Onecoin was to be the “Bitcoin killer” as claimed by its founder, Dr. Ruja Ignatova who is a Bulgarian-German convicted fraudster. This is quite an intriguing story of a crypto Ponzi Scheme because it involves greed, deceit, fraud and a massive scam worth $15 Billion dollars. Initially Onecoin was launched in 2014. The first transaction of OneCoin can be traced back to late 2014. But it was brought into the limelight in 2016 when Ignatova addressed a huge crowd at London’s Wembley Arena promoting Onecoin. Ruja Ignatova along with Sebastian Greenwood had lured 3 million people to invest in Onecoin. She was a smart and intelligent woman holding a PhD degree who previously worked at McKenzie which is a very exclusive global consulting group but she managed to fool the entire world and vanished.
With traditional banks, institutions and governments holding a lot of power over money and the people. The crypto movement with decentralization to revolutionize money and to give the power back to the people came rightly well in the scene. The masses have faced a tragedy of the 2008 financial crisis and the increasing rate of inflation. Cryptocurrency as an Idea was just entering the mainstream and people were ready to embrace the change but with every new shift there is always a drawback. Even right now in its first decade the Blockchain revolution in its legitimacy is going through these rough phases of scams, pumps and dumps, rug pulls, cryptojacking, shilling and what not.
Onecoin made a strategic move in 2016 campaigning it across the globe specially in developed nations where cryptocurrency was well accepted. It promised to replace Bitcoin and brought a lot of hope to the investors. Ignatova in her own words at the Wembley Arena said, “we will be the biggest out there and we will write history and the cryptocurrency community will have to rewrite philosophy, nobody can compare to us we have today the most users. We are the biggest crypto reserve currency out there and to everybody who tells me that I violate the philosophy of cryptocurrency, guys we are a bigger community we decide what the philosophy of cryptocurrency is. In two years nobody will speak about Bitcoin any more”. But ruefully Onecoin did not even have a Blockchain model or payment system of its own.
Onecoin would sell plagiarised educational materials on Cryptocurrencies where you could learn trading and investing and persuading the innocent investors just like any other Multi-level marketing schemes to get caught up into their trap. The participants were offered rewards for bringing in more people. They were also promised to receive tokens that could be used to mine Onecoins.
Onecoin also conducted a beauty contest, it was a hastily organised event intended to promote Onecoin in a time with doubt shrouded the company. The whole thing was a very strange affair. The top five contestants won $25,000 of plastic-surgery vouchers or the equivalent amount in Onecoin. The company claimed that it would have an audience of twenty to fifty million people and that it was sponsored by Vogue however this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Onecoin grew fast within three years of it’s launch. With more than 3 million investors from around the world, conferences and seminars were popping up everywhere from the United States, China and the UK all the way to African nations like Uganda. Every event would at least show a video of Dr. Rocha when she was too busy to leave her home country of Bulgaria. Things were going pretty smooth for Onecoin until late 2017. Dr. Raja was scheduled to speak at a Onecoin seminar in Lisbon Portugal in October 2017 but she didn’t make it to the seminar. This was unusual as her colleagues would say that she was extremely punctual and would often refuse to attend meetings if the other groups were just a single minute late. Ruja’s colleagues phoned her but she was in no avail and no messages either. No one knew where she was being the head of a movement as valuable as Onecoin.
During the boom of Onecoin there was an incident where in April of 2017 Indian police arrested 18 people in Mumbai for trying to organize a Onecoin recruiting event and this sting operation was led by DCP Dilip Sawant and he gave a statement where he said, “After freezing Rs.18.97 crore (around $3 Million Dollars) in banks accounts in Delhi and Rajasthan, the Navi Mumbai police have formed a special investigation team to probe the case and track the money trial to recover investors’ money.” Further sources reveal that Rs.24 crore were found in the accounts of the scammers. This scam was on action from 2016 September but in November of 2016 they could see a spike in deposits from the innocent investors into his scam project. The swindling was being operated from Delhi, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra.
Well on the other hand the Crypto Scam Queen was missing and rumours were that Ruja was being kidnapped and was under threat of being killed. After the disappearance of Ingnatova in 2017 her brother Konstantin Ignatov took over as the Head of the Onecoin Foundation. Ignatov was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport in March when he was about to board from LA to Bulgaria. The FBI charged him with money laundering and fraud. On the same day of his arrest FBI proclaimed publicly that Onecoin was a scam. Many investors around the world panic and were devasted after hearing the news of this mega scam. Grievously some people sold their houses, farm animals and other valuable assets to invest in Onecoin expecting a greater return.
Till this very day Ruja Ignatova is missing with billions of dollars and no one knows her where abouts.
She is being added to the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted fugitives for allegedly scamming millions of investors.
Beware of wolves in sheep clothing. Do your research well and invest wisely.
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