How the FBI’s Most Wanted “Crypto Queen” Stole Billions

On June 11, 2016, Ruja Ignatova stepped onto a stage in London and said this about her new cryptocurrency. This network was created to become and to fuel the growth of OneCoin, which I strongly believe will be the number one cryptocurrency worldwide. Six years later, in July 2022, Ignatova, who's often been known by the nickname CryptoQueen, was added to the FBI's list of 10 most wanted fugitives. The FBI says she travels with armed security and may have even had plastic surgery to alter her appearance and evade capture. They are offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to her arrest. So how did it come to this? We are going to tell you the story of the CryptoQueen. This is Dirty Money. The story starts in 2014, when a company called OneCoin was set up, with an office in Sofia, Bulgaria. Yet this company also had additional offshore organizations in places like Belize and Dubai. OneCoin was a centralized cryptocurrency, as opposed to almost every other cryptocurrency out there which are decentralized, which is kind of the point of crypto. Court documents reveal that OneCoin didn't have a true blockchain. This is further substantiated by a blockchain expert that OneCoin tried to recruit. Here's what was said in his job interview, according to the BBC. I was thinking, what is my job going to be? What are the things that I'm going to have to do for this company, he recalls. And he said, well, first of all, they need a blockchain. They don't have a blockchain today. I said, what? You told me that it was a cryptocurrency company. The agent replied that that was correct. It was a cryptocurrency company and it had been running for a while, but it didn't have a blockchain. So we need you to build a blockchain. OneCoin could only be mined on OneCoin control computers at two sites, one in Bulgaria and one in Hong Kong. It could only be traded through an internal exchange owned by the company, and Bulgaria's Financial Supervision Commission even issued a warning about the company just a year after it started. This is because even early on, OneCoin already showed signs of being some kind of hybrid Ponzi scheme where you use money from late investors to pay fake returns to early investors. OneCoin was supposedly linked to a business selling educational materials that you would get access to at different investment levels. But these materials were revealed to have been plagiarized from other sources. There's a YouTube video that shows one example of how OneCoin's Academy plagiarized the book Technical Analysis for Dummies page by page. A Daily Mirror journalist who attended that OneCoin event in London where the founder Ruja Ignatova spoke wrote that affiliates were offered a 10% commission from all the money that anyone they recruited invested in the coin, and it seemed like an enticing prospect for both affiliates and prospective investors. When you invested in OneCoin, you would get tokens and these tokens could be used to mine coins on the OneCoin network. At different investment levels, there would also be so-called splits that increased your tokens. A speaker almost crazed with enthusiasm gave the example of someone who pays 5,000 euros, Thanks to splits, this turns into 8,500 pounds. This apparently meant that you could earn money even if the price of one coin didn't go up, and the possibility that the price could go down was conveniently never mentioned. Attendees at the event were offered a package for 28,000 British pounds where they could, with splits, turn it into 1.2 million without the price ever increasing. But they had to invest by February 20th that year, or the deal would be gone. If that didn't convince them, perhaps they were won over by the stream of buzzwords that spewed out of the crypto queen's mouth at the event. OneCoin is for everyone, make payments everywhere, everyone, globally. And this is who we are, global citizens of a small world wanting to make a change. Hmm, where have I heard something like that before? And let me tell you that we are really changing the world as we know it. The world is not anymore the way it used to be. So it has many similarities with the Bitconnect scam where it appeals to human greed and uses paid shills to get new investors into the scheme. But with OneCoin, I guess they didn't think of hiring a comedian to get on stage whilst keeping the identities of the founders private. OneCoin was able to amass about 4 billion dollars into the scam, through their clever use of too-good-to-be-true returns through splits, flashy marketing and shills earning a 10% commission. And there were daily withdrawal limits on their exchange, so it would have taken a long time for any investor to successfully withdraw all their money. Because the crypto queen was probably using that money to live the high life. Look, this was her private yacht, the Davina. But cracks soon started to appear. Throughout 2015 and 2016, country after country's financial services authorities issued warnings and even bans against OneCoin. In March 2016, the OneCoin exchange shut down without notice, supposedly for two weeks of maintenance. But when it reopened, there were no obvious changes that had been made. In January 2017, the exchange completely shut down. The company said at the time that this was in preparation for their IPO. But the IPO never happened and the exchange never reopened, leaving $4 billion, including commissions many affiliates were owed for recruiting people, trapped. Then in October 2017, Ignatova traveled from Bulgaria to Greece, according to the FBI, and has never been seen after that. But her brother was arrested at LAX airport and has supposedly signed a plea deal where he gave information about the scam. His plea deal document states that his cooperation may reveal activities of individuals who might use violence against him or his family. So he is now probably under witness protection with a new identity. One private investigator interviewed by the BBC said he believed the crypto queen was traveling around the Mediterranean on a yacht. Another theory is that she is in Frankfurt since she supposedly had a baby in 2016 and that is apparently where her husband and daughter is. The rumors about plastic surgery do have some weight to them since they were mentioned by the FBI in their wanted poster. So the crypto queen could literally be hiding in plain sight in Frankfurt or taking trips on a new luxury yacht in the Mediterranean protected by armed guards, and she might as well keep running. Her crimes carry a potential sentence of 90 years in prison. Thank you for watching Dirty Money. Please subscribe to the channel for more mini documentaries about the sinister side of finance.