Don't miss interesting news
The woman who deceived the whole world. The story of a Bulgarian woman who stole $4.5 billion worth of OneCoin pseudo-cryptocurrency.
Some call her a crypto-queen, some a genius and business woman, and some a fraud and a scammer. So who is this Dr. Rouge, who founded the cryptocurrency OneCoinand where did the 4.5 billion go?
Oxford University graduate Ruzha Ignatova was born in Bulgaria but grew up in Germany. Since childhood, Ignatova dreamed of becoming a millionaire. Therefore, after graduating from the Faculty of European Law and obtaining a doctorate, she got a job as a consultant at an international consulting company. Her career developed very rapidly, which was facilitated by her knowledge of different languages – Bulgarian, Russian, German and English. In 2014, Ruzha launched the OneCoin cryptocurrency, which made her an international scam artist.
Ref: OneCoin is a pseudo-cryptocurrency registered in Bulgaria. OneCoin was touted as a revolutionary cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin but with improved features. However, unlike real cryptocurrencies, OneCoin was not based on blockchain technology. It was a multi-level marketing scheme.
In 2014, Ignatova and co-founder Greenwood began offering OneCoin to investors in Europe, the United States, and around the world. Initially, they held online webinars and conferences where they encouraged potential investors to deposit funds into an account that allowed them to purchase OneCoin packages. The company sold financial education training packages that gave holders the right to mine OneCoin. These packages cost about a hundred thousand dollars, and different membership levels allowed buyers to purchase more tokens.
The fraud was that OneCoin was not registered on the blockchain, so there was no mining. Instead, OneCoin was created in the SQL programming language, meaning that the code could be changed without being written down (which changes the whole point). Also, OneCoin could be traded only on the “internal market”. This market was constantly being rebuilt and limited how traders could sell and exchange OneCoin for euros.
In four years, OneCoin has acquired more than 3 million participants. The company often used fake news, fake certificates, and unverified testimonials from celebrities to create the illusion of legitimacy. Eventually, rumors began to spread online that the business was fraudulent. The media started asking questions. And investigators from Germany and the United States got involved. But at one point, Ruzha Ignatova simply disappeared, along with $4.5 billion of defrauded investors. The last time she was seen was on October 25, 2017, when she boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia (Bulgaria) to Athens (Greece).
Ruja Ignatova is one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives and the only woman on the list. There is a reward for any information about her whereabouts.
Earlier, law enforcement officials offered a hundred thousand dollars for information about the woman who organized “one of the largest global fraud schemes in history”, but since then the reward has increased to five million dollars.
By the way, all those involved in the company were arrested and charged with fraud. OneCoin offices were closed in many countries, and the company’s accounts were frozen. A large number of assets related to the company were confiscated by governments of different countries. Many investors who lost money through OneCoin have filed class action lawsuits, but recovering funds remains problematic due to the difficulty of tracking assets and distributing funds to victims.
Nobody knows where the cryo-queen Ruzha Ignatova is now. But FBI officials believe that she may be using a German passport to travel to the UAE, Greece, and Eastern Europe.