CNN remembers how in 2016 Ruja Ignatova “touted her company, OneCoin, as a lucrative rival to Bitcoin in the growing cryptocurrency market.” As OneCoin’s co-founder, Ignatova told one audience in 2016 that “In two years, nobody will speak about Bitcoin anymore.
“Sixteen months later, Ignatova boarded a plane in Sofia, Bulgaria, and vanished. She hasn’t been seen since.”
Authorities say OneCoin was a pyramid scheme that defrauded people out of more than $4 billion as Ignatova convinced investors in the US and around the globe to throw fistfuls of cash at her company. Federal prosecutors describe OneCoin as one of the largest international fraud schemes ever perpetrated. She is now one of the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives, alongside accused gang leaders and murderers, and is the only woman currently on that list….
Ignatova and her partners “conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that 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 entirely worthless … (Their) lies were designed with one goal, to get everyday people all over the world to part with their hard-earned money.”
One subheading of CNN’s story reads “She knew it was a scam from the start, court documents say.”
While [co-founder] Greenwood and Ignatova were working on the concept for OneCoin, they referred to it in emails as a “trashy coin,” federal officials said…
