My bet is she was a front for some Eastern EU or EEU mafia group and now rests in a concrete-filled barrel at the bottom of Black Sea, with all the money taking multiple round trips through off-shore banks, never to be found by their MLM "investors" again.
The parent scam company, OneLife, still has a webpage up: <a href="https://www.onelife.eu/en" rel="nofollow">https://www.onelife.eu/en</a> however its official denial of OneCoin wrong-doing is a 503.<p>Fortunately, that denial, a glorious work on its own, can be seen in cache: <a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.onelife.eu/en/news/corporate-announcement" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...</a>
I torrent a lot of TV shows. And American Greed popped up a lot. I always dismissed the show until they they recently did a ep on the Fyre festival. I consume every bit of media about the Fyre festival. I Watched the ep about it. Then I saw that American greed is actually one of the best shows on TV. So I set Sonarr to grab every episode. It grabbed 114 of them. And I have now watched them all all.<p>But 80% of the episodes deal with Ponzi schemes claiming unrealistic returns. Part of me feels bad for the people. The other part doesn't since they think they can get a 5% return a month. If you can do 5% a month wall street will toss trillions at you.
a week ago I passed in front the One Coin shop in Sofia.
It was open.<p>I was surprised as It had been closed for a long time.<p>I had listened to the BBC podcast and was curious so I tried to enter.<p>It was locked and a lady came to open.
There were a couple of people, maybe customers.
There were books, CDs and other material.<p>I stayed two minutes and head to the exit.
The door was locked and the lady came to open.<p>That's all.<p>It felt weird.
My experience with OneCoin is that people who were involved in it were shady and trying get less shady people on the board. That was back in 2016 / 2017.<p>At least in Eastern Europe, it was going like this (translation): The "master scammer" created a platform for "wannabe scammers" to scam others. But the master is the master.<p>Typical ponzi scheme: everybody knew but they were hoping the get bigger sucker.
Great podcast. It fizzles out a bit in the end, but still well worth a listen.<p>FWIW the podcast ends up being more of a critique of MLM schemes in general rather than Ruja Ignatova herself (although she is certainly a crook).<p>The last episode is also interesting as it highlights the motivations of the whistleblowers- these people are mostly speaking out against OneCoin because they are promoting competing sh*tcoin schemes rather than because of any objection in principle to the idea of marketing rubbish to vulnerable people.<p>See also "The strange religion of cryptocurrency", where the same journalist talks about OneCoin (and money in general) as a religion. Very interesting. <a href="https://audioboom.com/posts/7386285-the-strange-religion-of-cryptocurrency" rel="nofollow">https://audioboom.com/posts/7386285-the-strange-religion-of-...</a>
For extensive coverage of OneCoin scam since 2015, see <a href="https://behindmlm.com/companies/onecoin/" rel="nofollow">https://behindmlm.com/companies/onecoin/</a><p>Also, US lawyer Mark Scott was convicted earlier this week of money laundering for OneCoin: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50509299" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50509299</a>
I can remember OneCoin back in the day. And I also remember that when visiting their website, my first though was "this must be a gigantic scam!" It was kinda obvious.
Unbelievable that people fell for this. But like with all pyramid schemes or similar scams, they target a very specific sort of people.
>Even the most obscure entry or innocuous comment on a forum is usually saved somewhere, and with enough digging can be found. You've heard of Google, but there are several other search engines that specialise in this.<p>That's a very interesting throwaway line; anyone know what those products are?
Another aspect of the OneCoin scam is they targeted people from the Muslim community by using a fake certificate/endorsement that suggested OneCoin was Sharia compliant.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=638_Jpp2Rq8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=638_Jpp2Rq8</a><p>:D ... cringe-inducing to the point it could gag a maggot ...
This is basically a write-up of the entire Missing CryptoQueen podcast if anyone didn't get a chance to listen. Almost reads like a transcription in a way....
Why, with all that money, didn't they simply buy a Blockchain? It's not hard, fork bitcoin, build something on Ethereum. Or did it simply not matter for the pyramid scheme? If in the end they had a crappy Blockchain and the investors would have gotten their coins, would they've been guilty of anything?
>Another tip he gives us is to find out where she has been on her yacht. We should try to get the tracker off it, he says, and he doesn't appear to be joking. I explain that this is probably beyond my abilities (apart from being illegal)<p>Uh, why would this be illegal? Is flightaware illegal? Or the yacht tracking sites?
I briefly worked for this group of people who were supposed to be launching a new cryptocurrency right at the peak of all the hype. It was promised to be this next generation technology that was going to make everyone involved rich, and it would never drop below $2 USD a coin. It was also supposed to be part of this new paradigm for society that would usher in a Golden Age.<p>Only problem was, every single thing I mentioned above was complete nonsense. The cryptocurrency didn't actually exist, and despite having multiple "crypto experts", nobody really understood how a blockchain actually worked. I quit after I started to see what was really going on, though everything smelled fishy from the beginning.
Painful to read, and realize that even minor ICO's can potentially do substantial harm especially when investors come from the African continent where even small sums of money represents their life savings and assets.
> "I did the calculation how many coins we needed to become the richest person on the planet," Igor says. "I said to Andreea, 'We need to build it up to 100 million coins, because when this coin goes to €100 and we have 100 million, we are richer than Bill Gates.' It's mathematic. It's easy as that."<p>There is an argument to be made here that someone who is that irresponsible, or frankly stupid, has only themselves to blame.
Funny thing is I know of of at least two other women that currently call themselves Crypto Queen, or a variation of that, who are doing the TED circuit and similar.
So I work in crypto hcaptcha.com. And it feels as though beyond money laundering and flim flam, people have left all the innovation to me. Blockchain, especially ethereum is incredibly cool tech if you can deal with the learning curve. It's got built in PKI, a decent consensus mechanism and with IPFS/IPNS tagging data and hashing it back to the blockchain is easy.<p>There's a common trope, the problem isn't [insert programming language like python or java] . It's the [programming lang] programmers. The same is true with blockchain. Very few people with reputations and skills wanna go into this field because of these scammers.
Just out of curiosity: say you've recently stolen more than $1B from various people, some of whom might have a somewhat shady background - how would you disappear in this time where everything is electronically tracked, you have instagram, facebook, forums etc.?
Only she was heading to a very public event in Portugal - a bitcoin evangelist. A history of good education and fully understood bitcoin ( but like Jimmy Hoffa ) She is being defined as if she had 3 million bitcoin in her handbag at the time of her kidnapping and murder.
"I did the calculation how many coins we needed to become the richest person on the planet," Igor says. "I said to Andreea, 'We need to build it up to 100 million coins, because when this coin goes to €100 and we have 100 million, we are richer than Bill Gates.' It's mathematic. It's easy as that."<p>Great math-guy.. wonder where he got info on Gates wealth.
Thanks to these con artists and careless big investors like SoftBank, once the recession comes, blockchain, AI, etc... will go into another long winter