The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has secured a guilty plea from one of the co-founders of OneCoin, a digital asset scheme that defrauded investors of nearly $4 billion.
Karl Sebastian Greenwood pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering charges in connection with OneCoin. With the wanted Ruja Ignatova, Greenwood misled investors by saying that OneCoin was poised to become the leading virtual currency in the world.
“In fact, OneCoin was entirely worthless. Greenwood’s lies were designed with one goal, to get everyday people all over the world to part with their hard-earned money — real money — and to line his own pockets to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said.
Court documents reveal that Greenwood served as OneCoin’s “global master distributor” and was the head of the multi-level marketing scheme, earning GBP20 million each month. Email correspondences with the wanted Ignatova revealed that from the onset, the duo had no plans to invest in digital assets.
OneCoin did not have any distributed ledgers and was also not mined, contrary to the message given to investors. “We are not mining actually – but telling people shit,” Ignatova wrote in an email to Greenwood.
The duo was also involved in price manipulation of OneCoin tokens which they referred to as “trashy coins.” Greenwood and Ignatova were shown to have discussed an exit strategy as early as 2014 with a plan to “take the money…
