Ruja Ignatova was the public face of the $4 billion scam. In 2018, the FBI 10 Most Wanted scammer was killed on a drug kingpin's yacht, dismembered and thrown overboard, a new report said.
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Ruja Ignatova, the woman behind the $4 billion OneCoin Ponzi scheme, was murdered on an alleged drug kingpin's yacht in Bulgaria in 2018, according to a local newspaper.
In June of last year, the FBI placed Ignatova, the CEO and public face of OneCoin, on its 10 Most Wanted list. A $100,000 reward was offered for the woman known as the Crypto Queen.
But they were four years too late, according to a report in Bulgaria's Bird.
Drawing on what it said were documents found in the home of a corrupt, formerly high-ranking police official murdered last March, Bird claimed that after Ignatova was killed, her body was dismembered and tossed into the Ionian Sea.
'Bigger than Bitcoin'
Launched in 2014, OneCoin was supposed to be a bigger and better version of Bitcoin, and by 2016 had become the No. 2 cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with Ignatova able to fill London's Wembley Stadium with 90,000 fans.
But it was a Ponzi scheme built on a token that was never made available for trading outside of its own closed system. And it used techniques common to multi-level marketing, with traders paying for educational packages that allowed them to "mine" OneCoin.
The $4 billion figure is at the lower end of the estimate of how much was stolen by the scammers, with some suggesting $15 billion was taken.
In December of 2022, OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering charges, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. Ruja Ignatova's brother, Konstantin Ignatov, was arrested in 2019 and pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges.
"As a founder and leader of OneCoin, Karl Sebastian Greenwood operated one of the largest international fraud schemes ever perpetrated," said Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York at the time of the conviction. He added:
"Greenwood and his co-conspirators, including fugitive Ruja Ignatova, conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that OneCoin would be the 'Bitcoin killer.' In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless. Greenwood's lies were designed with one goal, to get everyday people all over the world to part with their hard-earned money."
While the Bulgarian news report suggests the major OneCoin prosecutions are over, Bird noted that the information was not entirely solid. It was included in a large cache of documents seized from the murdered police commander, and was based upon a drunken report he received from an associate of the drug kingpin.
