There may be errors in spelling, grammar, and accuracy in this machine-generated transcript.

Caleb Newquist: [00:00:00] June 11th, 2016. London Wembley Arena 11,500 people are on their feet. The lights go down. Alicia Keys blasts through the speakers. Fireballs shoot up from the stage as Doctor Ruja Ignatova in a floor length Burgundy ball gown covered in black sequins, walks out and the crowd goes wild. To them, she's not just a founder, she's the Cryptoqueen, the woman who built the next Bitcoin. And tonight she has an announcement. Her cryptocurrency, Onecoin, has become so successful that they're running out of coins. So she's going to make more, a lot more. And nobody in the room seems to hear a problem with that.

Earmark Ad: [00:00:55] Are you an accountant with a continuing education requirement? You can earn free Nasba approved CPE. For listening to this episode, just visit earmark.app in your web browser, take a short quiz and get your certificate.

Caleb Newquist: [00:01:14] This is All My Fraud, a true crime podcast where the FOMO gives way to YOLO and then oh no. I'm Caleb Nyquist. How's it going? How's your summer? Hot enough for you? I never say that. For what it's worth. Um, yeah, it's just, I don't know. It's the weirdest. Hot enough for you? No, no, that's not that's not that's not my that's not one of my go to's, but it does remind me of, um, that old Far Side cartoon with the caption that reads nerds in hell. And the guy in the middle of the line is talking to the people behind him, and he's saying that exact phrase hot enough for you. And it's like, you know, imagine a Far Side nerd and you're you. That's what the guy looks like. But then everyone else in line has this look that says, I tell him to go to hell, but. Well, uh, you know. Anyway, it's a classic. Look it up. It's a it's a good one. Seriously, though, it's been awful. We just had a we. The as of this recording, we. Our heat wave in Denver, just our first big heat wave kind of snapped. Had some wicked thunderstorms to follow though. That's that's nice. But the heat is awful. But you know, I guess, you know, this is the world we wanted just burning ourselves up slowly, you know. And if we're not burning up, then we're getting swept away in biblical flooding or getting taken out by a by murder hail, you know.

Caleb Newquist: [00:02:40] Uh, speaking of which, uh, do you remember how states states kind of had, like, signature every state? Well, maybe not every state, but lots of states have like a signature disaster or extreme weather like California, right? Earthquakes, at least, you know, a guy from Nebraska. When I think of California growing up, I'm like, oh, those earthquakes, you know, 1989, World Series, San Francisco, of course. Right. Florida hurricanes, of course. New York stock market collapse, right. In Nebraska, where I grew up, I remember being worried about two things. And they often came together. And that is tornadoes. And like golf sized golf ball sized hail. Okay. And nowadays, I kind of get the impression that Nebraska and various other states they're trying to collect, like the whole extreme weather set. Like, yes, there's still tornadoes. The tornadoes are worse. It's like night of the twisters every night. And the hail is like beach ball size instead of golf ball size. But now Nebraska has had some terrible flooding in like 2019, like the worst in the state's history. Like the pictures are just awful. And the they've been having these epic wildfires this past spring. They had grass fires like more than a million acres burned, you know. So now there's fire and flooding and tornadoes and hail that can kill you. But, you know, Nebraska is like, they're just checking them off one by one because like flooding and wildfires, they were not a thing when I was growing up living in Nebraska.

Caleb Newquist: [00:04:10] And now all these people have to worry about all this stuff. I mean, really, it's the cattle that should be worried. But whatever people to, you know, watch out for floods and fires and hail and tornadoes. Jeez, it reminds me of something else. The other thing about like this era of batshit weather, everyone everywhere has this expression that I've, I've, I've, I've heard enough of. But in Colorado, it's very common. They say if you don't like the weather in Colorado, just wait 15 minutes. And I remember people in Nebraska saying that. And I feel like I've heard other. Like in the Midwest especially, and the Mountain West, that seems to be like a thing that people say, but I know this guy who grew up and lived in South Florida for most of his life, and he said that about the weather in South Florida. He's like, you know, you know, there's an old saying about the weather in South Florida. Just wait 15 minutes if you don't like it or whatever. You know, I butchered it. But like I there's, I guess no place is safe from this cliche. I get it. It's nice one minute and then it's terrible the next. We're on a blue marble spinning in space, people. It's not that weird. Be weird if the weather was all the same. All the time.

Caleb Newquist: [00:05:26] Everywhere. Like in hell. Anyway, if you have questions, comments, or fraud stories to share, email us at. Oh my fraud@cpe.com. All right, that's enough business time for some fraud. Ruja Ignatova was born in ruse, Bulgaria, in 1980. Her father was a mechanical engineer, her mother a nursery school teacher. When she was ten, not long after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the family moved to Germany to a small town in Baden-Württemberg called Schramberg. How's my German accent? I thought that was all right. Anyway, she grew up there, went to school there, and by every account was, you know, exceptional from the start. She ended up earning a doctorate in private international law from the University of Konstanz. She completed a masters in European law at Oxford. Her promotional materials also claimed a stint at McKinsey, although that's been a little bit harder for journalists to nail down. So let's just flag that and we will move on, okay? But even without the McKinsey bit, the rest of it checks out. The doctorate. Oxford. Real. Okay. And she knew exactly what to do with all of it. Here's the thing about Rugia as a performer, she was not selling a cryptocurrency. She was selling Rugia. Always doctor Rugia always the title, always the gravitas. It's like she showed up to a bond villains dinner party and decided to be the most credentialed person in the room out of pure spite. She talked about monetary policy and financial revolution with the authority of someone who had actually studied the stuff because she had.

Caleb Newquist: [00:07:27] And that's what made her so effective. She wasn't bluffing about the homework. She'd done the homework. Rugia was named Bulgaria's Businesswoman of the year. In 2014, she spoke at an event organized by The Economist. She was fluent and composed in rooms full of international banker types, and at some point, a Forbes cover with her face on. It started circulating. There's always a Forbes cover, I feel like. Anyway, it was shown at recruiting meetings passed around in WhatsApp groups. It's like the establishment had personally signed off on her. Here's the thing about that cover, though. The photo was real. The implication or the message that that cover gave was not because it was an ad. A paid placement tied to the Bulgarian edition in May 2015. Forbes never anointed her. She bought the credibility and handed it to herself, gift wrapped with a bow on it. By the time anyone thought to check it out, the cover had done exactly what it was designed to do. In 2012, Russia was convicted of fraud in Germany. She and her father had bought a Walton Hafen steelworks, a struggling factory in the Bavarian Allgau, promising to save the jobs that came with it. It collapsed anyway, and a German court found the collapse to be criminal. She got a suspended sentence 14 months and moved on without so much as a hiccup in her life.

Caleb Newquist: [00:09:02] The next year, she turned up in something called Bitcoin. That was a MLM multi-level marketing. It was dressed up as a currency, which functioned exactly like a Ponzi scheme in which collapsed exactly like one. Somehow she walked away clean. So a fraud conviction one year, a failed fake cryptocurrency the next. And so naturally, in 2014, she just started another one and it was called Onecoin. Before we get to Onecoin, let's talk about Rouges co-founder because she didn't build this alone, and the guy she built it with is a big part of why it spread the way it did. Sebastian Greenwood was a Swedish MLM lifer with a long, colorful resume. When he and Ruja crossed paths, he was promoting something called Site Talk. Pitched around 2010 as the new Facebook. And no, not an not an early scrappy Facebook competitor, a 2010 Facebook competitor. The same year, Facebook hit half a billion users and started planning its IPO. Before that, a string of other MLM ventures. The man had spent years perfecting the art of getting ordinary people to hand over money for promises that mostly paid off for the guy at the top of the chart, and the guy at the top of the chart was usually him. Here's the part that matters. Greenwood and Russia had already found each other before one coin existed. Remember, Bitcoin just mentioned it. The fake cryptocurrency Ruja walked away from in 2013.

Caleb Newquist: [00:10:57] Greenwood was there, too, when it collapsed. The two of them didn't actually drop the idea. They just dropped the name in 2014. They gutted it for parts, slapped on a new label and relaunched it as their own one coin. It was, in a deeply unsettling way, a genuinely complementary partnership. Ruja had the credentials, the stage presence, the air of someone who belonged on a panel about the future of finance. Greenwood. He had the machine. He knew how to build a downline, how to structure commissions. So recruiting paid better than literally anything else a person could do with their time. Federal filings later identify him as Onecoin self-appointed master distributor 001, and Ruja herself credited him as the architect of the entire MLM structure. She could fill an arena. He could make sure the arena kept refilling itself. Ruja put it more bluntly in a 2014 email. The whole thing, she wrote would be, quote, MLM meets Bitch of Wall Street. Very subtle. And we know exactly what they thought of the operation, because federal prosecutors later got their emails while they were still building it before launch, before a single package sold. Ruja wrote to Greenwood and spelled out the exit plan. Take the money and run and blame somebody else for this. That was from 2014, before €1 came in. They'd already written the ending. By 2014, Bitcoin had become a full blown cultural phenomenon. Early adopters were sitting on fortunes. Everyone had a story about someone who bought in for a few hundred bucks and was now rich.

Caleb Newquist: [00:12:54] And a lot of people who had heard about it too late, or had been too cautious or just hadn't understood it in time. They were nursing a very specific kind of regret watching somebody else get rich off the thing. You could have done, but didn't. Ruja handed that exact feeling a product. One coin was Bitcoin, but better. Simpler. It was for everyone, not just the tech bros. She called it the Bitcoin killer, and she said it with the authority of someone who actually understood the system. She claimed to be disrupting, which made the whole thing feel not just exciting, but credible. So let's actually walk through how this worked because the mechanics are the whole joke. You didn't buy one coin directly. That would have created security's problems, since paying commissions on direct coin sales is a legal minefield. So instead, you bought educational packages of courses on cryptocurrency trading. Financial literacy sold through a platform called One Academy, with names designed to make you feel like you are leveling up. Starter, trader. Pro trader. Executive trader. Tycoon, trader. All real. Apparently a starter package ran about €100 and came with a PDF and a handful of tokens. A tycoon trader was €5,000. Eventually, they added tiers that went up to €118,000 because apparently somewhere, somewhere, someplace, there was a guy willing to pay six figures for a PDF and the PDFs.

Caleb Newquist: [00:14:37] Yes, we're going to dwell on this for a second. The PDF was largely plagiarized from free sources, including Wikipedia. Investors later discovered that thousands of euros of proprietary financial education was just copy pasted right off the open internet. Nobody noticed for a while because nobody was buying the PDFs for their content. The PDFs were a legal costume. Window dressing what you were actually buying were the tokens. Those tokens got mined, fed into one coin system and converted into coins at a rate that one coin set and could change whenever it wanted. Seems fishy. Anyway, once you have the coins, they showed up in a digital wallet and you could watch the price tick upward on the internal exchange, a platform called X coin X. The growth was steady, reassuring, always up depending on when you got in. The number on your screen could look like a genuinely life changing sum. And if you think about that feeling for a second when you check your wallet, the number's up again. Your friends are seeing the same thing. You're all in a WhatsApp group, sharing screenshots, cheering each other on, talking about retiring early. You know, it feels like you're part of something real. And by the time it was over, one coin had taken in more than $4 billion from investors around the world. But here's what happened when people actually tried to get their money out. Key part of investing. Being able to get the money anyway.

Caleb Newquist: [00:16:19] The coin exchange, the only place where you could sell, had daily withdrawal limits, tight ones calibrated by package tier to make sure only a trickle of cash could ever leave the building. Not the physical building, but you know what I mean. You could request a wire transfer, but it was slow. Frequently delayed, and often just didn't go through. In practice, most investors had a number that looked enormous on a screen and was nearly impossible to turn into anything you could spend on. Most people didn't even try to cash out early. They were holding on for the moon, waiting for the public listing. Russia kept promising the next partnership, the next event where she explained the next phase of the revolution. The next big thing was always coming. And then there was the recruitment side, which is where the real money actually lived. Bringing new people and you earned commissions on their purchases, on the purchases of the people they recruited, and so on and so forth down the chain. The downline in MLM terms, which is where the serious cash always ends up. The people at the top, the aggressive early recruiters with big networks underneath them were making extraordinary sums in real currency, real commissions, real bank deposits every week, which created a beautiful, self-reinforcing loop. The people making the most money were the most devout believers, and their conspicuous success was living proof to everyone below them that this was real.

Caleb Newquist: [00:17:56] Why would you doubt the guy one rung up when you could see his commission checks? Clearing the community that formed around all this sat somewhere between an investment club and a cult. They called themselves One Life private WhatsApp groups, internal newsletters, motivational events and hotel ballrooms across multiple continents. And when regulators or journalists raise concerns, the community, they had the script ready. These were attacks from the banking establishment, terrified of losing power. The haters are everywhere because the revolution is real. Anyone inside who asked an uncomfortable question got the same treatment. You're being negative. You're letting the team down. Just trust the process. By 2016, money was pouring in from China, Uganda, Pakistan, Brazil, Germany, Norway, Yemen and dozens of other countries. It spread through churches, immigrant communities, professional networks, families. It went wherever trust already existed. And then it burned that trust for fuel. Let's go back to Wembley Arena in London, June 11th, 2016. There's 11,500 people. Many had flown in from all over the world, some spending more than they could comfortably afford just to be in that room. The vibe is something of a rock concert combined with WrestleMania, combined with a revival meeting, which is, you know, as unsettling as it sounds. Alicia Keys is still pumping through the speakers. The fireballs are still firing. Ruja still in the Burgundy gown, still covered in black sequins, working the crowd like she invented the concept of an entrance. She is exactly what they came for.

Caleb Newquist: [00:19:48] The academic, the visionary, the woman who's going to make them all rich. Doctor Ruja. She tells them that one coin's market cap is now second only to Bitcoin. She tells them that in two years nobody will even talk about Bitcoin anymore. She tells them that they're global citizens making history together. And then she tells them that there's a problem. One coin has grown, she explains, so big and so fast that they're running out of coins. The original supply cap 2.1 billion coins hard coded into the system, the promise of scarcity. She's been making since 2014. It can no longer support the growth she's promising them. Now let's just explain why this moment is the whole ball game, because it's easy to hear it as, uh, you know, a routine corporate update. If you don't know exactly what you are listening to or listening for in a real cryptocurrency, a hard supply cap is the entire point. Okay, so Bitcoin's 21 million coins ceiling is credible because it's enforced by this decentralized global network of thousands of computers that no one person controls. Not the biggest mining operation on earth, not the US government, not Satoshi Nakamoto himself. Assuming he's still alive. Nobody. That scarcity is structural, right? Built in to the protocol enforced by the network. That's the point. Ruja, on the other hand, could change her supply cap because one coin was never a cryptocurrency. It was a number in a database in an office building in Sofia.

Caleb Newquist: [00:21:37] That's the capital of Bulgaria. Not your childhood friend. Anyway, it was controlled entirely by her. Adjustable on her own schedule for her own reasons. The coins in your wallet weren't entries on a public ledger. They existed because her computers said they did. So back at Wembley, in front of 11,500 pain believers, she announced she was expanding the supply from 2.1 billion to 120 billion, conjured from nothing, with what two amounted to changing a number and a spreadsheet. And she sold it as a gift for you, she told the crowd. As existing members, people who supported us in phase one, we as a company will double the coins in your account. And the crowd cheered. Now, this is the moment that I keep coming back to, because she had just demonstrated in the clearest terms possible exactly what one coin was. There's no protocol. There was no limit, no verification, nothing she couldn't change with a few keystrokes whenever it suited her. She stood in front of 11,500 people and told them that their life savings were sitting in something. She could multiply by nearly 60 on a whim. And the response was applause. Because by June 2016, most of the people at that stadium were too far in to hear what she'd actually said. They'd recruited their neighbors, they'd convinced their families they'd stake their credibility on this being real. The cost of hearing the founder just proved the coin supply is completely made up, was just too high to pay.

Caleb Newquist: [00:23:23] So they didn't hear that. What they heard was, I'm so confident I'm doubling all your coins. And that's what they cheered for. By 2017, the walls were closing in. Multiple countries had enacted restrictions. Journalists kept publishing evidence based investigations. Prosecutors in Bielefeld, Germany, had been quietly building a case with Bulgarian authorities. And in New York, the Southern district, which handles all the country's biggest financial fraud cases, they had an indictment in the works. There was only one quieter signal when the members ran into themselves early in 2017. Zcoin X, the only place anyone could turn the coins back into cash, went down for maintenance, and it never came back up. The members, only way out of one coin closed months before Ruja found her own way out of the country. And by then the founders had already said the quiet part out loud, just not to investors. In an email prosecutors later obtained, Greenwood put it to Ruja Onecoin was, quote, not mining actually, but telling people shit. And it's worth, you know, stopping on what that shutdown actually proved because it's the cleanest evidence anyone got for free before a warrant even existed. A real exchange doesn't have a switch that one person can flip on and off, but Zcoin did. Because Zcoin X was never a market. It was a number one coin's own employees updated on a ledger nobody outside the company ever saw.

Caleb Newquist: [00:25:10] There was no blockchain underneath any of this. Not a flawed one. Not an early one. None. When the company stopped wanting people to take money out, the money stopped coming out. So then on October 12th, 2017, a federal arrest warrant went out for Ruja Ignatova that included charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. She was scheduled to appear at a one coin investor event in Lisbon shortly after, but she never showed. Colleagues tried to reach her to no avail. What actually happened was learned only later through FBI documents filed in court on October 25th, 2017, 13 days after the warrant. Ruja checked in at Sofia airport, boarded a Ryanair flight to Athens, landed and disappeared. What happened after Athens is genuinely unknown. She may have kept moving on her German passport. The FBI believes she likely had help. By the time anyone was looking in the right direction, the trail had gone cold. And there's even evidence that she saw it coming. Prosecutors say Ruja had bugged the apartment of her American boyfriend and through her own surveillance, discovered he was cooperating with the FBI's investigation into Onecoin. Not bad. She found out one of the people closest to her had become a witness. And so she vanished. None of this was improvised. Remember three years earlier, before the first package was sold? How she'd already written the plan to Greenwood. If it ever falls apart, take the money and run and blame somebody else.

Caleb Newquist: [00:26:51] On October 25th, 2017, she executed step one. She took the money and she ran. Now, here's part of the story I still find almost as remarkable as the disappearance itself. One coin kept going. The founder. The woman who'd given every speech, who was on the Forbes cover, paid for the Forbes cover. Whatever, who stood at Wembley in the gown amid the fireballs. She had just gone into hiding in direct response to a federal arrest warrant. The obvious move for anyone left holding the bag would be to shut it down immediately and call a lawyer instead. The events kept happening. Packages kept selling. The WhatsApp groups stayed lit up. Recruitment never stopped. Constantine Ruge's brother stepped into the spotlight as the new public face and the whole machine just continued like nothing had happened for almost two years. For weeks, the organization said nothing publicly about where she'd gone. Investors asking questions got vague reassurance she'd gone into hiding for her own protection, some were told, because powerful banking interests had threatened her, which, conveniently, was also proof that one coin was real and dangerous enough to scare the establishment. The exact conspiracy narrative Ruja had spent years building became, in her absence, the explanation for her absence very convenient And a striking number of people believed it because the alternative that they had handed over their life savings to a woman who was gone and never coming back was just too terrible to contemplate.

Caleb Newquist: [00:28:39] In March 2019, Constantine was arrested at LAX. He'd flown in on business and was about to board his return flight when he got pulled aside, handcuffed and put into an interrogation room where investigators spent hours asking him about his sister. He cooperated and became a government witness. He did 34 months and walked free with time served, forfeiting $118,000. A rounding error against the 4 billion won coin had taken in, but that was the deal his cooperation bought. Sebastian Greenwood was arrested in Thailand in 2018. He eventually pleaded guilty and in 2023 was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In order to forfeit 300 million. Mark Scott, a former Locke Lord lawyer who laundered over 400 million of won coins money through fake private equity funds, got ten years. Take the money and run. Blame somebody else. She wrote both halves of that sentence in 2014. She ran with the money and one by one, her co-founder, her lawyer, even her own brother. Somebody else went to prison for what she built. While Ruja Ignatova remained exactly wherever Ruja Ignatova was. Now, before we get to where Ruja went, it's worth stopping on where the money came from and the people who lost it. Okay, first Jennifer McAdam, the daughter of a coal miner from Ayrshire. Ayrshire. Am I saying that right? Scotland. Ayrshire, Scotland. She's from Scotland. She got into one coin through a family member she trusted completely and lost a 15,000 pound inheritance from her father.

Caleb Newquist: [00:30:28] That might sound modest next to a $4 billion headline number, but it was everything her dad left her. She spent years since trying to get it back, helping found a victim support group pushing publicly for accountability and serving as one of the 439 investors in an English High Court claim that in July 2024 actually won worldwide freezing orders against Russia and the other defendants. A real win. A short lived one. The litigation funder later pulled out, the solicitors came off the case, and recovery got harder, not easier. As Jennifer put it, quote, the pain and suffering from losing all your finances, your home, your family and your loved ones come alongside with trusting these fraudsters and their sophisticated scams. Second, Igor Albert's inexperienced MLM professional from Amsterdam. Igor and his partner went to their first Onecoin conference in May 2015 and made €90,000 in the first month. Within a year, they were clearing €2 million a month real money, hitting a real account on a recurring basis. These were not naive people. They built careers in multi-level marketing and understood the mechanics cold, and they believed one coin was legitimate, partly because the money they were personally banking was so real and so consistent. They poured it straight back into more packages, watching the nominal balance balloon on screen. Alberts reportedly did the math on exactly how many coins he'd need to become a billionaire.

Caleb Newquist: [00:32:00] The people who made real money at the top of the pyramid weren't villains in the usual sense. Many were also victims, but they were the engine. Their success made the next layer of recruitment possible. Their enthusiasm gave everyone below them permission to believe. Third Daniel Lionheart, 22 years old, living in Uganda. In 2017, Daniel sold three goats and used the proceeds to buy a one coin starter package $250. He was recruited by a woman named prudence, who had already signed up several people in their community herself. By 2019, when BBC journalists came through, neither Daniel nor Prudence had told the people they'd recruited that the money was gone. Prudence told the reporters, I'm somehow hiding myself. I don't want those people I introduced into one coin to see me moving around. They can easily kill me. They thought I ate their money. Three people. A Scottish woman who lost her father's inheritance. A Dutch professional who made millions and lost it all. A young Ugandan man who sold his goats. That's the range of this fraud. That's who was sitting in those WhatsApp groups watching the wallet numbers climb, waiting for the revolution. And here's what the people running the show thought about these investors in the same private emails where they discussed their exit. They called the coin itself a trashy coin. The investors, Jennifer's Inheritance, Daniel's goats, all 439 names on that court filing. Greenwood called them idiots. Crazy. That was the view from inside the room.

Caleb Newquist: [00:33:45] In June 2022. The FBI put Ruja Ignatova on the ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. She's currently the only woman on it and one of only 11 to ever appear on it since it started in 1950. The reward started in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by June 2024, it was up to $5 million. As of this recording, in June 2026, it's still $5 million. And she's still not been found. 5 million bucks and still nothing. So here are the theories about what happened to Ruja. None of them proven. And some of them, you know, totally contradict each other, which makes it kind of fun. Okay, first up, the murder theory. Always up. In February 2023, the Bulgarian Outlet Bureau for Investigative Reporting and Data, aka BRD, published a report based on police documents found in the safe of a murdered Bulgarian police commander. According to those documents, an informant overheard the brother in law of a Bulgarian drug lord, Christoforos Titus, it's the best I got. Known as Taki say that Taki had ordered Ruja killed in November 2018. The story murdered on a yacht, dismembered, dumped in the Ionian Sea. The alleged motive was that Taki had been laundering one coin money and wanted the one person who could tie him to it gone for good. So that's a hell of a story. It's also, in the words of the journalist who broke it, just a hypothesis, not conclusive.

Caleb Newquist: [00:35:27] And the people who spent the most actual time on this case don't buy it. German police who've worked on it for years say they're operating on the assumption that Ruja is alive, partly because her own family has never once behaved like people in mourning. A German police spokeswoman put it about as bluntly as a German police spokeswoman can quote there is no murder. She is alive. Period. A former Onecoin insider named Duncan Arthur backs it up, saying Ruja stayed in regular contact with Constantine long after the date she was supposedly murdered. Okay, next. Next conspiracy. Uh, the South Africa theory. This one's the strongest active lead, a German documentary filmmaker named Johann von Mirbach, who's tracked Ruja for years, says she's living in an upscale part of Cape Town under a false identity based on information his team got from South African security sources. German investigators have said publicly they're looking for her in South Africa. The BBC's Missing Cryptoqueen podcast returned in 2025, with new episodes built around this exact lead and finally the Russia theory. A journalist named Yaron Zaslav, who's worked with Bellingcat, a Netherlands based investigative journalism group, has reported that Ruja was tied to interests connected to the Kremlin through her former security adviser, Frank Schneider. Schneider is a former deputy chief of Luxembourg's foreign intelligence service, who ran a private firm hired by Onecoin and acted as Russia's crisis manager, allegedly feeding her inside. Information on the investigation's closing in around her.

Caleb Newquist: [00:37:14] Zaslav goes further, tracing some of one coin's money to Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted pro-Russian president of Ukraine who now lives in Russia and alleging Russia laundered funds for him. If any of that's true, she bought protection from people with both the means and the motive to keep her permanently out of America's reach. And Schneider, for what it's worth, knows exactly how this particular trick is done. He slipped out of French house arrest himself in 2023 before anyone caught him. The FBI says she may be traveling with armed bodyguards, possibly plastic surgery, possibly a new name, a new face, a new everything. Meanwhile, the legal machinery keeps grinding on without her. In 2025, German prosecutors in Bielefeld filed charges specifically to stop the statute of limitations from running out on a woman they can't find. In January 2026, the Royal Court of Guernsey seized more than 8.5 million pounds from accounts tied to two Kensington flats she'd bought through offshore shell companies. Money now routed to Bielefeld for victim compensation. All told across years of seizures in multiple countries, authorities have clawed back somewhere in the tens of millions of euros, against 4 billion that was invested. All right. So did we learn anything? Yeah. You know, a few things. Um, you know, this fraud itself was not technically complicated. And I think that's somewhat underappreciated. You know, there's no exotic financial engineering, no derivatives, no elaborate accounting tricks. One coin was a number in a database that one person controlled.

Caleb Newquist: [00:39:06] That's the entire mechanism. A $4 billion operation sustained by nothing but trust in Ruja Ignatova, which means the interesting question was never how it worked, rather why people believed it did. Part of it is timing, of course, 2014 through 2016, Bitcoin is exploding, and a lot of ordinary people who'd been too cautious or too slow were experiencing a serious case of FOMO. Ruja handed them a second chance to be early on, something she made them feel like insiders. Finally, for once. Another part of it is the social structure. Your recruiter is almost never a stranger. It was your aunt, your brother in law, someone from your mosque or church. Doubting onecoin meant doubting them. That's a much harder thing to do than doubting a company. Yet another part of it is that the early winners actually won for a while at least. Igor Alberts really was clearing €2 million a month in real cash. That doesn't look like a scam from the inside. It looks like proof and part of it. The part Russia probably understood better than anyone is that by the time most investors had real doubts, they were already too far in to act on them. They'd recruited people. They'd vouched for it personally. Admitting they were wrong meant admitting it to everyone they'd brought in, which might be one of the hardest sentences a person can say out loud. So they doubled down instead, held the coins, waited for the listing, needed it to be true more than they needed proof that it was true.

Caleb Newquist: [00:40:48] That's the empathetic version of the answer. The people behind Onecoin had a colder one in September 2016. In a text to Greenwood, Constantine Ruge's brother, the man who'd later run the company after she vanished and go to prison for it, he summed up the whole operation in one line quote, As you told me, the network would not work with intelligent people. Then he added a winking emoji, a winking emoji. After writing that sentence, the network would not work with intelligent people. But he's not admitting a flaw. That's a statement about the design specs. Onecoin was built on purpose for people who wouldn't look too closely wrapped in a community that made looking closely feel like betrayal. Every single thing we just walked through the FOMO, the trust in whoever recruited you, being too far in to turn back. The people running it, they saw it all too. They just filed it under feature. So strip away the arena, the ball gown, the Forbes cover, fugitive on the run. And one coin comes down to one sentence. Every piece of evidence that it was real came from the people selling it. The price, the wallet balance. The market cap that supposedly beat every coin but Bitcoin, all of it generated by the same company collecting the money. Nobody on the outside, no ledger, no auditor, no independent.

Caleb Newquist: [00:42:15] Anyone who could confirm a single number on that screen. That's the whole lesson. And it outlives crypto and MLM and even Ruja ignatova herself when the only proof an investment is real comes from the people who want your money. That's not verification. That's just marketing in a much nicer outfit. And it's worth sitting with how thoroughly unsophisticated that actually is. There's no clever trickery here, just the oldest structure in fraud dressed up in a blockchain. It never built. What would have protected every single person in the story wasn't technical expertise. It was one boring, deeply unglamorous question asked of someone with no financial reason to lie to you. Says who? Who who can actually confirm that any of this is real? And by that I mean someone that doesn't get paid when I buy in. That's it for this episode. And remember, if you're going to disappear with $4 billion, maybe don't tell your boyfriend first. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for stories, drop us a line at fraud at earmark. Cpe.com. This episode of Oh My Fraud was written by Zack Frank and me, Caleb Newquist. Oh My fraud is created, produced and hosted by me, Caleb Newquist. Zack Frank is my co producer, audio engineer, and music supervisor. Laura Hobbs designed our logo. Rate review and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. If you listen on earmark, you can earn free CPE credit there. Join us next time for more average swindlers and scams from stories that will make you say oh my fraud!