Ruja Ignatova, known as Cryptoqueen, has been included in the top most wanted list by the US investigative agency FBI. Ruja Ignatova is accused of defrauding Rs 32,000 crore in the name of investing in cryptocurrency. Ruja Ignatova, originally from Bulgaria, was a doctor by profession. Ruja launched OneCoin after seeing the success of Bitcoin. Ruja claimed that at one time OneCoin would become the world’s largest cryptocurrency and people would earn manifold profits from it.
Ruja Ignatova has 8 cases registered including cheating. It is alleged that Ruja Ignatova’s company offered commission to agents to entice others to buy cryptocurrency. Ruja is absconding since 2017. He had caught a flight from Bulgaria to Greece. Nothing is known of him since then. Before Ruja Ignatova become one of 11 women to be on the FBI’s most wanted list in its 72-year history, she was regarded as a rising star in the crypto industry.
Ignatova was known for liking glitz and glamour, per CNN, and was revered for growing from her humble beginnings in Germany to success as a consultant and then a crypto entrepreneur. Together with her business partner Sebastian Greenwood, the pair convinced investors to back their OneCoin crypto token which they said would be more valuable than Bitcoin. However, authorities found that OneCoin defrauded investors out of $4 billion in one of the largest international fraud schemes of all time.
According to authorities, OneCoin was a pyramid scheme that defrauded people out of more than $4 billion as Ignatova convinced investors in the US and around the globe. Officials said that OneCoin was not backed by any secured, independent blockchain-type technology as other cryptocurrencies are. The US unsealed an indictment against her in 2019, charging her with wire fraud, conspiracy to launder money, and securities fraud.
”Ignatova and her partners “conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that OneCoin would be the ‘Bitcoin killer. In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless … (Their) lies were designed with one goal, to get everyday people all over the world to part with their hard-earned money,” US Attorney Damian Williams, New York’s top prosecutor, said in a statement last month.
This scam started in 2016. Then Ruja Ignatova conducted seminars in many countries from London to Dubai including OneCoin. In every seminar, she used to say that one day OneCoin will leave Bitcoin behind. There was also investment in OneCoin from many countries around the world. The special thing is that people invested only in Ruja’s words, otherwise OneCoin did not have the blockchain technology on which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work. Ruja tried to connect OneCoin to the blockchain, but she failed.
German police, who have been trying in vain to track her down since 2020, even claimed that she could have undergone a plastic surgery to change her looks. Her ex-boyfriend and co-founder of the mastermind of the Ponzi scheme Karl Sebastian Greenwood, 46, is currently serving his five-year-long prison sentence in the USA. FBI officials said in a statement obtained by Newsflash: “The FBI is offering a reward of up to $100,000 (£83,000) for information leading to the arrest of Ruja Ignatova.”
