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BILLION DOLLAR CRYPTO SCAM.
Cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more a part of people's lives every year. Some invest in them, some store and transfer money in stablecoins, but it was not always like that. Just over ten years ago, only a very small group of enthusiasts used crypto, and then 2013 happened and Bitcoin grew several dozen times.
That group of enthusiasts got rich, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world began to think about whether they were missing their chance of the century. This is what our heroine of today took advantage of, creating the OneCoin cryptocurrency, convincing thousands of people that this is the new Bitcoin, and they should not miss a second chance to get rich without doing anything. As a result, all this resulted in one of the largest frauds not only in the cryptocurrency field, but in general. So, if you are interested in learning how the daughter of ordinary Bulgarian workers managed to steal several billion euros and not go to jail, then meet her.
Ruja Ignatova on the other side of the law. Ruja Ignatova used new technologies to make money by deceiving, but it is possible to do it illegally, for example, in IT.
Ruja Ignatova was born on May 30, 1980 to Veski and Plamen Ignatov in the city of Sofia in Bulgaria.
Her father was educated as a mechanical engineer, and her mother worked as a kindergarten teacher. In 1986, Ruja's brother Konstantin was born, and in 1990 the family moved to Germany and settled in a poor neighborhood of the small southwestern town of Schramberg. Born in Bulgaria, Ruja had an unusual accent as a child, fluctuating between sharp German consonants and rhythmic Bulgarian sounds.
Growing up, she sometimes said that her accent thus contained two sides of her personality - an impulsive Bulgarian and a rational German. She studied well at school, was the best in her class and was brilliant in every subject. One teacher in Schramberg said that she was the smartest student he had ever met. However, being the brightest child in school was not easy, because her classmates considered her arrogant and distant, and instead of company and friends, the girl preferred her parents or her studies.
At 18, Ruja Ignatova won a prestigious scholarship to the University of Constantine, one of the best universities in Germany, where she defended her doctorate in law and completed a distance learning course in economics at the University of Hagen. As in high school, she had interests beyond her years. For example, she was involved in politics and became a student representative for the center-right Christian Democratic Union party.
During her studies, the girl met Björn Strell, fell in love with him and soon got married. As before, her studies were easy for her. After Constantine, she was accepted to Oxford University to study a master's degree in European law. And history always repeated itself, Ruja was the best, the smartest, but alienated.
She had a huge number of ambitions, and she always told her friends and acquaintances that she would become a millionaire by the age of 30. But time passed, and now she is 28, and there are still no mountains of money. And she desperately wanted it and could well become successful. However, simple success was not enough for her, she needed a financial triumph. In 2008, Ruja found herself back in her hometown and worked as a consultant at the prestigious American consulting company McKinsey & Company, which was considered to be almost the best job available at that time in Sofia.
And Ruja herself liked this position, because she had the whole world in front of her - stock prices, exchange rates, investment portfolios - and she controlled all of it. The girl stood out among her colleagues and was one of those to whom you could write at any time of the day or night and receive an answer almost instantly. Her colleagues and classmates at the university found her distant, mistaking her hard work and attention to detail for rudeness, while her clients, on the contrary, found her charming and efficient.
But this job did not provide enough money for the weapons, so she decided to earn some extra money on the side, not entirely legally, of course. It was 2010, somewhere in southern Germany at that time there was a factory called Weltenhoff & Gusswerks. It was run by a certain Carlos Hill, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy. For a long time, trying to figure out the situation, the owner finally spat and decided to sell the company, and then for several months tried to find the right buyer.
No, it was not that difficult. The hard part was finding a person who would worry and care about the workers, and for Carlos this was the most important thing, because due to the problems at the factory, 60 out of 140 people in the company lost their jobs, and the rest could be left without work in the near future. In early 2010, the factory was unexpectedly bought by a young woman and her father.
The woman turned out to be Ruja Ignatova, and her father Plamen was a man who had worked at a steel mill for many years. Ruja immediately won Carlos Gile over, and her impeccable resume, company development forecasts, tables, etc. made a great impression on him. He practically agreed to sell the factory, but he was tormented by one single question - the fate of the workers. But Ruja dispelled these doubts, assuring that jobs would be created and the employees would be reinstated.
The deal took place. Ruja offered more than two million euros for the factory, which she took out a loan from a German bank, and used two blast furnaces that she and her father owned, worth almost a million euros, as collateral for the loan. She and her father were supposed to eventually move these furnaces and install them at the factory, but this never happened. Whether the furnaces themselves existed, by the way, also remains a mystery.
So, in the spring of 2010, Ružej and Plamen became co-owners of a steel foundry in southern Germany. For the first few months, everything went as smoothly as possible. Ružej sat in her office, running the factory, Mother Veska was her assistant, and Father Plamen was usually on the shop floor, overseeing production and talking to the workers. But then problems started. About a year later, one of the employees called Carlos and said that Ružej owned a consulting company that she hired and was paying herself from the factory’s money.
As a result, the workers’ salaries were getting smaller. Carlos, who had never interfered with the new director’s affairs up until that point, decided to talk to Ružej, but she explained that it was just a small rebranding job and that everything was fine. After all, the employees were paid for their work. Gradually, the working conditions began to deteriorate. Employees were asked to work overtime without pay. Invoices were ignored, vacation pay was cut.
And one day, Ruža said that during her trip to Bulgaria, her company car, a Porsche Cayenne, was allegedly stolen. The blast furnaces that Ruža and Plamen promised to bring from Bulgaria never arrived. The plant was operating with outdated equipment, and new furnaces were desperately needed to maintain production. But weeks of waiting turned into months, and there was always some new excuse as to why it would happen next week, next month, and so on.
Carlos, who began arriving at the plant without warning and demanding meetings with Ruža, also began to insist on transporting the furnaces to the factory. But the new director answered quite rudely that he was interfering in something that was none of his business. Soon, one of the workers called Carlos again and said that the factory had been sold to an unknown businessman for only 1 euro. Now the plant was finally doomed to closure. The woman had to answer in court for the ruin of the factory and fraud with money 6 years later, in 2016.
On April 12, she appeared in the dock at the Augsburg District Court and pleaded guilty to a crime, namely, intentional breach of duty in the event of insolvency, fraud, withholding and embezzlement of employee wages, and breach of accounting duties. The judge sentenced Ruža to 14 months probation and a fine of 18 thousand euros, and Plamen, who was absent from the court hearing, had to pay 12 thousand.
Carlos considered this punishment insufficient, but could not do anything else. Around the same time that Ruža bought the factory, the consulting firm where the woman had previously worked closed. Now she was faced with a choice: to stay in Bulgaria or return to Germany, where she had recently bought real estate. The choice was made in favor of her country of birth, since Ruža later admitted that while she lived in Germany, she always lacked something, and the woman continued to develop in Bulgaria.
Besides money, Ruja was always interested in fashion, so she tried to get into the beauty industry by launching her own line of cosmetics. She also socialized with famous people in Sofia and attended their parties. For a while, she also worked at the largest investment firm in Bulgaria, headed by Tsvetselina Borislava. Eventually, her efforts paid off, and by 2013, Ruja had become a recognizable face in the city's fashion, business, and politics.
But she was still haunted by the fear of unrealized potential. And although she now had several business interests of her own, they did not bring in the kind of money Ruja wanted. So she began to study Bitcoin, which caught her interest when its price began to rise sharply. Watching Bitcoin's growing popularity, a certain John And J. decided to create his own Bitcoin and called it Big Coin.
However, instead of being bought and sold on currency exchange sites, this new coin, BikCoin, was to follow the MLM model, where people join, buy coins, and then sell coins to other people, earning a percentage of that, with the commissions also accumulating up the levels, meaning the person at the top gets a percentage of everyone at the bottom. John N.J. started calling around to find people interested in the idea.
One of those people was Sebastian Greenwoon, who was then representing the interests of a company called SideTalk. Sebastian was a natural salesman, and his bosses noticed this, so by 2011 he was already selling SideTalk directly to investors all over Europe. Sebastian left SideTalk in early 2013 and with a former colleague, Björn Thomas, created his own company called Tovan Group Keeper, which, however, went bankrupt.
They tried again, calling the project Lupium, and around this time, John Andrzej contacted him about joining Bikcoin. John and Sebastian were a perfect fit. John was a bit older, hard-working, and organized, but he needed someone who could excite a crowd, which Sebastian did well. Greenwood met Ruja in November 2013 at a cryptocurrency seminar in Singapore, where Ignatova was one of the speakers.
Ruja’s idea itself didn’t really stick in Sebastian’s mind, but he realized that she was well versed in finance. After her talk, Sebastian approached her, introduced himself, and offered to collaborate. Ruja was hired as Bikcoin’s legal counsel. She did a great job, and Bikcoin did so well that Sebastian eventually closed his company, Lupium.
It is unclear at what point Sebastian and Ruzsa decided to steal John and Andrzej’s idea, but the more they promoted Bitcoin, the more they realized that they could do a better job without John. From early spring 2014, the pair worked on Bitcoin all day, then secretly met every evening to develop their own improved version of the currency. This is how OneCoin was born.
Despite all his enthusiasm, Sebastian did not know how to start an MLM company from scratch. So they decided to approach one of Sebastian’s friends, Juha Parhiala. Juha had been working in MLM for a long time and had built a large network of promoters in Asia who, in theory, OneCoin could attract. Juha contacted Ruzsa, and for 40 minutes she tried to explain to him in simple terms how cryptocurrencies work.
She said that all cryptocurrencies work on specialized software called blockchain, which is an immutable database that is updated every few minutes. This is the so-called diary of the coin, where all transactions made by anyone anywhere using the cryptocurrency are published. And thanks to technology, no previous record can be deleted. After talking to Ruža, Juha understood little, but his task was not to understand OneCoin, but to sell it.
Sebastin promised that Juha would be the main promoter in the pyramid, and this meant that he would receive a commission from almost everyone who invested after him. Juha agreed, although he still understood little. After some time, the newly minted colleagues agreed on two main ways to earn money. First, anyone who sold OneCoin should receive a 10% commission for direct sales. Secondly, promoters should also receive a 10% commission on the volume of business, depending on all the sales of those they invite to join.
It was simple and profitable. In addition, there was another option, which was the most important of all. At some point in the near future, OneCoin was supposed to be listed on a cryptocurrency exchange where it could be sold for real money, just like Bitcoin. And likewise, the value of OneCoin was supposed to grow, which would differentiate it from other MLM companies.
In other words, the company was targeting two types of hamsters at once. The first was hoping to make money by attracting other hamsters. The second was hoping for Bitcoin to come back and multiply its value when it went public. By the end of the summer of 2014, the Trio had agreed on a basic business model and sales scheme. OneCoin was supposed to be the next Bitcoin sold through MLM, and it was supposed to continue to grow.
While Sebastian and Juha were finalizing the plan, Ruža began creating the corporate structure of the new company. Website, recruiting, company registration, etc. She also renamed several of her old companies and handed them over to her mother to manage. And in June '14, Ruža registered the domain name 3w1coin.Eu and advertised OneCoin as the next Bitcoin.
With the corporate structure and sales plan in place, Ruža and Sebastian needed to finally stop working on Bitcoin, but do so in a way that would not immediately arouse suspicion. The same month that Ruža registered the OneCoin website, she and Sebastian flew to Hong Kong for a large Bitcoin sales conference, where she pitched investors the idea of exchanging coins for shares in an investment fund that was created under the name Crypto Real Investment. Trust
. It was most likely just a hoax to distract John from the truth, as Sebastian and Ruja were on the verge of launching their own competing project. The only thing left to do to launch a cryptocurrency was to create a blockchain that would power the currency. The difficulty was that neither Ruja, nor Sebastian, nor especially Juha, knew how to do this.
So it was decided to contract a Bulgarian IT firm, which, with the help of Indian developers, copied the original Bitcoin blockchain and added a few tweaks to make the blockchain their own. And then there was the decision of how big OneCoin should be. And Ruja decided that OneCoin should consist of 2 billion and 100 million coins, which is 100 times larger than Bitcoin.
In July 2014, when Sebastian was supposed to speak at a Bitcoin event in South Korea, he simply did not show up, and a few hours later he sent John a photo of himself from a hospital room, saying that he was very sick. In fact, John was simply dumped, not considering it important to officially end the cooperation. The launch of the blockchain was planned for January 2015, but Ruja wanted to start sales right away.
Therefore, Sebastien and Yujha had to call their friends and former colleagues, specialists and reputable sellers from the MLM sphere, offering them to make history, quit everything they sold before, and join the new promising company OneCoin. Some considered the idea dubious, but some still agreed. Among the recognizable personalities in the MLM sphere who responded were Nigel Allen, Per Carlsson and Petri Väläli. Nigel was a British promoter in his 50s and had worked in the MLM sphere since the 80s, including several leading companies, including Herbalife.
Per and Petri were also MLM sellers, both were about 30 years old and lived in Scandinavia at the time, all three were somehow acquainted with Juha. There was one problem, in 2014 OneCoin was so new that no one knew whether it would be considered a real product or not.
And Juha and Sebastian's plan was to sell education. The OneCoin product that the promoters were supposed to sell consisted of 5 educational packages, which consisted of educational videos and long PDF files, which contained tips and information about finance, investments and cryptocurrencies. Each package also contained free OneCoins. The cheapest package was the starter package, which cost 100 euros.
It came with one educational PDF file and 1000 tokens, which could be converted into about 200 coins. There were 5 packages in total, each more expensive than the previous one. The most expensive one cost 5000 euros and included all the previous educational files and 48 thousand OneCoins. And although the educational packages were claimed to be for those who wanted to bring their trading skills to the highest level, the information in them was practically useless.
In reality, investors were buying coins that were essentially not even worth anything yet. There was no public blockchain yet, but Nigel, Perr, Petri and Juha were selling these packages by the end of August '14. They worked hard, but most sensible people were not interested in buying coins that did not even exist yet.
The first presentation of OneCoin took place on September 27, 2014 in Helsinki. By this time, only 27 packages had been sold, mostly to investors from Sweden and Finland. Then the gun went into more decisive action and said that if Perr could convince at least 50 people to attend the presentation, she would personally fly in from Bulgaria to speak. Somehow Perr succeeded and the presentation took place, and although the participants doubted the reality of the gun's plans, they were won over by her self-confidence and belief in herself and her product.
After the Helsinki event, rumors about the new cryptocurrency began to spread, and more interest appeared. Rougey and Sebastian continued to promote their currency, refining the concept of Bitcoin and convincing people more and more that the project would succeed.
And although the coin still technically did not exist, Sebastian explained that when the blockchain was launched in January 2015, a currency exchange site called OneExchange would also be created, where OneCoins could be exchanged for money at a price of 0.5 euros per coin. He also convinced people to invest 5,000 euros now to get 24 thousand in three months. The audience liked this, they did not want to miss out on the new cryptocurrency, just as they had missed out on Bitcoin.
As planned, the genesis block was launched in January 2015, the currency got its own blockchain and investors' coins were supposed to be deposited into their accounts within the next 1-2 days. In addition, OneExchange was ready to start working, where each coin cost half a euro, as promised by Sebastian, and now the coins could be exchanged for real money. However, fearing that investors would immediately withdraw large amounts, and the money in the companies' accounts might not be enough to cover all the payments, Ruja set a temporary limit on the amount that could be withdrawn weekly.
In order to achieve maximum popularity for herself and her company, Ruja engaged in self-promotion. In the summer of 2015, around the time when OneCoin released the Premium Trader package worth 12.5 thousand euros, and the company's revenue exceeded 1 billion euros, Ruja's photos appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine under the headline "Cryptocurrency of Bulgarian Origin".
And on a two-page spread, Ruja talked about the future of finance and the coming crypto revolution. Forbes is one of the most famous business magazines, where all aspiring entrepreneurs dream of getting into. Ruja succeeded, but there was one “but”. The publication was not quite real. Through a specialized PR company Forbes Brand Voice, Ruja acquired the opportunity to publish an advertisement on three pages of the Bulgarian edition of the magazine and developed an article that looked indistinguishable from a real Forbes article, including the layout of the title page.
The only difference from the real edition, published in the USA, was that the cover of the American Forbes for the month of publication featured pop icon Katy Perry. Ruja paid for the simulation of the American edition of Forbes. A few months later, Ruja repeated the trick with an even more respected business publication, The Economist. Also in November 2015, she managed to become the keynote speaker at a large conference organized by the magazine in the center of Sofia, attended by local influential people, including the President of Bulgaria Ruslan Plevniliev.
In May 2015, another presentation of OneCoin took place in Dubai. This time, it was announced that OneExchange would be replaced by an independent exchange site XCoinX, which would buy and sell OneCoin in parallel with Bitcoin, and the starting price of one OneCoin would be 1 euro.
Ruja said that once XCoinX was open, people would be able to cash out their coins on an open, independent market. The OneCoin corporation continued to grow, and one could say that Ruja had finally realized her potential. OneCoin was everything to her, she had more money than she could spend and absolute control over a huge, growing company.
After graduating, Ruja worked tirelessly, and now, after OneCoin took off, she decided she wanted to become a mother. In the late fall of 2016, after she answered in court for fraud with a factory in 2009-2010, Ruja was due to have a child. Until that happened, she was busy with the company, and the bigger and richer OneCoin became, the more problems there were with storing and transferring money.
When too much money was transferred, banks froze transactions, and the number of new accounts increased sharply. Among other things, she had several personal and corporate accounts in the Emirates. But when OneCoin's roost became sky-high, some banks got nervous. OneCoin's corporate accounts at Bank AlmaShrek suddenly began receiving millions in unexplained payments every month from companies with strange names, such as Swift Electronic Limited or World Creation Electronic Limited, and then the money disappeared just as quickly.
In May 2015 alone, Sebastian Greenwoth was paid €9.5 million and got another €5 million from Royal Yacht & Boats. In September, Mashreq Bank filed a suspicious transaction report with the UAE Central Bank, and a few weeks later, Commercial Bank Dubai did the same.
On September 14, 2015, Ruja told Sebastian that about €50 million had been frozen in Dubai. But, as always, Ruja had a solution. She flew to Dubai to meet a member of the Sharjah royal family who knew one of the richest men in the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Saud bin Faisal Al Qassimi. Ruja made a deal with the latter. She sold the sheikh One Coin Limited and three cheques from Al-Mashrek Bank for a total of 210 million Emirati dirhams – about €50 million.
In exchange, Al Qassimi handed over the guns four USB sticks containing around €48.5 million worth of Bitcoin over the course of several months. This was likely done so that Alcos-7, through its connections, could take over the company and unfreeze the guns’ assets for itself, while she would have access to the digital money that she could use immediately.
A few months later, Alcos-7 did indeed write to the attorney general of Dubai, explaining that the guns’ bank accounts had been frozen without good cause, that he had power of attorney over them, and that this was an insult to Ignatova. Gilbert Armenta was a banker, owning two investment companies of his own, Zala Group and Faiths, as well as a controlling stake in a small independent bank called JSC Capital in Georgia.
By mid-2010, he was doing finance, including providing prepaid cards for businesses and payment solutions for online casinos. In 2015, he began providing banking services for Ruja. Gilbert opened business accounts in his own name that received payments from OneCoin investors and used his own bank, AOCapital, to provide prepaid cards to promoters to pay their fees.
Ruja also asked Gilbert to find someone to help her manage her rapidly growing personal wealth. Gilbert suggested Mark Scott. Mark was a Florida-based corporate lawyer Gilbert had worked with several years earlier and had a fairly good business and friendship relationship with. Ruja wanted her money to be turned into assets, stocks, companies, funds, or real estate.
She wanted more than just bank accounts, and Mark could help her do that. Mark suggested setting up four investment funds. Mark’s firm, Locklord, also handled Ruja’s real estate deals. On February 9, 2016, Mark and Ruja met in person for the first time to discuss the FinEro funds, as Mark called them, which included four $100 million funds, three of which were registered in the British Virgin Islands and one in the Cayman Islands.
The funds invested in VEES technology companies, mostly in the UK and Ireland. And although it was Ruja’s money, her name did not appear anywhere on the company’s documents. Instead, the FinEro funds were owned, on paper, by an investment management firm Mark had founded called MSS International Consulting BVI, which was in turn owned by MSS International Consulting, a Florida company Mark had owned for years.
There were also plans to create several more subsidiaries, each of which, like each fund, would have its own bank account and would be controlled by Mark. Funds like FinEro abounded in the British Virgin Islands, which has imposed some regulations on the funds. For example, all funds had to appoint an independent administrator to ensure professional management while protecting investors’ interests. One of the administrators was Paul Spendiff, whose company Apex managed thousands of investment funds around the world.
Marks had recently become an approved fund manager in the British Virgin Islands, meaning he could do business without going through lengthy approval procedures. Marks told Paul that the investors in Finner’s new fund were wealthy European families he had worked with before. Once Apex had opened bank accounts at DMS Bank in the Cayman Islands for Finner and the background checks had been completed, Ruja could start sending money into one of the fund’s bank accounts, which she did almost immediately.
On June 2, three separate payments totaling 5 million euros were transferred to the Finera Equity Investment Limited account, and then on June 3, 6, 7, 8, 15 and 20, another 5 million each day. This continued throughout the summer. Over the course of two years, OneCoin investors bought packages worth between 100 and 12.5 thousand euros and diligently sent their money to various bank accounts around the world.
Cryptocurrencies are becoming more and more a part of people's lives every year. Some invest in them, some store and transfer money in stablecoins, but it was not always like that. Just over ten years ago, only a very small group of enthusiasts used crypto, and then 2013 happened and Bitcoin grew several dozen times.
That group of enthusiasts got rich, and hundreds of thousands of people around the world began to think about whether they were missing their chance of the century. This is what our heroine of today took advantage of, creating the OneCoin cryptocurrency, convincing thousands of people that this is the new Bitcoin, and they should not miss a second chance to get rich without doing anything. As a result, all this resulted in one of the largest frauds not only in the cryptocurrency field, but in general. So, if you are interested in learning how the daughter of ordinary Bulgarian workers managed to steal several billion euros and not go to jail, then meet her.
Ruja Ignatova on the other side of the law. Ruja Ignatova used new technologies to make money by deceiving, but it is possible to do it illegally, for example, in IT.
Ruja Ignatova was born on May 30, 1980 to Veski and Plamen Ignatov in the city of Sofia in Bulgaria.
Her father was educated as a mechanical engineer, and her mother worked as a kindergarten teacher. In 1986, Ruja's brother Konstantin was born, and in 1990 the family moved to Germany and settled in a poor neighborhood of the small southwestern town of Schramberg. Born in Bulgaria, Ruja had an unusual accent as a child, fluctuating between sharp German consonants and rhythmic Bulgarian sounds.
Growing up, she sometimes said that her accent thus contained two sides of her personality - an impulsive Bulgarian and a rational German. She studied well at school, was the best in her class and was brilliant in every subject. One teacher in Schramberg said that she was the smartest student he had ever met. However, being the brightest child in school was not easy, because her classmates considered her arrogant and distant, and instead of company and friends, the girl preferred her parents or her studies.
At 18, Ruja Ignatova won a prestigious scholarship to the University of Constantine, one of the best universities in Germany, where she defended her doctorate in law and completed a distance learning course in economics at the University of Hagen. As in high school, she had interests beyond her years. For example, she was involved in politics and became a student representative for the center-right Christian Democratic Union party.
During her studies, the girl met Björn Strell, fell in love with him and soon got married. As before, her studies were easy for her. After Constantine, she was accepted to Oxford University to study a master's degree in European law. And history always repeated itself, Ruja was the best, the smartest, but alienated.
She had a huge number of ambitions, and she always told her friends and acquaintances that she would become a millionaire by the age of 30. But time passed, and now she is 28, and there are still no mountains of money. And she desperately wanted it and could well become successful. However, simple success was not enough for her, she needed a financial triumph. In 2008, Ruja found herself back in her hometown and worked as a consultant at the prestigious American consulting company McKinsey & Company, which was considered to be almost the best job available at that time in Sofia.
And Ruja herself liked this position, because she had the whole world in front of her - stock prices, exchange rates, investment portfolios - and she controlled all of it. The girl stood out among her colleagues and was one of those to whom you could write at any time of the day or night and receive an answer almost instantly. Her colleagues and classmates at the university found her distant, mistaking her hard work and attention to detail for rudeness, while her clients, on the contrary, found her charming and efficient.
But this job did not provide enough money for the weapons, so she decided to earn some extra money on the side, not entirely legally, of course. It was 2010, somewhere in southern Germany at that time there was a factory called Weltenhoff & Gusswerks. It was run by a certain Carlos Hill, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy. For a long time, trying to figure out the situation, the owner finally spat and decided to sell the company, and then for several months tried to find the right buyer.
No, it was not that difficult. The hard part was finding a person who would worry and care about the workers, and for Carlos this was the most important thing, because due to the problems at the factory, 60 out of 140 people in the company lost their jobs, and the rest could be left without work in the near future. In early 2010, the factory was unexpectedly bought by a young woman and her father.
The woman turned out to be Ruja Ignatova, and her father Plamen was a man who had worked at a steel mill for many years. Ruja immediately won Carlos Gile over, and her impeccable resume, company development forecasts, tables, etc. made a great impression on him. He practically agreed to sell the factory, but he was tormented by one single question - the fate of the workers. But Ruja dispelled these doubts, assuring that jobs would be created and the employees would be reinstated.
The deal took place. Ruja offered more than two million euros for the factory, which she took out a loan from a German bank, and used two blast furnaces that she and her father owned, worth almost a million euros, as collateral for the loan. She and her father were supposed to eventually move these furnaces and install them at the factory, but this never happened. Whether the furnaces themselves existed, by the way, also remains a mystery.
So, in the spring of 2010, Ružej and Plamen became co-owners of a steel foundry in southern Germany. For the first few months, everything went as smoothly as possible. Ružej sat in her office, running the factory, Mother Veska was her assistant, and Father Plamen was usually on the shop floor, overseeing production and talking to the workers. But then problems started. About a year later, one of the employees called Carlos and said that Ružej owned a consulting company that she hired and was paying herself from the factory’s money.
As a result, the workers’ salaries were getting smaller. Carlos, who had never interfered with the new director’s affairs up until that point, decided to talk to Ružej, but she explained that it was just a small rebranding job and that everything was fine. After all, the employees were paid for their work. Gradually, the working conditions began to deteriorate. Employees were asked to work overtime without pay. Invoices were ignored, vacation pay was cut.
And one day, Ruža said that during her trip to Bulgaria, her company car, a Porsche Cayenne, was allegedly stolen. The blast furnaces that Ruža and Plamen promised to bring from Bulgaria never arrived. The plant was operating with outdated equipment, and new furnaces were desperately needed to maintain production. But weeks of waiting turned into months, and there was always some new excuse as to why it would happen next week, next month, and so on.
Carlos, who began arriving at the plant without warning and demanding meetings with Ruža, also began to insist on transporting the furnaces to the factory. But the new director answered quite rudely that he was interfering in something that was none of his business. Soon, one of the workers called Carlos again and said that the factory had been sold to an unknown businessman for only 1 euro. Now the plant was finally doomed to closure. The woman had to answer in court for the ruin of the factory and fraud with money 6 years later, in 2016.
On April 12, she appeared in the dock at the Augsburg District Court and pleaded guilty to a crime, namely, intentional breach of duty in the event of insolvency, fraud, withholding and embezzlement of employee wages, and breach of accounting duties. The judge sentenced Ruža to 14 months probation and a fine of 18 thousand euros, and Plamen, who was absent from the court hearing, had to pay 12 thousand.
Carlos considered this punishment insufficient, but could not do anything else. Around the same time that Ruža bought the factory, the consulting firm where the woman had previously worked closed. Now she was faced with a choice: to stay in Bulgaria or return to Germany, where she had recently bought real estate. The choice was made in favor of her country of birth, since Ruža later admitted that while she lived in Germany, she always lacked something, and the woman continued to develop in Bulgaria.
Besides money, Ruja was always interested in fashion, so she tried to get into the beauty industry by launching her own line of cosmetics. She also socialized with famous people in Sofia and attended their parties. For a while, she also worked at the largest investment firm in Bulgaria, headed by Tsvetselina Borislava. Eventually, her efforts paid off, and by 2013, Ruja had become a recognizable face in the city's fashion, business, and politics.
But she was still haunted by the fear of unrealized potential. And although she now had several business interests of her own, they did not bring in the kind of money Ruja wanted. So she began to study Bitcoin, which caught her interest when its price began to rise sharply. Watching Bitcoin's growing popularity, a certain John And J. decided to create his own Bitcoin and called it Big Coin.
However, instead of being bought and sold on currency exchange sites, this new coin, BikCoin, was to follow the MLM model, where people join, buy coins, and then sell coins to other people, earning a percentage of that, with the commissions also accumulating up the levels, meaning the person at the top gets a percentage of everyone at the bottom. John N.J. started calling around to find people interested in the idea.
One of those people was Sebastian Greenwoon, who was then representing the interests of a company called SideTalk. Sebastian was a natural salesman, and his bosses noticed this, so by 2011 he was already selling SideTalk directly to investors all over Europe. Sebastian left SideTalk in early 2013 and with a former colleague, Björn Thomas, created his own company called Tovan Group Keeper, which, however, went bankrupt.
They tried again, calling the project Lupium, and around this time, John Andrzej contacted him about joining Bikcoin. John and Sebastian were a perfect fit. John was a bit older, hard-working, and organized, but he needed someone who could excite a crowd, which Sebastian did well. Greenwood met Ruja in November 2013 at a cryptocurrency seminar in Singapore, where Ignatova was one of the speakers.
Ruja’s idea itself didn’t really stick in Sebastian’s mind, but he realized that she was well versed in finance. After her talk, Sebastian approached her, introduced himself, and offered to collaborate. Ruja was hired as Bikcoin’s legal counsel. She did a great job, and Bikcoin did so well that Sebastian eventually closed his company, Lupium.
It is unclear at what point Sebastian and Ruzsa decided to steal John and Andrzej’s idea, but the more they promoted Bitcoin, the more they realized that they could do a better job without John. From early spring 2014, the pair worked on Bitcoin all day, then secretly met every evening to develop their own improved version of the currency. This is how OneCoin was born.
Despite all his enthusiasm, Sebastian did not know how to start an MLM company from scratch. So they decided to approach one of Sebastian’s friends, Juha Parhiala. Juha had been working in MLM for a long time and had built a large network of promoters in Asia who, in theory, OneCoin could attract. Juha contacted Ruzsa, and for 40 minutes she tried to explain to him in simple terms how cryptocurrencies work.
She said that all cryptocurrencies work on specialized software called blockchain, which is an immutable database that is updated every few minutes. This is the so-called diary of the coin, where all transactions made by anyone anywhere using the cryptocurrency are published. And thanks to technology, no previous record can be deleted. After talking to Ruža, Juha understood little, but his task was not to understand OneCoin, but to sell it.
Sebastin promised that Juha would be the main promoter in the pyramid, and this meant that he would receive a commission from almost everyone who invested after him. Juha agreed, although he still understood little. After some time, the newly minted colleagues agreed on two main ways to earn money. First, anyone who sold OneCoin should receive a 10% commission for direct sales. Secondly, promoters should also receive a 10% commission on the volume of business, depending on all the sales of those they invite to join.
It was simple and profitable. In addition, there was another option, which was the most important of all. At some point in the near future, OneCoin was supposed to be listed on a cryptocurrency exchange where it could be sold for real money, just like Bitcoin. And likewise, the value of OneCoin was supposed to grow, which would differentiate it from other MLM companies.
In other words, the company was targeting two types of hamsters at once. The first was hoping to make money by attracting other hamsters. The second was hoping for Bitcoin to come back and multiply its value when it went public. By the end of the summer of 2014, the Trio had agreed on a basic business model and sales scheme. OneCoin was supposed to be the next Bitcoin sold through MLM, and it was supposed to continue to grow.
While Sebastian and Juha were finalizing the plan, Ruža began creating the corporate structure of the new company. Website, recruiting, company registration, etc. She also renamed several of her old companies and handed them over to her mother to manage. And in June '14, Ruža registered the domain name 3w1coin.Eu and advertised OneCoin as the next Bitcoin.
With the corporate structure and sales plan in place, Ruža and Sebastian needed to finally stop working on Bitcoin, but do so in a way that would not immediately arouse suspicion. The same month that Ruža registered the OneCoin website, she and Sebastian flew to Hong Kong for a large Bitcoin sales conference, where she pitched investors the idea of exchanging coins for shares in an investment fund that was created under the name Crypto Real Investment. Trust
. It was most likely just a hoax to distract John from the truth, as Sebastian and Ruja were on the verge of launching their own competing project. The only thing left to do to launch a cryptocurrency was to create a blockchain that would power the currency. The difficulty was that neither Ruja, nor Sebastian, nor especially Juha, knew how to do this.
So it was decided to contract a Bulgarian IT firm, which, with the help of Indian developers, copied the original Bitcoin blockchain and added a few tweaks to make the blockchain their own. And then there was the decision of how big OneCoin should be. And Ruja decided that OneCoin should consist of 2 billion and 100 million coins, which is 100 times larger than Bitcoin.
In July 2014, when Sebastian was supposed to speak at a Bitcoin event in South Korea, he simply did not show up, and a few hours later he sent John a photo of himself from a hospital room, saying that he was very sick. In fact, John was simply dumped, not considering it important to officially end the cooperation. The launch of the blockchain was planned for January 2015, but Ruja wanted to start sales right away.
Therefore, Sebastien and Yujha had to call their friends and former colleagues, specialists and reputable sellers from the MLM sphere, offering them to make history, quit everything they sold before, and join the new promising company OneCoin. Some considered the idea dubious, but some still agreed. Among the recognizable personalities in the MLM sphere who responded were Nigel Allen, Per Carlsson and Petri Väläli. Nigel was a British promoter in his 50s and had worked in the MLM sphere since the 80s, including several leading companies, including Herbalife.
Per and Petri were also MLM sellers, both were about 30 years old and lived in Scandinavia at the time, all three were somehow acquainted with Juha. There was one problem, in 2014 OneCoin was so new that no one knew whether it would be considered a real product or not.
And Juha and Sebastian's plan was to sell education. The OneCoin product that the promoters were supposed to sell consisted of 5 educational packages, which consisted of educational videos and long PDF files, which contained tips and information about finance, investments and cryptocurrencies. Each package also contained free OneCoins. The cheapest package was the starter package, which cost 100 euros.
It came with one educational PDF file and 1000 tokens, which could be converted into about 200 coins. There were 5 packages in total, each more expensive than the previous one. The most expensive one cost 5000 euros and included all the previous educational files and 48 thousand OneCoins. And although the educational packages were claimed to be for those who wanted to bring their trading skills to the highest level, the information in them was practically useless.
In reality, investors were buying coins that were essentially not even worth anything yet. There was no public blockchain yet, but Nigel, Perr, Petri and Juha were selling these packages by the end of August '14. They worked hard, but most sensible people were not interested in buying coins that did not even exist yet.
The first presentation of OneCoin took place on September 27, 2014 in Helsinki. By this time, only 27 packages had been sold, mostly to investors from Sweden and Finland. Then the gun went into more decisive action and said that if Perr could convince at least 50 people to attend the presentation, she would personally fly in from Bulgaria to speak. Somehow Perr succeeded and the presentation took place, and although the participants doubted the reality of the gun's plans, they were won over by her self-confidence and belief in herself and her product.
After the Helsinki event, rumors about the new cryptocurrency began to spread, and more interest appeared. Rougey and Sebastian continued to promote their currency, refining the concept of Bitcoin and convincing people more and more that the project would succeed.
And although the coin still technically did not exist, Sebastian explained that when the blockchain was launched in January 2015, a currency exchange site called OneExchange would also be created, where OneCoins could be exchanged for money at a price of 0.5 euros per coin. He also convinced people to invest 5,000 euros now to get 24 thousand in three months. The audience liked this, they did not want to miss out on the new cryptocurrency, just as they had missed out on Bitcoin.
As planned, the genesis block was launched in January 2015, the currency got its own blockchain and investors' coins were supposed to be deposited into their accounts within the next 1-2 days. In addition, OneExchange was ready to start working, where each coin cost half a euro, as promised by Sebastian, and now the coins could be exchanged for real money. However, fearing that investors would immediately withdraw large amounts, and the money in the companies' accounts might not be enough to cover all the payments, Ruja set a temporary limit on the amount that could be withdrawn weekly.
In order to achieve maximum popularity for herself and her company, Ruja engaged in self-promotion. In the summer of 2015, around the time when OneCoin released the Premium Trader package worth 12.5 thousand euros, and the company's revenue exceeded 1 billion euros, Ruja's photos appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine under the headline "Cryptocurrency of Bulgarian Origin".
And on a two-page spread, Ruja talked about the future of finance and the coming crypto revolution. Forbes is one of the most famous business magazines, where all aspiring entrepreneurs dream of getting into. Ruja succeeded, but there was one “but”. The publication was not quite real. Through a specialized PR company Forbes Brand Voice, Ruja acquired the opportunity to publish an advertisement on three pages of the Bulgarian edition of the magazine and developed an article that looked indistinguishable from a real Forbes article, including the layout of the title page.
The only difference from the real edition, published in the USA, was that the cover of the American Forbes for the month of publication featured pop icon Katy Perry. Ruja paid for the simulation of the American edition of Forbes. A few months later, Ruja repeated the trick with an even more respected business publication, The Economist. Also in November 2015, she managed to become the keynote speaker at a large conference organized by the magazine in the center of Sofia, attended by local influential people, including the President of Bulgaria Ruslan Plevniliev.
In May 2015, another presentation of OneCoin took place in Dubai. This time, it was announced that OneExchange would be replaced by an independent exchange site XCoinX, which would buy and sell OneCoin in parallel with Bitcoin, and the starting price of one OneCoin would be 1 euro.
Ruja said that once XCoinX was open, people would be able to cash out their coins on an open, independent market. The OneCoin corporation continued to grow, and one could say that Ruja had finally realized her potential. OneCoin was everything to her, she had more money than she could spend and absolute control over a huge, growing company.
After graduating, Ruja worked tirelessly, and now, after OneCoin took off, she decided she wanted to become a mother. In the late fall of 2016, after she answered in court for fraud with a factory in 2009-2010, Ruja was due to have a child. Until that happened, she was busy with the company, and the bigger and richer OneCoin became, the more problems there were with storing and transferring money.
When too much money was transferred, banks froze transactions, and the number of new accounts increased sharply. Among other things, she had several personal and corporate accounts in the Emirates. But when OneCoin's roost became sky-high, some banks got nervous. OneCoin's corporate accounts at Bank AlmaShrek suddenly began receiving millions in unexplained payments every month from companies with strange names, such as Swift Electronic Limited or World Creation Electronic Limited, and then the money disappeared just as quickly.
In May 2015 alone, Sebastian Greenwoth was paid €9.5 million and got another €5 million from Royal Yacht & Boats. In September, Mashreq Bank filed a suspicious transaction report with the UAE Central Bank, and a few weeks later, Commercial Bank Dubai did the same.
On September 14, 2015, Ruja told Sebastian that about €50 million had been frozen in Dubai. But, as always, Ruja had a solution. She flew to Dubai to meet a member of the Sharjah royal family who knew one of the richest men in the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Saud bin Faisal Al Qassimi. Ruja made a deal with the latter. She sold the sheikh One Coin Limited and three cheques from Al-Mashrek Bank for a total of 210 million Emirati dirhams – about €50 million.
In exchange, Al Qassimi handed over the guns four USB sticks containing around €48.5 million worth of Bitcoin over the course of several months. This was likely done so that Alcos-7, through its connections, could take over the company and unfreeze the guns’ assets for itself, while she would have access to the digital money that she could use immediately.
A few months later, Alcos-7 did indeed write to the attorney general of Dubai, explaining that the guns’ bank accounts had been frozen without good cause, that he had power of attorney over them, and that this was an insult to Ignatova. Gilbert Armenta was a banker, owning two investment companies of his own, Zala Group and Faiths, as well as a controlling stake in a small independent bank called JSC Capital in Georgia.
By mid-2010, he was doing finance, including providing prepaid cards for businesses and payment solutions for online casinos. In 2015, he began providing banking services for Ruja. Gilbert opened business accounts in his own name that received payments from OneCoin investors and used his own bank, AOCapital, to provide prepaid cards to promoters to pay their fees.
Ruja also asked Gilbert to find someone to help her manage her rapidly growing personal wealth. Gilbert suggested Mark Scott. Mark was a Florida-based corporate lawyer Gilbert had worked with several years earlier and had a fairly good business and friendship relationship with. Ruja wanted her money to be turned into assets, stocks, companies, funds, or real estate.
She wanted more than just bank accounts, and Mark could help her do that. Mark suggested setting up four investment funds. Mark’s firm, Locklord, also handled Ruja’s real estate deals. On February 9, 2016, Mark and Ruja met in person for the first time to discuss the FinEro funds, as Mark called them, which included four $100 million funds, three of which were registered in the British Virgin Islands and one in the Cayman Islands.
The funds invested in VEES technology companies, mostly in the UK and Ireland. And although it was Ruja’s money, her name did not appear anywhere on the company’s documents. Instead, the FinEro funds were owned, on paper, by an investment management firm Mark had founded called MSS International Consulting BVI, which was in turn owned by MSS International Consulting, a Florida company Mark had owned for years.
There were also plans to create several more subsidiaries, each of which, like each fund, would have its own bank account and would be controlled by Mark. Funds like FinEro abounded in the British Virgin Islands, which has imposed some regulations on the funds. For example, all funds had to appoint an independent administrator to ensure professional management while protecting investors’ interests. One of the administrators was Paul Spendiff, whose company Apex managed thousands of investment funds around the world.
Marks had recently become an approved fund manager in the British Virgin Islands, meaning he could do business without going through lengthy approval procedures. Marks told Paul that the investors in Finner’s new fund were wealthy European families he had worked with before. Once Apex had opened bank accounts at DMS Bank in the Cayman Islands for Finner and the background checks had been completed, Ruja could start sending money into one of the fund’s bank accounts, which she did almost immediately.
On June 2, three separate payments totaling 5 million euros were transferred to the Finera Equity Investment Limited account, and then on June 3, 6, 7, 8, 15 and 20, another 5 million each day. This continued throughout the summer. Over the course of two years, OneCoin investors bought packages worth between 100 and 12.5 thousand euros and diligently sent their money to various bank accounts around the world.
