By the time the webinar had finished she had decided to invest 1,000. So much for following the money. Money can buy a lot of friends, and I would imagine shes taking advantage of that.. 2023 BBC. She told the cheering crowd that OneCoin was on course to become the world's biggest cryptocurrency "for everyone to make payments everywhere". "I'm devastated for all the UK victims," Jen McAdam told me, when she heard the news. ", Such explanations don't offer much comfort to those affected. It emerged during a money-laundering trial in. (I tested this explanation on my mother, the family technophobe, and she told me I'd failed to make it clear enough and should start again. Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is one of five financial routes Ignatova has known connections to. MLM is not illegal. Now a hit podcast is stepping up the search for the international scam artist, writes Tanya Sweeney She is now on the FBIs list of the 10 most-wanted fugitives and is the only woman currently on the hit list. "You are so lucky that you're seeing this webinar right now," she was told. "There was no other way," he says ruefully. Dr. Ruja Ignatova is the only scammer who is on both the FBI and Interpol's 2022 Ten Most Wanted Lists. In early October 2016 - four months after Dr Ruja's London appearance - a blockchain expert called Bjorn Bjercke was called by a recruitment agent, with a curious job offer. It wasn't a place we'd previously thought of looking. She reportedly earned a PhD in private international law from the University of Constance and has a daughter who. According to the BBC in an article dated July 2, 2022, Ignatova stashed millions of dollars in the rival Bitcoin before disappearing in 2017. Technically it was owned by a company called One Property. That was the last time anyone saw or heard from Dr Ruja. Together with Daniel, Georgia and I travel south to meet his mother. The Onecoin Ponzi was a multi-level-marketing (MLM) venture that featured packages that were ostensibly tethered to a blockchain network. People involved at the early stages have told him it was never supposed to be a billion-dollar scam. ", Some action at the OneCoin HQ at last. Then we started looking at some old photos of Ruja, and spotted one friend who appeared with her all the way back to 2011. Reluctantly, she agreed to a conversation on Skype. We called the lawyer who is (or was) married to her, and he didn't want to talk. Facebook Previously, the property belonged to a company called Abbots House Penthouse Limited,. Up to 90 years for the Ponzi scheme. They can easily kill me. The 16th century English buccaneer Sir Francis Drake died without heirs and this has inspired many to search for his supposed fortune, and others to swindle fortune hunters. But when it comes to someone trying to find them - whether that's a journalist or a police officer - they are invisible.". 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 . Several of the people Georgia and I interviewed spoke darkly about mysterious people and connections they didn't want to name. OneCoin has always denied wrongdoing. Oliver describes this kind of dizzying arrangement as "improbably standard". Police have warned that she has likely had plastic surgery to change her appearance, with hopes low that she would ever be caught. This is also where Dr Ruja's husband - or perhaps ex-husband - lives and works. She doesn't speak English either, so I'm shocked to discover, as we sit and talk, that Daniel has never actually told his mother that the money is lost. Documents leaked to the BBC say 4bn between August 2014 and March 2017. But though she has stopped recruiting, many others haven't, and there are still plenty of interested buyers, she says. "Well then prove it to me!" Dr. Ruja Ignatova was born in Bulgaria on May 30, 1980. He already had 400,000 shillings in savings, and to raise the rest he returned from the capital, Kampala, to his family home, took three goats raised by his younger brothers, and sold them. She vanished, he said, because she was afraid that somebody close to her was going to give her up to the FBI. They are desperate to get their hands on the conwoman, offering a $100,000 reward for intel that ultimately leads to her arrest. On the run since 2017, Dr Ruja Ignat Some are running because they got loans from a bank. According to OneCoin, its main business was selling educational material for cryptocurrency trading. One of the main OneCoin offices in Kampala is attached to a church. She was entered into a Whatsapp group, with its own "leader" who disseminated information from the headquarters in Sofia. Frankfurt probably isn't the only place she goes - it might be one of several places, including perhaps Dubai and Russia. The fact that OneCoin was operating internationally also created difficulties for the authorities. I had no clue that it could be false. Details first surfaced in 2021 in leaked documents from Dubai's courts, posted online by Dr. Jonathan Levy, a UK-based lawyer, who described her as "the most successful criminal in history.". Ruja Ignatova called herself the Cryptoqueen. THE FBI has added a Bulgarian woman dubbed the 'Crypto Queen' to its infamous 10 most wanted list after she stole billions in the biggest scam EVER. I've even heard that she might be in London. So it's our blockchain technology, a SQL server with a database.". 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. Then he got into network marketing, or multi-level marketing (MLM) as it is often known, and started making money. She was dressed, as usual, in an expensive. The head office in Sofia, where she was such an imposing presence, didn't know anything either. When you're dealing with a scam worth billions of euros, it's not unusual for shadowy groups to get involved. The reason so many people are excited by Bitcoin is that it solves that problem. A reward is offered for information leading to the arrest of the co-founder of the alleged cryptocurrency 'OneCoin' in hiding since 2017. bka.de/oeffentlichkeitsfahndung14", "Ruja Ignatova: What we know about the OneCoin affair DW 07/05/2022", "OneCoin's Missing 'Crypto Queen' Is Now One of Europe's Most-Wanted Fugitives", https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/1627201381873352704/, "The life and crimes of Ruja Ignatova, new to FBI's 10 Most Wanted Ruja Ignatova", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ruja_Ignatova&oldid=1141594616, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Bulgarian-language text, Articles with failed verification from February 2023, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. Blame is not easy to apportion. In 2016 it was here that 22-year-old Daniel Lienhardt came as he was scraping together the 700,000 Ugandan shillings ($250) he needed to buy a OneCoin starter package. In 2020, it was announced that Jennifer McAdam will be portrayed by Kate Winslet in an upcoming Hollywood film about the OneCoin fraud. He claimed to be a good Samaritan, someone who had studied OneCoin carefully and wanted to speak to people who had invested. [2][7], Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, in 1980,[8] to a Romani family. Far from putting an end to their financial worries, she and her friends and family had thrown a quarter of a million euros away. 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. One spring day a few months earlier, Jen McAdam received a message from a friend about an unmissable investment opportunity. I ask her how much she earned from selling OneCoin and she says it was 3,000 - 1,800 of which she received in cash, and which she used to buy more OneCoin. Ruja Plamenova Ignatova (Bulgarian: , romanized:Rua Plamenova Ignatova; born 30 May 1980) is a Bulgarian-born German citizen and convicted fraudster. I would have just turned my back and walked away," he says. 5 Nr. This is clearly a question for a professional, which is why Georgia and I went to see private investigator Alan McLean. Back July 2018 he was arrested in Koh Samui, Thailand, and extradited to the US where he pleaded guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to launder money. All of them were "very up-tempo, full of beans, full of passion", she remembers. I sell a box to my friends, Georgia and Phil, and make a small cut. She was added to the FBI Ten Most Wanted in June 2022. Authorities say she may have. If nothing else it should make it easier for the authorities to freeze that asset and maybe even start getting money back to victims.. 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. "What's the name of the company?" So with Georgia Catt, producer of The Missing Cryptoqueen podcast, I went to see Oliver Bullough, an expert on what he calls Moneyland - the shadowy parallel world where criminals and the super-rich hide their wealth. "In two years, nobody will speak about Bitcoin any more!" He points out that he spent millions buying OneCoin, possibly more than anyone else. And every item of clothing is Dolce and Gabbana. "And in that sense it's cultic.". They keep postponing this. Investors often told us that what drew them in initially was the fear that they would miss out on the next big thing. [19], In 2022, prosecutors in Darmstadt, Germany confirmed an investigation of "a lawyer from Neu-Isenburg" for possible money laundering: the transfer of 7.69 million euros by Ignatova into one of her private accounts in 2016. In the FBI's' 72-year history, Ruja is only the 11th woman to appear on this list. It was launched by two offshore companies: OneCoin Ltd. (based in Bulgaria and registered in Dubai) and OneLife Network Ltd. (registered in Belize). Lots of money. Yet a typical recruiting event would include no education, but plenty of discussion about investing in cryptocurrency. It is a tale of 'greed and folly' perhaps even more scandalous than Holmes' billion-dollar Theranos bust-up. July 1, 2022 By Jamie Barlett. People in villages trust people from the city, Prudence tells us. Doors opened. When there is nothing of value to sell, though, and all the money is made by recruiting other people, it is illegal and goes by another name: a pyramid scheme. Not guilt," he replies. 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