The Missing Cryptoqueen • By Jamie Bartlett • WH Allen • 320 pages • ISBN: 978-0-7535-5958-1 • £16.99 / $29
One reason the era in which Agatha Christie lived was such a fruitful source of crime novel plots was that post-war upheaval and new mobility combined to force the inhabitants of small towns to interact with strangers in unprecedented ways. Previously, strangers came with letters of introduction from people Christie’s village characters already knew. In our era, the internet has enabled interaction with poorly-attested strangers at unprecedented scale; I often wonder what Christie would have made of it.
Nowhere is the problem of establishing the trustworthiness of a counter-party more acute than in the cryptocurrency market, where even the longest-established companies and technologies jostle with questionable and outright scams.
In The Missing Cryptoqueen, Jamie Bartlett tells the story of one of the most outrageous of these scams, OneCoin — an unholy marriage of three scams in one: a Ponzi scheme, a pyramid scheme and a fake cryptocurrency. In its first 15 months, OneCoin’s pyramid base reached one million investors in 175 countries; the €1.4 billion paid out in commissions and withdrawals went to just 5% of those investors. Most of those who lost the scam’s billions of euros were ordinary people, many of whom were devastated by the loss.
SEE: Cryptocurrency scams pose largest threat to investors
It took Bernie Madoff many years to cost his…
