

Money earns value when other people put their faith in it, and OneCoin managed to draw “believers” through several glamorous events, where Ruja herself delivered speeches. OneCoin quickly onboarded millions of investors, who did not know one very important thing – that the company had no blockchain.

We have been familiar with cryptocurrency for nearly a decade now, and most people would perhaps be able to connect the critical role, that a blockchain plays to give the currency credibility. Blockchains forms the foundation for cryptocurrency. It is the financial ledger in the absence of a central bank. So a cryptocurrency without blockchain is a scam.

Yet, those who were pulling the strings of the OneCoin scam, were able to keep this hidden from investors. The Ponzi scheme added more unsuspecting converts, until the investors grew concerned, when a long-promised exchange that would allow OneCoin to be turned into cash, kept being delayed. OneCoin promoters were to meet in Lisbon in October 2017, to resolve this but Ruja was nowhere to be seen.

Where is Ruja Ignatova?

She was last traced to Athens where she arrived from Sofia, Bulgaria, and then went off the radar.

Investigators and blockchain experts, who later spoke to people involved in the early stages of OneCoin said: they did not expect the scam to get so big, and apparently neither did Ruja. Yet when it kept raking in money, those who were Ruja’s masters would not allow it to stop. It is suspected that: significant players in Eastern European organised crime got involved. Investigations have also shown Ruja’s connections to Saudi Arabia.

A lawyer representing a OneCoin victim received thousands of documents, from a whitsleblower who said: it was wrong that people in Dubai were being “unjustly enriched”, BBC reported. The “Dubai files” show that a massive Bitcoin deal was struck, with an Emirati royal Sheikh: Saoud bin Faisal Al Qassimi. Sheikh Saoud's lawyer says: all information connecting Ruja and his client are “baseless”. Yet evidence shows both of them once had close links, until relations probably soured following her alleged Bitcoin deal.

Some crypto experts say that: if Ruja still has Bitcoins she amassed during the peak of the Ponzi scheme, it would be difficult for her to move billions of dollars, without alerting law enforcement agencies, who now monitor the publicly viewable database, of cryptocurrencies closely.

#onecoinnews #rujaignatova #cryptoqueen