The OneCoin Scam That Even the FBI Can’t Crack: Where Is Ruja Ignatova?

Fraud.

A crime in which a person deceives another to obtain the delivery of property or to gain an economic benefit, or causes a third party to obtain the delivery of property or an economic benefit in the same way. (Article 347 of the Criminal Act)

When someone says, “It was all a lie,” and causes financial damage, at what point does the scale become big enough to earn the label “the scam of the century”?

In this article, we’ll walk through a Ponzi scheme worth $4.5 billion, or about 6.2 trillion won.

Ruja Ignatova is a Bulgarian con artist who vanished after pulling off a $4.5 billion scam targeting 3 million retail investors worldwide with a cryptocurrency called “OneCoin.”

Bulgaria’s population is 6.45 million; she scammed a number of people close to half the population of her home country.

“Catch this woman and get 7 billion won”… Who is the woman they’ve been chasing for seven years?

Even Do Kwon, who triggered the Luna collapse, has been caught, but Ignatova remains at large, prompting the FBI on the 28th of last month to announce a reward that is 50 times higher than before.

Up to $5 million—the highest reward for any female fugitive currently pursued by the FBI. What is she, some kind of Pirate King out of One Piece?

First, let’s look at how things unfolded to the point where even the FBI has been left stumped.

OneCoin stepped into the world in 2014.

It drew a great deal of attention alongside the rise of cryptocurrencies at the time. After seeing Bitcoin’s success, many people were looking for the next opportunity, which is why interest in OneCoin surged.

Wait a second, isn’t the “Bitcoin boom” we know from 2017, or 2021, or 2024?

The reason we find Bitcoin’s rise so compelling is that the market had only recently started from zero.

What captivates people about a particular asset is less the price itself than the magnitude of its climb. Looking at Bitcoin’s 2014 price, you probably think, “If only I had bought back then…”

Investors who saw Bitcoin in 2014 felt the same way when they looked at prices from three or four years earlier.

Watching Bitcoin being exchanged for dollars, investors at the time surely wondered, “Isn’t the price already too high now?”

Naturally, if something has surged tens of thousands of percent in just three years, anyone would think that way. It was precisely at this moment that Ruja Ignatova burst onto the scene,

claiming that they could catch up with Bitcoin.

A bus that feels like it has already left makes you anxious and clouds your judgment.

According to the testimony of Karl Sebastian Greenwood, OneCoin’s co‑founder who was arrested in Thailand in 2018, and the indictment, Ruja Ignatova structurally approached the scheme in a classic multi‑level marketing format:

1. Selling educational materials on blockchain technology, the history of cryptocurrencies, investment strategies, and more in the form of PDF files, video lectures, and webinars

Each education package included a certain amount of OneCoin. The more expensive the package, the more OneCoin you would receive.

2. Assigning specific membership tiers within the OneCoin network, with higher tiers receiving more benefits and bonuses

3. Paying sales commissions every time a member brought in a new investor and sold them an education package

4. Splitting members into two teams and paying performance bonuses to the team with higher sales, in proportion to the gap in sales

This is how they sold it.

If you look at OneCoin’s white paper, the grounds for suspicion only grow.

First, OneCoin did not disclose its blockchain data for the mining process (PoW). Every legitimate blockchain has a blockchain explorer where you can transparently view transaction histories, wallet information, and other records. OneCoin did not provide this, which is like a broker texting you on KakaoTalk, “Your return is 100% right now~” without giving you any way to verify it.

Next, OneCoin stated that it would switch its validation mechanism to PoS, but offered no technical explanation of how. This is like a company announcing a new project and, without any strategy or plan, leaving only the vague line, “We’ll boost sales with marketing.”

For comparison, take Ethereum: its white paper contains technical details on the mining process, and Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s founder, was already conducting research on PoS back in 2017. The actual transition was completed five years later, in 2022, which shows just how technically challenging it is to change a validation mechanism.

- The Rise and Fall of the 'Cryptoqueen': The Enigmatic Story of Ruja Ignatova and OneCoin

According to a Market Realist article from November 2023, Ruja Ignatova captivated investors through massive offline events like the ones you see in the video, along with other displays of extravagant behavior.

To sum it all up:

As a Ponzi scheme, OneCoin was able to ride the wave of Bitcoin’s meteoric rise, using a multi-level structure and ostentatious showmanship to maximize the number of victims. Co‑founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood has been arrested, but Ruja Ignatova remains at large.

In 2016, two years after OneCoin appeared in 2014, law enforcement agencies in several countries, including the U.S. FBI and IRS, began investigating OneCoin.

By 2017, a year after the investigation began, it was becoming increasingly clear that OneCoin was not a real cryptocurrency but a Ponzi scheme.

On October 25, 2017, Ruja Ignatova fled to Greece, and she has been missing ever since.

Where did Ruja Ignatova disappear to?

According to a BBC News video released in June (based on the original English version), she was last seen in Greece riding in a Porsche.

But the story is not that she is living lavishly in a mansion driving a Porsche, but rather that she may have been killed by the Mafia.

Below is part of the original English BBC News video.

According to the BBC, the “Taki” mentioned here is Hristoforos Nikos Amanatidis, her head of personal security. At the same time, former Bulgarian MP Ivan Hristanov has said that he is the boss of a Bulgarian mafia organization.

The inference is that, after the OneCoin fraud was exposed, Taki, who was deeply involved, may have eliminated Ruja Ignatova to avoid being arrested himself.

Frank Schneider is a former spy for Luxembourg’s intelligence service who provided information and security services to Ruja Ignatova.

He was awaiting extradition to the United States on charges related to the OneCoin fraud. He had been under house arrest in France, but in June 2023, he disappeared just before his extradition.

If we pull together a few more sources and lay them out chronologically:

(Reference: There's More Evidence 'Cryptoqueen' Was Murdered by Drug Kingpin: BBC)

* Kamenov is accused of organizing the murder of former police officer Lyubomir Ivanov. Documents found among Ivanov’s belongings suggest that Kamenov was involved in a plot to kill Ruja Ignatova and that he was also likely assisting U.S. authorities with their investigation into OneCoin.

Before she vanished in 2017, Ruja Ignatova bought multiple luxury properties and high-end goods, and tens of millions of dollars in fraud proceeds flowed into her bank accounts. Since she disappeared, numerous law enforcement agencies have been tracking her whereabouts and the missing funds, but most of the money is still unaccounted for.
Those funds were almost certainly laundered through Taki. Remember, “Ruja did some really suspicious real estate deals with Taki’s partner,” as one source put it.