Crypto Queen: OneCoin scammer on the run from FBI for five years

Ruja Ignatova, the ‘Crypto Queen’ who was instrumental in the $4 billion OneCoin pyramid scheme scam in 2016, has been on the run from the FBI for five years.

Crypto Queen: OneCoin scammer is one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives

Her name is Ruja Ignatova and she is nicknamed ‘Crypto Queen,’ and has become one of the 10 most wanted fugitives from justice by the FBI, with her five-year-long escape. 

Ignatova had started her scam in 2016, after promoting OneCoin’s pyramid scheme by calling it a lucrative rival to Bitcoin in the growing cryptocurrency market. 

It was from there that she began calling herself the “Crypto Queen,” precisely as she began her persuasion efforts with investors in the United States and around the world to invest in OneCoin. 

Not coincidentally, OneCoin is that company that federal prosecutors later revealed to be one of the largest international frauds ever perpetrated, worth more than $4 billion. 

In 2017, Ignatova boarded a plane in Sofia, Bulgaria, and disappeared. Since then, her disappearance began and she has not been seen since.

According to reports, today the ‘Crypto Queen’ is one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, along with gang leaders and accused murderers, and is the only woman currently on the list. Of the 529 fugitives on the FBI’s list since it was established in 1950, she is one of only 11 women.

Crypto Queen: her London residence for sale valued at £11 million

#DYK that the #FBI has a #podcast?

🎙Listen to our latest episode now to learn how Ruja Ignatova—through a company once marketed as the Bitcoin killer—allegedly robbed investors of billions of dollars: https://t.co/AjF0MCAban pic.twitter.com/HIial4To7h

— FBI (@FBI) September 19, 2022

As the FBI proceeds to release posters and podcasts about the ‘Crypto Queen,’ news has circulated this week that Ignatova would claim her London penthouse, valued at £11 million. 

It is a property located in the exclusive Abbots House apartment building in Kensington and is described as “an impressive four-bedroom penthouse,” specifically listed at between £11 million and £2.5 million, lower than the amount Ignatova would have paid to purchase it. 

According to reports, the property is owned by Abbots House Penthouse Limited, a Guernsey-based shell company, which is supposed to ensure that Ignatova’s name does not appear in land deeds or public records. The apartment was put up for sale by Knight Frank, an independent British real estate consulting firm.

OneCoin was supposed to be the Bitcoin Killer

OneCoin is a company founded in 2015 in Bulgaria with the aim of being the creation of an electronic currency, an alternative to cash and, most importantly, to Bitcoin. 

In reality, OneCoin was later discovered to be a Ponzi or Pyramid Scheme, and in fact, its modus operandi was to get other people into the business to convince other investors to buy packets of tokens that would be converted into OneCoin in the future when the currency was created. 

Packages of tokens ranged from 140 euros to as much as 27,530 euros, with promised revenues of 2,800 euros in the first case and 3 million euros in the second. But the only concrete basis for the survival of this project was that in order to get rich, each user had to ‘network’ and sell such packages to other people, recruiting new investors. 

After several years, OneCoin was stopped by Germany’s BaFin and the UK’s FCA, as well as Italy’s Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato, because it had no license to operate. 

Since that time, it is safe to say that the more than $4 billion scam has been revealed and the hunt for the perpetrators like Ruja Ignatova, the “Crypto Queen,” has begun.