The FBI is looking for a "crypto queen" for multi-million dollar fraud 0:49
(CNN) --
Ruja Ignatova took the stage in an elegant ball gown embellished with black sparkles.
Beams of light flashed, fireballs sprang up, and Alicia Keys' "Girl on Fire" blared from the speakers.
"
Looks like a girl, but she's a flame. So bright, she can burn your eyes, better look the other way
," played in the song as a beaming Ignatova thanked the cheering crowd at London's Wembley Arena.
That was in June 2016, when cryptocurrency was an emerging buzzword and investors were scrambling to cash in.
Ignatova called herself the "crypto queen" and promoted his company, OneCoin, as a lucrative rival to Bitcoin in the growing cryptocurrency market.
Will bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies be able to recover in 2023 after falling more than 60% this year?
“In two years, no one will talk about Bitcoin anymore,” he said, as investors clapped and whistled.
Sixteen months later, Ignatova boarded a plane in Sofia, Bulgaria, and disappeared.
She has not been seen since.
advertising
Authorities say OneCoin was a Ponzi scheme worth more than $4 billion, as Ignatova convinced investors from the United States and around the world to deposit handfuls of money into her company.
Federal prosecutors describe OneCoin as one of the largest international scams ever perpetrated.
Ruja Ignatova is one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives, the only woman currently on that list.
(Credit: FBI)
She is now one of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives, along with gang bosses and accused murderers, and is the only woman currently on that list.
Of the 529 fugitives on the FBI list since its creation in 1950, only 11 are women.
Ignatova and her associates "swindled unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming OneCoin would be the 'Bitcoin killer,'" US Attorney Damian Williams, New York's top prosecutor, said in a statement last month.
"In fact, OneCoins were completely worthless... (His) lies were designed with a single goal, to get ordinary people around the world to part with their hard-earned money."
She knew it was a scam from the start, court documents say
Since Ignatova disappeared in October 2017, her face has appeared on the FBI website and in mainstream media around the world.
She is also one of Europe's most wanted fugitives.
At the bottom of her FBI wanted poster is a note: "Ignatova is believed to be traveling with armed guards and/or associates. Ignatova may have undergone plastic surgery or altered her appearance."
The FBI says it selects fugitives for the list based on how long their criminal records are and how dangerous they are.
He also favors fugitives who aren't well known to maximize the national publicity benefit of the show.
The agency declined to provide CNN with any details other than court documents from the US Department of Justice, which did not list an attorney for Ignatova.
"This case is an ongoing investigation. We cannot comment further than what has already been made public," said Daniel Crifo, a spokesman for the FBI's New York office.
But court documents detail a mind-boggling narrative: how Ignatova and her OneCoin co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood were allegedly aware all along that their ambitious venture was a Ponzi scheme.
"The OneCoin cryptocurrency was established for the sole purpose of defrauding investors," IRS Special Agent John R. Tafur said in a statement.
Ignatova called herself the "crypto queen" and promoted her company, OneCoin, as a lucrative rival to Bitcoin in the growing cryptocurrency market.
(Credit: Attorney for the Southern District of New York/Twitter)
As Greenwood and Ignatova worked on the OneCoin concept, they referred to it in emails as a "junk coin," federal officials said in court documents.
The documents show that Greenwood described his investors as "idiots" and "crazy" in an email to Ignatova's brother, Konstantin Ignatov, who also participated in the scam and took over leadership of OneCoin after his sister's disappearance, according to the reports. prosecutors.
"It may not be (something) really clean or that I normally work on or even be proud of (except with you in private when we make money)," Ignatova wrote to Greenwood in 2014.
He also proposed an exit strategy in case the venture failed, saying in a 2014 email to Greenwood that they should "take the money and run and blame someone else for this."
From a very young age, Ignatova wanted to be rich
Ruja Ignatova, 42, has German nationality but was born in Bulgaria, where her father was an engineer and her mother a teacher.
In his book "The Missing Crypto Queen," author Jamie Bartlett details his rise from modest beginnings to corporate stardom.
When she was a child, her family moved to Germany, where Ignatova excelled as a student and spent her free time studying and playing chess, Bartlett wrote.
Her classmates described her as intelligent, driven, and aloof.
Ignatova obtained a scholarship to study at a university in Konstanz (Germany), where she met a fellow law student with whom she married.
According to her Bartlett, she claimed that she did not want children because they would get in the way of her wealth.
She also said that she wanted to be a millionaire by the age of 30.
"She desperately wanted to be rich, even devouring books late at night on how to make money," Bartlett wrote.
After studying European Law at Oxford University, Ignatova landed a job in Sofia as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, the international management consulting firm.
Clients trusted her and identified with her rise from humble beginnings and her fierce desire to be rich, Bartlett wrote.
Her command of her languages - Russian, German, English and Bulgarian - also helped.
Appearances were important to Ignatova, who often turned up to events in evening gowns with bright red lipstick and diamonds dangling from her ears.
"Everything exhibited success and glamour," Bartlett wrote.
"She was obsessed with style and image."
Konstantin Ignatov pleaded guilty to fraud and related charges in connection with his sister's company.
His sentencing is scheduled for February.
(Credit: Konstantin Ignatov/Instagram)
OneCoin supposedly promised investors a return between five and ten times higher
Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, are digital assets created and managed by a decentralized global network of computers, rather than by a bank or government.
Bitcoin, for example, is "mined," or created, by professional cryptocurrency miners using armies of servers in data centers.
This is a largely unregulated and highly volatile industry, and expert opinions on the viability of cryptocurrency vary greatly.
Its proponents envision a future in which economies are powered by digital currencies validated by the user community and not by a central bank.
Detractors dismiss it as a Ponzi scheme or, at the very least, a high-risk investment.
In 2014, Ignatova and Greenwood, her co-founder, began introducing OneCoin to investors from Europe, New York, and around the world.
They hosted webinars and conferences urging potential investors to deposit funds into an account that would allow the purchase of OneCoin bundles, according to a federal indictment.
OneCoin functioned as a multi-level marketing network in which investors received commissions for recruiting others to buy packages of the cryptocurrency, according to the federal indictment.
The packages catered to various income levels, from "beginner" to "merchant tycoon."
Ignatova and her partners promised buyers a five-fold or even ten-fold investment, according to court documents.
Karl Sebastian Greenwood, co-founder of OneCoin, in 2016. He later pleaded guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to launder money.
(Credit: Attorney for the Southern District of New York/Twitter)
A shopping spree followed.
Between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, investors gave OneCoin more than $4 billion, according to federal prosecutors, citing records obtained in the course of their investigation.
About $50 million came from investors in the United States, according to court documents.
"She timed her scheme perfectly, capitalizing on the frenzied speculation of early cryptocurrency," said Williams, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
OneCoins were not minted like other cryptocurrencies, according to federal investigators.
Instead of armies of powerful servers, OneCoin was generated by a piece of software, court documents say.
Federal prosecutors said that in an email to Greenwood in August 2014, Ignatova wrote: "We're not actually mining, we're talking nonsense to people."
OneCoin's value was not based on market supply and demand like other cryptocurrencies, according to prosecutors, but was privately manipulated by OneCoin itself.
But then it all fell apart
The facade began to crack in 2016, when investors struggled to sell their OneCoins to recoup their original investments, court documents say.
Word began to spread on the internet that the business was a scam.
The media began to ask questions.
International and US federal investigators became involved.
It is unclear what happened to Ignatova's marriage.
But the FBI said she learned OneCoin was under investigation after she bugged an apartment belonging to her American boyfriend of hers and discovered that she was cooperating with a federal investigation into the company's trading practices. she.
In October 2017, the US Department of Justice charged Ignatova with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, each of which carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. .
She was also charged with one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years.
A federal judge in New York issued a warrant for her arrest.
Less than two weeks later, on October 25, 2017, he boarded a commercial flight from Sofia, Bulgaria, to Athens, Greece, according to court documents.
He then disappeared, leaving his partners to take responsibility for the failing company.
Several people walk past the OneCoin offices in Sofia (Bulgaria).
Federal authorities claim that the cryptocurrency was created to defraud investors.
(Credit: Cylonphoto/iStock Editorial/Getty Images)
The FBI believes that he may have traveled on a German passport from Athens, possibly to the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe, or even back to Bulgaria.
He is offered a US$100,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
"He walked away with an enormous amount of cash," Michael Driscoll, deputy director of the FBI in New York, told reporters.
"Money can buy a lot of allies, and I imagine she's taking advantage of that."
His partners were not so lucky.
Greenwood was arrested in July 2018 at his home in Koh Samui, Thailand, and extradited to the US. He pleaded guilty in December to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy to launder money.
He is in jail and faces 20 years in prison on each of the three counts when he is sentenced in April.
Ignatova's brother, Konstantin Ignatov, was detained in March 2019 at Los Angeles International Airport.
He had traveled to the United States on business and was preparing to board his flight back to Bulgaria when five burly men in suits handcuffed him and took him to an interrogation room, where they peppered him with questions about his missing sister, Bartlett wrote.
Ignatov pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering and fraud charges and is scheduled to be sentenced in February.
OneCoin has closed and its website is no longer active.
But its founder, the woman in the long dresses and flashy jewelry, has evaded authorities.
More than five years after the crypto queen stepped off a plane in Greece, her whereabouts remain a mystery.
CNN's Allison Morrow contributed to this article.
CryptocurrenciesOneCoin