Ruja Ignatova, a woman known as the ‘Crypto Queen’, is being added to the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives who allegedly duped millions of investors through the OneCoin cryptocurrency company worth over $4 billion .
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation held a $100,000 bounty for a Bulgarian woman who disappeared in Greece in October 2017 after US authorities filed a sealed indictment and warrant for her arrest.
Ruja Ignatova. about
In 2014 Ignatova launched OneCoin, which aimed to replace bitcoin as the world’s leading virtual currency. OneCoin operated around the world, including the US, and at one time claimed to have at least three million investors.
Ignatova, a 42-year-old woman with a sterling resume, reportedly studied law at Oxford and worked at McKinsey.
Tapping a global network to market the coin to friends and family in exchange for their own payments, he and his co-conspirators raised at least $3.4 billion and possibly $4 billion from the fourth quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016. but had no real value and could not be used to buy anything.
According to the AFP news agency, OneCoin was not backed by any secure, independent blockchain-type technology as other cryptocurrencies are.
Citing an official, the agency said OneCoin was a classic Ponzi scheme in which early investors are incentivized to find others and then paid by receivables from subsequent investors.
Ignatova disappeared in 2017 as international investigators began closing her group. She traveled from Sofia, Bulgaria to Athens, Greece on October 25, 2017 and has not been seen since.
The US dropped an indictment against him in 2019 accusing him of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and securities fraud.
On 11 May, Europol announced that it had added Ignatova to its most wanted list, and offered a 5,000 euro ($5,200) reward for information on her whereabouts.
Her brother Konstantin Ignatov was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport in March 2019 and later pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a deal with US authorities.
Another accomplice, Sebastian Greenwood, was detained in Thailand in 2018 and then extradited to the United States, where he remains in prison awaiting trial.
Another accomplice, US Attorney Mark Scott, was convicted in November 2019 of laundering $400 million for the group.