High-profile lawsuit in Germany – for the first time in the country and, possibly, in the world, a case on fraud with cryptocurrencies is being heard. True, it passes without the main figurant: Ruja Ignatova, who modestly called herself a “crypto-royal”, will not be in the land court in Munster.
For several years, a native of Bulgaria with a German passport collected money from investors from Germany and from all over the world, selling them the Onecoin cryptocurrency. Only this currency, it seems, she simply invented, for a surprisingly long time leading millions of gullible investors by the nose: in Germany alone, tens of thousands of people suffered from Ignatova’s activities.
Who was in the dock in Münster and who was not
In the dock in Münster, a married couple from the city of Grevin (this is the north-west of Germany) and a lawyer from Munich (the south of the country). The spouses transferred the depositors’ money for “cryptocurrency” to Ruzha’s accounts. Through these intermediaries alone, the “crypto queen” received 320 million euros for Onecoin. The court will have to prove that the Grevenians knew about the fraudulent nature of the transactions – they deny this.
Ruja Ignatova promised that “everyone will forget about bitcoin”
The second person involved in the process is a Munich lawyer, who, instead of Mrs. Ignatova, signed papers and made large purchases so that the head of the company would not shine unnecessarily. He is accused of money laundering. But neither the married couple nor the lawyer played a key role in the Onecoin scam: the protagonist was precisely Ruja Ignatova, for whose arrest an international FBI warrant was issued long ago, but who has nevertheless managed to hide since 2017.
As a child, Ignatova, together with her parents and her younger brother Konstantin, moved from Bulgaria to the German Black Forest, studied at Oxford and defended her doctoral dissertation at the University of Constance, Germany. Before the cryptocurrency scam, she managed to work for the well-known consulting company McKinsey, and also made an illegal deal with the purchase and sale of a steel mill in the Bavarian Allgäu, leaving the buyer a ruined and looted factory.
This is the only offense for which Ignatova was convicted in Germany in 2016, and even then she was given only a suspended sentence for a year and two months in prison. Ruzha’s new scam was not interested in German justice then, although by that time she had already turned from a manufacturer into the very “crypto-queen”.
Rouge, who promised that “everyone will forget about bitcoin”
The Onecoin financial pyramid appeared in July 2014. The promise of the startup Ruzha is a cryptocurrency “understandable to any” person, more convenient and easy to use than the rest. Investors were offered to buy so-called “training packages”, allegedly including cryptocurrency and instructions on how it works. The cost of such packages ranged from several hundred to 118 thousand euros. If someone who had already bought a “package” persuaded someone else to buy a new currency, he received a good percentage of the transaction.
Photo by Ruzha Ignatova in the Süddeutsche Zeitung article “The Vanished Queen”
In one of her advertising speeches in 2015, Rouge stated that, unlike other cryptocurrencies, Onecoin is backed by gold hidden so securely that even she does not know where it is. The money raised was gradually enough for more and more pompous promotional events – in 2016 the company booked Wembley Stadium for its investors for the evening, where Ruja promised loudly that “in two years everyone will forget about Bitcoin.” The recording is still hanging on Youtube.
The overwhelming majority of depositors ignored the alarming signals even when strong arguments were made publicly in favor of Onecoin as a dummy, based on no blockchain, the underlying technology on which cryptocurrencies are based.
But no one was in a hurry to intervene. So, imperceptibly neither for the world of cryptocurrencies, nor for the general public, the pyramid has grown to an impressive size. The cost of one currency unit reached $ 2,000, and the total amount of investments in Onecoin, according to various estimates, amounted to 4-5 billion euros. When it came to opening to investors the exchange of the purchased cryptocurrency for the usual money, Ruja Ignatova … disappeared without a trace.
“Crypto Queen” in Germany? Or in Russia?
Ruzha’s place was taken by her younger brother Constantine, who continued to recruit new investors from Sofia, including in the poor countries of Latin America and Africa. The total number of participants in the crypto pyramid at that time exceeded the mark of three million. It is striking that even when Konstantin Ignatov was detained in Los Angeles in March 2019 on charges of fraud, the deception continued for some time. Konstantin pleaded guilty and agreed to a deal with the FBI, and it was after his revelations that many of the details of the scam became known.
Meanwhile, BBC journalists tried to find the escaped Rouge. According to her brother, in October 2017, she flew to Athens. There, several witnesses confirmed to reporters that they allegedly saw her several months after her escape. In Ruja’s footsteps, the reporters traveled to Bucharest and, finally, to Frankfurt am Main. A BBC source confirmed that she is there. But they could not find her. She allegedly underwent plastic surgery, and also received a new passport, as her brother suggested. He did not rule out that Ruzha might be in Russia, since allegedly shortly before her disappearance she met a very influential Russian.
But there are still no facts capable of confirming these statements and assumptions. It may seem incredible, but even today, despite the collapse of the Onecoin company, the pseudo-currency itself still exists – now under the name OneLife. Around the world, several tens of thousands of people still hope that they will someday get rich – as Ruja Ignatova promised them.
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