The OneCoin scam, orchestrated by Ruja Ignatova, was a colossal multi-billion dollar fraud that combined elements of a Ponzi scheme, pyramid scheme, and cryptocurrency scam, defrauding millions of investors worldwide.
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Notorious cryptocurrency
scammer Dr. Bruha Ignativa made billions
of pounds selling a fake cryptocurrency
called OneCoin. This is the only woman
on the FBI's most wanted list, and she
is responsible for one of the biggest
scams in history.
She led millions of believers in her
cult-like company to trust her with
their life
savings before abandoning them and
escaping with
billions. It was basically a get-richqu
scheme, a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid
scheme, and a crypto scam all combined
into one colossal multi-billion dollar
fraud. But how did she do it? And where
is she now?
Even years later, this is a story
shrouded in mystery as her whereabouts
are still
unknown, and there's a $5 million reward
if you can find
her. One theory says she lives in Dubai
with a new name and a new face. Another
claims her body sits dismembered at the
bottom of the Mediterranean.
But either way, evidence suggests she
might be one of the wealthiest criminals
ever. This is a story filled with
gangster hit squads, mafia,
mafia,
espionage, and corrupt Saudi royals.
It's a story with betrayal, apartments
filled to the ceiling with cash, and a
billiondoll empire built on lies and manipulation.
manipulation.
This is the sinister true story of
OneCoin and the search for the evil
crypto. Roua Ignatova was born in a poor
Bulgarian city in 1980. But at the age
of 10, her family fled to Germany in the
hope of a better life. Growing up, Roua
was very bright. But that led to her
feeling like she was better than
everyone else around her. She became
increasingly obsessed with the idea of
getting rich and vowed to become a
millionaire before she was 30.
After finishing school, Roua got a
scholarship to a German university, then
a PhD in law, followed by a degree from Oxford
Oxford
University. With her impressive
qualifications, she landed several
prestigious jobs. First at the Bulgarian
branch of McKenzie, a top consulting
firm, and then at Bulgaria's largest
investment company. There she became
extremely wellconed as sheworked with
important business people, politicians, and
and
celebrities. But it still wasn't enough
for her. She was now 31 and still not a
millionaire. And dealing with wealthy
clients and international banks all day
only made her more desperate to build
her own fortune.
So in 2013, she started to seriously
research Bitcoin, a new idea in finance
that had started to get people's
attention. At the time, Bitcoin was only
a few years old, but its price had
recently been shooting
up. Because of Roua's financial
background, as well as her extensive
network, she was in great demand to
speak about cryptocurrency at seminars
and events around Europe. And at one
seminar in November of 2013, a man
called Sebastian Greenwood watched her
speak and how well she captured the
crowd during her crypto
talk. After she left the stage,
Sebastian pushed his way over to her and
asked a question that would change her life
life
forever. Have you ever considered
With multi-level marketing companies
known as MLMs, you typically buy their
product through a seller directly, not
from a store or website. That seller
isn't an employee of the company earning
a salary, but instead they earn a
commission on every sale they make. This
allows MLM companies to get an army of
individual sellers working on their
behalf. But that's just one way you can
make money. You can also recruit other
people to sell and you'll earn
commissions on any sales they make. And
when those people recruit more people,
you earn commissions from them as well,
which starts to look a lot like a
pyramid. If you get in early, you can
make a lot of money. But most people who
join MLMs
don't. However, at the crypto conference
where Roua had been giving a speech, she
got chatting with Sebastian about their
shared interests, especially about how
they both wanted to get
rich. Sebastian had already made money
from running an MLM before, but he felt
the hype around this new crypto
technology presented a huge opportunity.
What if they teamed up to create their
own crypto project, but used multi-level
marketing to sell
it? There were plenty of MLMs and plenty
of new crypto projects, but combining
the two together could be powerful. If
they had a network of sellers working on
commission, it would help drive up the
price of the coin, and then the price of
the coin would help bring more people
into the network, creating a powerful
growth cycle.
Sebastian's MLM expertise meant he could
handle sales, whilst Rouger's banking
experience and polished look made her
the ideal face of the company. They
would call it
OneCoin. They came up with a plan to
target a whole new audience. People who
weren't techsavvy, who didn't understand
how crypto worked, but understood MLM
and wanted to get
rich. However, there was one major
obstacle in their way.
Neither Roua or Sebastian actually knew
how to create the blockchain they
needed. But then they realized this
could be an
advantage. By not actually having a
blockchain and instead just telling
people they did, it would mean they
could set the price of their coin to
whatever they
wanted. Rouger would simply keep a
record of how many onecoins someone
bought on an SQL database, basically a
glorified Excel spreadsheet.
With their plan in place, Roua and
Sebastian officially registered the
company in Jibralta and Dubai. And Roua
also opened a physical office in her
home city in
Bulgaria. They proudly announced that
OneCoin would be the Bitcoin killer. But
unlike Bitcoin, which had a fixed supply
of 21 million, OneCoin would have 2.1
billion coins.
However, the difference between legal
multi-level marketing and an illegal
pyramid scheme is whether the company
has an actual product or not. For
example, Herbal Life uses multi-level
marketing, but since they have a real
tangible product, it's
legal. But in 2014, when OneCoin was
starting, cryptocurrency regulation was
practically non-existent. And so Roua
and Sebastian weren't sure that OneCoin
would classify as a real product. They
definitely didn't want to risk attention
from regulators. And so they found a
loophole. Instead of people directly
buying OneCoin, customers would buy
education packages. These contained a
basic PDF file with information about
finance and investing. The material by
itself was pretty poor quality, often
had spelling mistakes, and much of it was
was
plagiarized. But that didn't matter
because customers were buying these
education packages for an entirely
different reason. With each package, you
also received free tokens which could be
exchanged for one
coin. Depending on which package someone
bought, they got a different number of
OneCoin tokens as a free bonus. The more
expensive package you bought, the more
tokens you
got. This way, OneCoin was officially
selling a product, these education
packages, even though everyone was
really buying them for the OneCoin
tokens. So, now that they had their
product, Roua and Sebastian began
persuading MLM sellers to come sell for
OneCoin, and they offered a generous
commission plan.
If you sold someone a OneCoin package,
you got a 10% sales commission. But if
anyone you refer also makes a sale, you
got 10% commission on all their sales,
too. For example, you sell your friend a
onecoin package worth
€5,000. You get
€500. But then later, your friend sells
someone else a one coin package worth €5,000.
€5,000.
Not only does your friend get €500
commission, but since you recruited
them, you get €500 from that sale as
well, and this can continue indefinitely
as people refer
others. 60% of commissions would be paid
out in real money, and the remaining 40%
would be paid out in one coin. It was
simple, but
lucrative. But finally, there was the
extra twist that set OneCoin apart from
every other MLM. You could not only make
money from selling onecoin and
recruiting others, but also from OneCoin
increasing in value over
time. Rucha promised that at some point
soon, OneCoin would be listed on a
crypto exchange platform, so it could be
traded at any time for real money. And
this is where things started to get crazy.
crazy. [Music]
The pitch for buying OneCoin was simple
but powerful. Roua said she had taken
all of Bitcoin's problems and fix them.
Rouger said Onecoin was the people's
coin. She said Bitcoin was too
complicated as people needed their own
wallets and private keys. Whereas
OneCoin was simple as you just signed up
to their website. She said Bitcoin was
about speculation and it was slow and
inefficient as a currency whereas
OneCocoin was focused on everyday use.
She said Bitcoin was anonymous and used
by criminals whereas OneCoin was
centralized and monitored so it was safe
from crime. And finally, Bitcoin's
founder was unknown and had disappeared.
Whereas the founder of Onecoin had a
degree from Oxford and was seemingly a
very trustworthy and competent
businesswoman. Roua frequently talked
about her time working for McKenzie,
consulting for Fortune 500 companies,
and working with Wall Street
banks. So, Roua had everything she
needed to make Onecoin seem instantly
trustworthy. Roua then began speaking at
live events and hosting webinars. She
taught the world doing radio shows,
interviews, and anything she could to
sell people on how Onecoin would change the
the
world. And she always emphasized her
PhD, referring to herself only as Dr.
Rouger. She essentially created a new
public persona. Whereas Roua's fashion
sense used to be understated, Dr. Rouger
wore bright red lipstick and
eye-catching designer dresses. And in
videos, she prominently displayed her
degrees on the wall behind her and spoke
about having lots of
money. Now, at this point, one news
story was going viral about a man who
spent $27 on Bitcoin in 2009. And now
that the price had shot up, his crypto
made him a millionaire. And there were
countless more stories of ordinary
people getting in early on Bitcoin and
making life-changing money. So, Rouger
exploited this fear of missing out as
nobody wanted to miss out on the next big
big
crypto. Onecoin felt like people's
chance and Roua assured everyone would
eventually be even bigger than
Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Sebastian recruited
more of his connections from the MLM
world who were top sellers. Using their
networks and OneCoin's lucrative
promises, the scam was fully underway.
A lot of sales came from parties,
lunches, and DMs on Facebook. Many
people got introduced to OneCoin from
someone they knew with a simple message.
Do you know about Bitcoin? Well, I heard
about a new cryptocurrency that's going
to be even
bigger. Little did these people know,
they were getting their friends and
family to invest in a giant
scam. But OneCoin's biggest sales
channel of all was public live events.
They always reminded the audience how
they'd missed out on Bitcoin and that
this was a once- ina-lifetime
opportunity to get in early on a new and
better crypto
project. Through a combination of
misplaced trust, greed, playing on
people's emotions, and fear of missing
out, Roua and Sebastian got people from
all over the world to start buying
OneCoin packages. And of course, those
people who bought in then told other
people. And so word began to spread and
momentum began to
build. The combination of emotional
manipulation techniques to get crowds
excited and the perceived authority and
credibility of Dr. Rouger was
convincing. Rouger even won Bulgaria's
businesswoman of the year award which
only accelerated OneCoin's growth. The
fact that the entire crypto space was
booming at the time also
helped. But another tactic OneCoin used
to convince investors everything was
legitimate was that they distributed
copies of Forbes magazine with Dr.
Rouger on the cover. How could this be a
scam if Rouger was in Forbes
magazine? What they didn't realize is
that she'd simply paid for an ad in
Forbes which appeared a few pages into
the magazine and she then tore off the
first few pages to make people think she
was the cover star.
And since it was in the Bulgarian
version of Forbes, they couldn't read
the disclaimer that said it was a paid
ad. Just like everything else about
OneCoin, it was a
lie. The reality was OneCoin was a
get-richqu scheme from the start, but it
was now multiple different frauds
allinone. Firstly, it was a Ponzi scheme
as the only reason they were able to pay
out referral commissions to early
investors was by using the money from
new investors. Secondly, since OneCoin
was nothing but a spreadsheet with
madeup prices masquerading as a digital
currency, it was essentially a fake
crypto scam, merely using crypto
terminology to hype up what they were
doing as some kind of financial
revolution and confuse vulnerable people
into not understanding how it works. And
thirdly, since they didn't have an
actual product, this meant it was also a
pyramid scheme.
However, Rouer and Sebastian were
already discussing what to do if they
got caught. Rouger's suggestion was
simple. Disappear and let someone else
In November of 2014, investors packed
into a small conference room at a hotel
to hear Rouger talk about her vision for
OneCoin. And there she made two big
announcements. Firstly, starting in 2
months, OneCoin would sell for actual
money on their internal exchange site
called Xcoin X. And secondly, OneCoin's
price was set at
54. A buzz went through the crowd. They
did the maths and realized that a $5,000
education package with 48,000 coins
would immediately be worth
$26,000. So, the investors scrambled to
buy packages after the news. By
Christmas, 10,000 people had bought
packages worth millions of dollars in
total. Then in January alone, OneCoin
did 15 million in
sales. That same month was the official
opening of OneCoin's exchange, where
people could trade their OneCoin for
actual money. But there was a catch.
People were only allowed to withdraw a
maximum of 1.5% of their OneCoin into
real money each day. And there was an
upper withdrawal limit.
Roua claimed it was just temporary
because she feared a bank run and wanted
to protect people's investments. But of
course, the truth was far more
sinister. People could only cash out a
small amount of their coins because the
company was a giant Ponzi scheme, simply
using the money from new investors to
pay up those who were cashing out.
That's why instead of listing on a
popular crypto exchange like Coinbase or
Kraken, OneCoin was using its own
internal site called Xcoin X, which they
had full control over, which is how Roua
was just changing the price to whatever
she wanted, which is why it always
seemed to go
up. However, investors didn't seem to
mind the strict withdrawal limits
because everyone believed in the promise
of OneCoin's future. Sure, it was 54
cents per coin now, but the price would
surely increase soon, so why sell now
and regret cashing out
early? And because people could at least
exchange a small amount of OneCoin for
cash, it made everything feel legitimate
as they were actually trading a small
amount of OneCoin for real
money. So throughout 2015, OneCoin
continued to grow beyond everyone's expectations.
expectations.
60 million in sales in March, 85 million
in April, and then the rate grew even
faster in May when Roua announced
OneCoin's price had doubled, now $18 per
coin. Investors were delighted to see
their balance on the OneCoin website
jump up so fast. Little did they know,
OneCoin's value was just Rou plucking a
random number out of thin air. But these
regular price increases would be used by
Rouger to ensure investors didn't want
to withdraw their money. The fear of
missing out was very real and it was
Rouger's number one tool to keep people
hooked on
OneCoin. Onecoin also started
introducing more expensive education
packages like the premium trader package for
for
€12,500 with around €40,000 OneCoin
tokens. Sure,
€12,500 seemed like a lot, but people
could see on the exchange that'd be
worth around
€40,000, so it seemed like a great
deal. OneCoin started packing out arenas
with music performances and fireworks
and thousands of chanting fans. At these
events, OneCoin would sell more
education packages. But they'd also put
a lot of focus on the top sellers in the
company. Those at the top of the pyramid
who are now earning hundreds of
thousands a month from selling one coin
to others. These top sellers were
publicly gifted Rolex watches partly to
thank them, but mostly to inspire the
lesser sellers to up their game next
month and sell
more. To many, OneCoin became a family.
At events, investors discussed how
they'd spend their newfound riches. When
OneCoin went public on one of the main
crypto exchanges like Coinbase, as at
that point they could trade all of their
OneCoin for cash, Rouger kept promising
they'd be going public very soon. So
investors all excitedly shared their
dream homes and vacations they were
planning to buy. They even created a
sign, your finger and thumb in the shape
of an O, to show you were part of the OneCoin
OneCoin
family. By October, OneCoin's price had
risen again. this time to around $2.50
per coin. And by November 2015, one year
after OneCoin's exchange opened, it hit
$1 billion in
sales. Money was coming in faster than
they could handle it. Roua bought a
luxury apartment in Hong Kong simply to
store the money stacked floor to ceiling
with cash from investors.
Thanks to their network of thousands of
sellers, all recruiting more sellers,
OneCoin just kept growing rapidly. And
to help increase the pressure to buy
more, OneCoin would frequently have
one-time special offers on their education
education
packages. Investors didn't question the
huge rise in OneCoin's supposed value
because it made sense to them. The hype
around one coin was what was bumping up
the price. And then the higher prices
increased the hype
further. Plus, people desperately wanted
to believe. For hundreds of thousands of
regular people all across the world,
OneCoin was a beacon of hope. For some,
it represented the opportunity to escape
a dangerous country, send their children
to college, or finally stop being so
worried about money.
A family from a council estate in London
invested 20,000. A single mother in
Tennessee invested a h 100,000. And more
than 50,000 Ugandans had joined the
pyramid. Some of them selling their
homes, their land, and even their
animals to get
in. But OneCoin was growing far faster
than Roua had ever imagined. And this
by the end of 2015, OneCoin was growing
too big too
quickly. Of all the money coming in,
onethird of it was paid out as referral
commissions, which meant tens of
millions of dollars had to be sent to
over a 100 countries around the world.
Even with Rouger's financial background,
moving millions of dollars each month
into her various accounts was bound to attract
attract
attention. In one case, a bank in Dubai
grew suspicious of these high
transactions being paid out to accounts
in the Cayman Islands, Uganda, and
Malta, places notorious for illegal
activity. So, the bank froze $50 million
in assets, leaving OneCoin scrambling
for cash.
So, Roua developed a plan. She contacted
a Saudi royal chic, a man who was
fascinated by new technology. Roua
convinced the chic to give her four USB
memory sticks containing 230,000
Bitcoin, which at the time was worth
around $50
million. In exchange, she gave the chic
a large amount of OneCoin and ownership
of her Dubai company. as using his
influence, he'd be able to contact the
bank and get it
unfrozen. But still, Roua needed to find
a more permanent answer to these banking
problems. And so that's when she reached
out to a financeier she knew from her
earlier days in banking. Gilbert,
Armentor. Gilbert was an international
financial expert with experience
operating the books for less than legal
companies. And so he became Onecoin's private
private
banker and he was very aware exactly
what Rouger was asking him to do. In his
calendar, Gilbert wrote his first call
was to discuss money transfer and laundering
laundering
issues. As they worked together, Roua
and Gilbert grew close, very close. Roua
started cheating on her husband with
Gilbert. By the end of 2015, Roua and
Gilbert set up what became known as the
Fiero Funds. Four separate accounts,
each with over a hundred million. These
accounts in the British Virgin Islands
and the Caymans, helped REA move money
around the world easier, without
worrying about banks freezing their
accounts or asking too many
questions. It was essentially a 9 figure
money laundering operation.
Now, Roua and the OneCoin team were free
to spend all the money they were making.
Rouger wore necklaces worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars. She commissioned a
$7.5 million yacht for private parties.
She bought a luxury flat in London and a
penthouse in
Dubai. But even though Roua had solved
her money problems, by the end of 2015,
she had an even bigger problem. They
When Roua created Onecoin, she announced
it had a capped amount of 2.1 billion
coins, never imagining she would reach
that limit in her
lifetime. But growth had been so much
faster than she ever imagined. And by
mid 2016, she had already sold more than 2.1
2.1
billion. Now, of course, investors
believed that OneCoin had its own
private blockchain, so it would be
impossible to sell more than what was
programmed at the start. But in reality,
OneCoin didn't have a blockchain, which
meant Rouger could sell an infinite
amount. The problem was she'd repeated
so many times about the hard limit of
2.1 billion. And if anyone ever worked
out they'd sold more than this,
OneCoin's perceived credibility would be instantly
instantly
destroyed. On the flip side, if she
stopped selling coins, she wouldn't have
any new money coming in. So, she
wouldn't be able to afford the tens of
millions of payouts she was making every
week in referral
commissions. Roua knew that unless she
came up with a solution, she and her
company would both be exposed for the
frauds they were.
So, Roua came up with an audacious
idea. She would announce a new
blockchain. This one with 120 billion
coins. Changing blockchains completely
contradicted everything Rouger had been
saying for years about having a fixed
supply that could never be altered. She
had literally told people at events, "I
cannot print more." But in June 2016,
OneCoin hired out Wembley Stadium for a
packed crowd of thousands to make a few historic
historic
announcements. As with all OneCoin
events, there were motivational speeches
and hypemen shouting about how everyone
was getting rich. And when Dr. Rger came
out on stage to Alicia Keys's This Girl
is on fire and pyrochnic displays, the
crowd erupted in massive cheers.
In her speech, she projected the vision
of OneCoin that it would soon be bigger
than any
cryptocurrency. She said that within 2
years, no one would even talk about
Bitcoin anymore. And this was when she
dropped her big
news. Roua said if Onecoin wanted to be
the world's number one cryptocurrency,
they had to improve their technology and
make room for more
investors. That's why in a few months
time, OneCoin was launching a new blockchain.
blockchain.
She said it was more powerful, safer,
and instead of 2.1 billion coins, it
would have 120 billion one coins up for
grabs. We will retire the old blockchain
and switch on the new one. But Roua
promised in October when the new
blockchain came out, the price per coin
would stay the same. And as a thank you
to their loyal supporters for getting in
early, investors would have their one
coins doubled.
What we will do as a company, we will
People wept, they cheered, they posted
on social media about becoming rich.
Investors were so excited by this news
that they didn't stop to consider the
truth that Roua had just violated every
financial, investing, and crypto rule there
there
was. If you significantly increase the
supply of coins, the value of each coin
should fall
drastically. And yet, Roua was somehow
saying the price was staying the same.
It didn't make any economic sense, but
the announcement about their coins being
doubled worked as a perfect
distraction. But wait, there's more. Rou
also announced a new ultimate trader
education package that cost a whopping €118,000.
€118,000.
But because Roua made a point to say
that people's coins were only ever going
to be doubled once, people rushed to buy
this useless new education package so
they could get double
coins. Rouger said the package would
give you enough OneCoin to earn €14
million once the new blockchain
launched. So people teamed up and took
out loans to afford it. And sure enough,
in October 2016, OneCoin users logged
into their accounts, and as promised,
their coins appeared to have doubled.
Better yet, OneCoin's price had
increased again. It seemed like
everything was going
perfectly. Of course, in reality, the
price of OneCoin was merely a number
invented by Roua that she was
periodically increasing to keep
investors happy. and they could still
only sell a tiny fraction of their
OneCoin for actual
money. But most of OneCoin's
non-technical investors were too
indoctrinated to question anything, and
they didn't want to because when OneCoin
finally went public, they'd be set for
life. However, outside of OneCoin, this
latest stunt from Roua was starting to
With the massive growth of OneCoin came
an increase in skeptics and doubters.
People started commenting online that
OneCoin's price always seemed to go up
unlike a normal coin which would fluctuate.
fluctuate.
and commenters pointed out that
expecting 300% returns within months was
ridiculous. One website called
behindmlm.com worked hard to expose
onecoin and accused it of being a
gigantic Ponzi
scheme. However, even though there were
clearly a lot of red flags, many found
it hard to believe a billiondoll
cryptocurrency didn't have a blockchain.
Besides, Roua had such great credentials
and hundreds of thousands of people had
invested. So, OneCoin leaders called
anyone who questioned their project a
hater. Any negative media was dismissed
as rumors spread by jealous and
uninformed haters trying to destroy
OneCoin. Unfortunately, OneCoin's
cult-like following of investors trusted
Rouger blindly. They had been
indoctrinated not to trust outsiders.
But as more critics began to grow
online, Roua found out she was pregnant
and she started thinking about her
endgame. By this point in 2016, she was
running out of people she could trust.
So she fired her PA and hired her
brother Constantin as her new personal
assistant. Rouer's brother was a
forklift operator and a bodybuilder. And
until now, he'd been uninvolved and
uninterested in OneCoin.
But he couldn't help but notice how much
money Rouger was throwing around. So he
quit his forklift job and naively
accepted a position at
OneCoin. This was not because his sister
wanted to help him. The dark truth was
that Roua viewed him as a solution to
her problems if everything went wrong.
As long as she kept her brother close
enough, she could eventually pin
Since OneCoin had begun, Roua had
promised everyone that OneCoin was kept
honest and secure through her blockchain
technology. Even most of the OneCoin
staff were kept in the dark about the
reality that there was no actual blockchain.
blockchain.
All the records were simply kept on an
SQL database and thus could be easily
changed. Of course, the entire point of
blockchain is that the data is
decentralized and someone can't just
edit the records. So, it was the exact
opposite of what they claimed it to
be. Now, most investors didn't fully
understand the technology, but they were
confident the OneCoin blockchain existed
because why wouldn't they? This was a
multi-billion dollar company with
millions of people invested. It had
audit reports. Roua was on magazine
covers and they could see their OneCoin
balance on the
site. But with the increased scrutiny
now surrounding OneCoin, Roua felt she
desperately needed to create an actual
blockchain to try and quieten the
doubters. Of course, she couldn't just
ask her own IT team to create it, or
else she would expose herself as a liar
from the start.
So, in September 2016, OneCoin sent out
a LinkedIn message to Bjorn Barake, an
expert in helping companies transform
their old SQL databases into new
blockchains. Bjorn had a decade of IT
experience with banking, and he was a
crypto enthusiast who knew all about
blockchains and crypto
companies. But there was one problem.
Bjön had never heard of OneCoin, and to
him, something seemed off about the job
offer. Onecoin promised Bjorn a
$270,000 salary, plus two furnished
luxury apartments in Sophia and London,
if he could help them create a new
blockchain. Hearing this, Bejorn had
even more
questions. How could a cryptocurrency
like OneCoin exist? It seemed to earn
billions. So, how could it not already
have a blockchain? It didn't make any
sense. But, of course, there's been a
lot of transactions already. So, how do
I incorporate that into a new
blockchain, which is, as we know, uh,
completely impossible because there is
no coin. It's just transactions, right?
So, Bejorn logged on to the OneCoin
exchange to find out what was really happening.
happening.
The website showed a seemingly live
display of OneCoin's blockchain, showing
all of the transactions as they
happened. But if there wasn't a
blockchain, then what was really
happening here? Bjorn decided to test
it. He opened up three monitors, two
with OneCoin accounts and the third with
the live display. He transferred random
amounts between the two accounts and
watched the display to see if he could
match his transactions.
He tried numbers that were easy to spot,
like sending 1.234
coins. In total, he tried around 200
different transactions to track his own
movements, but he never saw any of his
transactions on the live
feed. The disturbing truth soon became
clear to Bjorn. OneCoin's live display
was just a front, nothing more than a
random display of numbers to look good.
It was merely a script generating fake
transactions between imaginary wallets
to fool investors that their coins were
held securely on the blockchain rather
than meaningless entries on a database
controlled by
Rouger. No wonder she could double
people's coins at will or change the
price whenever she wanted. It was just a
basic database not driven by supply and
demand like an actual cryptocurrency.
This scared Bjorn because that meant
millions of people owned billions of fake
fake
coins. He turned down OneCoin's job
offer and instead joined the growing
number of people on social media calling
out OneCoin as a
scam. Behind MLM.com reached out to
Bjorn and he agreed to give an interview
on the site exposing what OneCoin asked
him to do and what he believed was
actually happening behind the scenes.
The interview started to pick up some
traction, and the more people dug, the
darker the lies that
surfaced. Researchers even uncovered
that the auditing company OneCoin used
was owned by Roua
herself. Everything, it seemed, was
fake. And behind MLM.com was exposing it
all piece by piece.
As for the people who had invested in
OneCoin, many of them heard these
accusations and started to question OneCoin
OneCoin
themselves. But the problem was
accepting these accusations meant
everything they had believed was a lie
and that was too difficult to
take. That would mean these people who'd
invested their life savings based on
Rou's promises had lost everything.
They might have wiped out their savings
accounts and school funds and loans all
on a useless fake coin. And these people
who had convinced their own family and
friends to join them and buy OneCoin as
well would have inadvertently scammed
their loved
ones. Onecoin investors were so
desperate to believe Rouger that many of
them doubled down on their belief that
OneCoin must be real. It was easier to
Rouger promised investors that these
outside doubters were just haters.
Meanwhile, OneCoin started threatening
to shut down people's accounts if they
publicly asked too many questions, which
helped silence investors who raised
concerns. In fact, some people who tried
to point out the truth about OneCoin
In January 2017, people logged on to
OneCoin's exchange site and saw an ominous
ominous
message. This site is under
maintenance. At first, people just
assumed it was an annoying technical
problem that would soon be
fixed. But time went on. The exchange
stayed down and investors grew increasingly
increasingly
worried. Buyers messaged their
recruiters pleading for information.
"Don't worry," they would say. "It's
just a glitch." But the recruiters
themselves were stalling, unsure
themselves what was going
on. Days turned into weeks, and OneCoin
headquarters stopped taking calls.
The truth was, Rouger had shut down the
exchange site on purpose without telling
anyone the real reason. By now,
OneCoin's price was listed at $8.50 per
coin, its highest price ever. This meant
Rouger was technically selling $500
million worth of OneCoin every day. It
was too much. The scam was slipping out
of her control, and she couldn't afford
to keep paying people even with the
ridiculous withdrawal limits. So, she
had to stop people from cashing out
their OneCocoin
completely. The fact people had always
been able to withdraw a small amount of
their OneCoin into real money is what
gave people confidence it must be real.
And their confidence is what helped
refer more
victims. But now they couldn't withdraw
anything as the site was constantly
under maintenance. And so the panic
started to creep in. People who'd sold
land, cars, and borrowed money from
family to pay for it now had no way to
get any onecoin out. And this should
have been the moment that OneCoin
collapsed. But Bitcoin then started
making a massive run, going from a,000
to $5,000 in
months. People grew greedy again, afraid
that if they demanded their money,
they'd miss out on a similar growth when
OneCoin finally broke through.
Plus, when Roua finally broke her
silence about the exchange being down,
she tried to wave away all concerns by
offering some good
news. Roua claimed that the exchange was
simply shut because they were finally
having an initial coin offering,
launching OneCoin on a public exchange
site. Her followers had been waiting for
this for years as it would allow many of
them to cash out fully and become
incredibly wealthy.
The only catch was that she said people
had to wait a little while longer for
the paperwork to go through, but she
urged them to be
patient. In reality, Roua was stalling
and had secretly been planning something
very different. She knew that OneCoin
was in serious trouble. With all the
negativity online and allegations of
being a scam, fewer people were buying
OneCoin, leaving her with less money to
pay out those commissions and cash
outs. Just like any Ponzi scheme, it
only works until people stopped getting
paid. And Rouger knew the end was near.
Rouger had never planned for OneCoin to
get this big, but now it was too big to
disappear under the radar as OneCoin's
all-time revenue had recently surpassed €3
€3
billion. So, she grew increasingly
stressed and announced to her team she
was stepping back temporarily, using the
excuse of extended maternity leave after
having her baby. Her brother,
Constantin, took over in the meantime.
Meanwhile, Roua started looking for a
way out of the Fiero funds, where she
kept $400
million. She used some of her shady
connections, including Bulgaria's most
prolific drug trafficker of all time, to
help move money without alerting
anyone. Within a few months, Roua had
turned her $400 million into assets she
could liquidate easily or use if she wanted.
wanted.
things like investments in Bulgarian
tobacco companies, horse racing circuits
in Dubai, and a $7 million
superyachts. By the spring of 2017, she
had emptied the OneCoin accounts into
private funds that no one could access but
but
her. Interestingly though, it wasn't the
money laundering or the pyramid scheme
that would finally topple her empire. It
was Rou's affair with OneCoin's banker. [Music]
For almost 2 years, Roua and Gilbert had
been having an affair. And by the summer
of 2017, they were talking about leaving
their respective spouses and getting
married. But whilst Roua was in love
with Gilbert, Gilbert kept postponing the
the
decision. After a few months, Roua
started getting suspicious that Gilbert
was stringing her along to take
advantage of her money. And so she took
matters into her own [Music]
[Music]
hands. Roua told her lawyer, who used to
be a spy at an intelligence agency in
Luxembourg, to use some of his old
tricks and see if he could find a way to
listen in on Gilbert's conversations
with his wife.
So Rou's
lawyer/spy rented the apartment below
where Gilbert lived and installed a
listening device below his bedroom. When
the recordings came in, it was
abundantly clear that Gilbert was indeed
using Rouger for her money. But they
also revealed something else, and it
kept Roua up at night.
The FBI was investigating Gilbert for an
extortion charge that was completely
unrelated to
OneCoin, but Roua was afraid they would
find incriminating documents about her
on Gilbert's
computers. And it was even worse than Roua
Roua
feared. In September of 2017, US
authorities had already secretly
indicted and arrested Gilbert on
moneyaundering and extortion
charges. and Gilbert turned on Rouger
immediately, offering to become an
informant to help the feds build their
case against OneCoin and
Rouger. The FBI started recording all of
Gilbert's calls between himself and
Rouger. By this point, Roua was very
paranoid about OneCoin's future and her
escape plan. So, she called Gilbert
every day to talk about her money,
completely unaware that Gilbert had sold
her out and become an FBI informant.
even though they used an encrypted line.
At one point, Roua scolded Gilbert to be
more careful with what they said on the
phone. What she didn't realize is that
FBI agents were sitting right next to
him, listening to her every
word. Meanwhile, the OneCoin network was
getting noisy and restless, demanding
answers. Rouger kept trying to stall for
time, promising answers and big plans
very soon.
But in the midst of all this, in October
2017, Roua called her brother Constantin
and demanded he book a flight for her in
a few days time to Vienna. The next day,
she called him again to book another
flight on the exact same day, but this
time to
Athens. Constantin was confused, but
Roua assured him she'd be back
soon. On October 25th, 2017, Roua
boarded an early morning flight from
Sophia to
Athens. This was the last time anyone
her. Hey legends, it's John here,
creator of Magnates Media. I've got
three quick exciting updates for you.
Firstly, I'm now approaching my 100th
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and I'll see you [Music]
there. Back at OneCoin, no one, not
Sebastian, not OneCoin staff, not even
her brother Constantin knew what was
going on. No one could reach Roua. She
was scheduled to speak at a conference
in Lisbon, but she never showed up. News
of her disappearance spread throughout
the OneCoin community. Although top
sellers and staff tried to quiet the
panic, nobody had any real answers to
give. The exchange website wasn't
working. The plans to list on a public
exchange were delayed again, and their
beloved leader was gone. Finally, in
January 2018, Bulgarian police conducted
a raid at OneCoin's head office. With
warrant in hand, they burst in and took
servers, laptops, files, and anything
else they could find. Authorities were
able to prove that there was no
blockchain, no cryptocoin, and no money
left in the OneCoin
accounts. Many of Onequin's victims were
normal everyday people. As the
realization sunk in that they would
never get their money back, they grew
increasingly depressed and some even
threatened to end their
lives. There are two ways to count up
the losses of this scam. The first is
how much people actually spent buying
one coin with estimates ranging from 4
billion to 15 billion. The second way is
to count up the loss of what people
expected they had, which was far higher.
For context, with Bernie Maidoff's Ponzi
scheme, which lasted for decades and had
been considered the largest Ponzi scheme
ever, people's paper loss was $60
billion. In comparison, those who
weren't able to cash out their OneCoin
were owed over a hundred
billion. Around 3.5 million people are
believed to have bought into OneCoin. Of
those, only 50,000 are believed to have
made any money. Within that group, just
5% took almost all of it, and none of
them were regular investors. So, there
were a tiny fraction of people at the
top of the pyramid who got in early and
made money just from referring others.
But the vast majority of people involved
lost everything, and many now faced
financial ruin. Onecoin was constantly
bombarded with demands for refunds.
Refunds they could never give because
the billions were gone. Over the next
few months, financial analysts working
with the international police found that
Roua had used just about every trick in
the book to conceal the money she was
collecting from people. Shell
corporations owned other shell
corporations, all registered in various
countries, and the names of unsuspecting
people she had paid to sign the papers.
As for Constantin, in Rou's absence, he
had become the face of Onecoin.
Unfortunately for him, he learned too
late that his sister had been planning
to put him in this position all along.
Back in 2014, before OneCoin had made a
single sale, Roua already knew her exit
strategy. In a leaked email, Roua wrote
that should anything go wrong, she would
disappear and leave the blame on someone
else. And that person turned out to be
her own brother.
Even though Constantin valued loyalty to
family above all else, he found out his
own sister had betrayed him, using him
from day one so she could be free with her
her
billions. However, Constantin was
definitely not innocent himself. Maybe
when he first came into the company, he
was. He'd initially just been Rou's
assistant, and he knew nothing about
running a business or cryptocurrency.
But in a leaked message between him and
Sebastian, they described people who had
invested in OneCoin as idiots.
Constantin said, "As you told me, the
network would not work with intelligent
people." He was clearly well aware of
the scam, just not aware that he was the
full guy. And things soon got worse for
him. Shortly after Rouger disappeared,
Constantin was pushed into a minivan by
a Bulgarian gang. They broke one of his
fingers and threatened to cut off body
parts unless he could come up with their
money. A few weeks after that, the
motorcycle gang, Hell's Angels, cornered
Constantin in a hotel room and put a gun
in his mouth. They told him that the
money they'd invested in one coin was
worth far more than his life. Constantin
realized he needed to get money quickly
to pay off these dangerous groups coming
after him. But without Rouger, he
couldn't access any of the funds or
shell companies where OneCoin's money
had been funneled away. So he decided to
do what OneCoin had always done, scam
people. He flew to underdeveloped
countries in South America, Africa, and
Asia, where he gave starving people the
opportunity of a lifetime to buy
OneCoin's education packages, which were
of course completely worthless. But news
of OneCoin scam wasn't well publicized
in these places. After defrauding more
poor and desperate people, Constantin
returned home in March 2019. On his way,
he stopped for a few days in California
where he was arrested by the FBI and
taken to a maximum security prison in
New York. He paid for the best lawyer
money could afford, the same lawyer used
by Mexico's most feared drug kingpin.
But Constantin was still denied bail and
formally charged with wire fraud. In the
end, Constantin plead guilty to all the
crimes he'd been accused of, signed an
agreement to cooperate with the
authorities in their search for Roua,
prison. A few cell blocks down from
Constantin was Sebastian, who'd also
been arrested, sentenced to 20 years in
prison, and fined $300 million. In fact,
all major parties involved in OneCoin
have been arrested except for Roua.
Still, no one has seen her. So, where
did she go? How can one of the most
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On October 25th, 2017, Roua took a
flight from Sophia in Bulgaria to Athens
in Greece. And then she got in a car
with some Russian-speaking men. That is
all we know for certain. However, around
the world, police were trying to find
Roua, and investors and journalists have
had plenty of theories on where she is.
Firstly, Roua surely changed her
appearance soon after disappearing. One
source claimed she had dyed her hair
blonde and possibly had plastic surgery
to alter her face. One claim is that she
escaped to Dubai, sheltered by her Saudi
royal connections, or possibly that she
was arrested by Dubai authorities who
wanted her to hand over the password for
the Bitcoin on those four USB drives
that she gave her. Another possibility
is that Roua was killed by angry
investors that got to her or the Russian
and Bulgarian mafia who'd used Onecoin
to launder money. Supposedly, one of
Bulgaria's crime bosses known as Tachi
ordered a hit on Roua a year after her
disappearance, and she was thrown into
the sea, never to be seen again. But
this was just a story passed down with
no actual evidence. But as journalists
dug in further, they heard anonymous tip
offs that Roua had been seen in ports
around the Mediterranean, spending most
of her time in international waters.
However, theories continue to float
around and still to this day, Rouger is
on the FBI's top 10 most wanted list.
The FBI offers $5 million for anyone
with information that leads to her
capture. Perhaps the most insane part of
this story is that if Roua is still
alive somewhere, she could still have
those four USB drives worth 230,000
Bitcoin. When she got them in 2015, they
were worth around 50 million. But as of
today, they're worth around 20 billion.
So, ironically, despite advertising
herself as the Bitcoin killer, she could
be one of the largest Bitcoin holders in
the world and also one of the wealthiest
criminals in history. We hear of crypto
scams a lot these days, but none of this
size. And to make this much money and
not even have a real blockchain is what
makes this so unique and crazy.
But if you thought Rouger's fake crypto
scam was wild, you have to check out the
story of the man who sold the Eiffel
Tower twice. Just click the thumbnail on
screen right now and I'll see you there
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