Ruja Ignatova is simply accused of organizing one of the scams crypto the most lucrative of the late 2010s. It is still running, probably in a European country.
OneCoin is the name of the currency that was to supplant bitcoin. By gathering a large number of followers in Europe, the United States and as far away as Uganda, the OneCoin team was able to generate billions in revenue through a thinly disguised Ponzi scheme. The Strongest ? Some people still believe in the OneCoin concept today.
OneCoin, crypto without blockchain
Back in 2014, where most major crypto projects emerged in the wake of bitcoin. These include the early hours of Ethereum and the start of BTC’s surge. Bulgarian Ruja Ignatova praises the merits of a new virtual currency, OneCoin, whose price seems to be rising day by day on her website.
Among the millions of people who invest their money in this project, there are Chinese, Germans, English and a large number of residents of African countries. Problem ? OneCoin developers are at pains to explain how this token works. Even worse, it looks like it doesn’t have a blockchain, only an SQL database that has nothing to do with cryptos.
The commercial success of OneCoin reached its climax during a conference in a Wembley stadium, where Ruja Ignatova extolled the merits of the investment in front of 60,000 spectators. To convince, she uses strong slogans and does not hesitate to alienate the rest of the crypto community, especially bitcoin enthusiasts whom she considers the sworn enemy of her fake currency.
At the bottom of the pyramid, more than 3 million victims
In 2016-2017, the OneCoin site offered you attractive prospects for financial independence. Starting with €140 for the beginner pack, €5,000 for the Tycoon pack and €118,000 for the Ultimate pack, the investor bought OneCoin tokens and could access financial analysis training in order to resell them to his relatives. and friends.
In the field, these OneCoin tokens have never been mined (lack of blockchain) and these formations were cheerfully plagiarized from existing books. However, OneCoin encouraged you to tell your friends about it to hope to earn a commission once their package was purchased. So much for the operation of this Ponzi scheme which has brought in millions to the many people who have found themselves at the top of the pyramid.
In the end, it is more than 3 million people robbed by the OneCoin system to the tune of more than a billion dollars. More than a crypto investment, we were also selling membership in a group (the “ bitcoin killer “) supposed to revolutionize global finance. This is partly why some investors still believe in the project, even though it has been considered a scam since 2017.
The Cryptoqueen is still running
Ruja Ignatova evaporated in 2017, when all the investors understood that OneCoin had no chance to prosper and that its bull phase had been set up from scratch. Filed by Europol, the scammer of Bulgarian origin is probably hiding in Germany or in a country around the Mediterranean.
It’s possible that cosmetic surgery made her unrecognizable. Thanks to her fortune and her connections with the Bulgarian government, she still has the opportunity to play cat and mouse for a while. The figure of Ruja Ignatova continues to fascinate the crypto community which speculates on her current place of residence, between Sofia (Bulgaria) and Hamburg, Germany.
However, his brother Konstantin Ignatov and his partner Sebastian Greenwood were arrested on suspicion of fraud in connection with OneCoin. Because this scam is above all a family affair, the organizers of OneCoin having powerful allies in the Bulgarian and European mafia, and this may be the reason why Konstantin’s trial has been constantly postponed since 2019. He risks more than 90 years in prison for stealing $4 billion and embezzling $400 million from the US tax authorities.
Source : BBC
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