OneCoin

» see onecoin.eu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard of onecoin was probably 2019, in a bbc podcast series called the missing cryptoqueen, years after the scheme had already collapsed. by then ruja ignatova was gone, the exchange marketplace had been dark for two years, and the money had already been laundered through wherever it went. the story lived in the crypto press mostly as an example of what a total scam a coin could be while still generating billions in sales.

what onecoin actually sold was training packages. you paid a few hundred to a few thousand euros for a starter kit that came with educational material about cryptocurrency, plus a bundle of tokens the company called onecoins. the tokens had no blockchain. investigators who looked at the code found a sql server database on the back end assigning coin numbers to member accounts, which is not a cryptocurrency, that is a spreadsheet. the promoters were paid multi-level-marketing commissions on any recruits they brought in under them, which is the actual product.

it launched in september 2014 out of sofia bulgaria. ignatova had a doctorate from konstanz and mckinsey on her cv. sebastian greenwood was the mlm operator. between them they built a promoter network across germany uganda vietnam china britain and about a dozen other countries. at its peak the scheme claimed 3 million members. the sales rooms in london wembley arena in june 2016 were full. ignatova gave a red-dress speech about how onecoin would kill bitcoin.

i was in ankara through all of this, and turkey did have a onecoin presence too, promoted through the same mlm-style hotel-conference-room events. i did not attend one. a couple of forum posters on donanimhaber flagged it as a scam in 2015-2016. the sec of turkey issued a warning in early 2017. by then the fact that onecoin was a scam was already the mainstream english-crypto-press position, but the promoter network kept selling packages in developing markets for another year.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the disappearance ~

in january 2017 the internal exchange marketplace shut down without notice. members could no longer convert their fake tokens into euros through the onecoin backend. the excuse was maintenance. it never reopened. on 12 october 2017 ignatova flew from sofia to athens and vanished. the fbi later revealed a secret us indictment had been unsealed that same week. someone (or she herself) had tipped her off. she has not been seen since. wikipedia notes reports place her possibly in dubai or south africa or on a yacht in the mediterranean.

~ what happened to everyone else ~

sebastian greenwood was arrested in thailand in july 2018 and sent to new york, where he was sentenced in september 2023 to 20 years in federal prison. konstantin ignatov, ruja's brother, was arrested in los angeles in march 2019 and pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering in november 2019. mark scott, a lawyer who moved 400 million dollars of onecoin proceeds through cayman islands funds, was convicted in 2019. in june 2022 ignatova was added to the fbi ten most wanted list. the reward is now 5 million dollars.

~ what got buried ~

onecoin as a product is dead in the sense that no one can log into the exchange and no promoter is selling starter kits any more, at least not openly. really though, some countries closed their local shell companies quietly through 2019 and 2020 rather than announce a shutdown. the total losses are hard to pin down. us prosecutors used 4 billion dollars as a working figure. chinese authorities recovered 267 million on their own. the interesting part of onecoin now is that it worked as long as it did entirely on the mlm sales layer, which was a well-known technology decades before the word cryptocurrency existed. onecoin was really a chain-referral pyramid dressed up in crypto vocabulary. the blockchain was theater.

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