A Bulgaria-born super-ambitious shrewd businesswoman who loves her flowy gowns, jewels and bright red lipstick, scams people, rich and poor, of billions of dollars, only to disappear into thin air as soon as law agencies narrow their claws. This makes for a perfect premise for an intriguing crime thriller. Only, in this case, the woman is real, and so are the thousands, spread across a hundred countries, she ended up scamming to build a fortune worth billions of dollars.
And how she pulled off the con, one of the biggest in the world and probably still running, is the premise of journalist-writer Jamie Bartlett’s latest book The Missing Cryptoqueen. Bulgarian-German Ruja Ignatova boasted of a remarkable resume, including an education from Oxford and a stint at McKinsey & Co. However, in her quest of “making change-your-life money”, she stumbled upon cryptocurrencies and by extension, Bitcoin. And in 2014, without any technical know-how whatsoever, she came up with OneCoin, the ‘Bitcoin Killer’. OneCoin was everything Bitcoin was not, given it did not even have a blockchain, the technology that enables the existence of cryptocurrencies. The “killer fact” is that “a billion-dollar cryptocurrency without a blockchain is impossible,” as the writer put it.
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This rendered OneCoins literally worthless from the beginning. So what Ignatova was selling was literally nothing…
