The crooks who invented Onecoin promised that their cryptocurrency would eclipse everyone else.
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A case of cryptocurrency fraud – probably the first of its kind in the world – has been launched in a court in Münster. But the main swindler – the Bulgarian Ruzha Ignatova, was never found, she says Deutsche Welle.
“Take the money and run”: under this motto, the “crypto queen” and creator of OneCoin Ruzha Ignatova disappeared in September 2017. With a handbag and billions made through one of the biggest scams in history. Ignatova’s whereabouts remain unknown, but a court in Munster will now have to decide what guilt two men and a woman in her entourage have for the OneCoin scheme, which has lured a huge number of people with more than five billion dollars. The trial began on Friday.
Defendants: an elderly couple from Greven and a lawyer from Munich
An elderly family from the German city of Greven sits on the dock next to the other accused – an elegant lawyer from Munich, reports “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. There is no trace of the ecstasy that OneCoin caused at Wembley in 2016 or in Macau in 2017. Defendant Greven was then among the speakers, assuring that OneCoin was the currency of the future. His wife was the director of a company through which money from OneCoin was transferred abroad.
The court in Münster must find the answers to several key questions: how is a probable fraud with digital currency proven? How is it proven that something has no value when millions of people believe it is valuable, some of them to this day? The Bielefeld prosecutor’s office had accused the Greven couple only of offering payment services without permission. However, the Munster criminal panel has expanded the charge – now the man and woman can be convicted of money laundering and complicity in fraud. It is assumed that through them alone Ignatova received 320 million euros for OneCoin.
The district court wants to get to the heart of a structure designed to dilute the legal responsibility for the years-long conversion of real money into virtual currencies. The end of the cat-and-mouse game between German Justice and OneCoin has begun.
How did they launder the money from OneCoin?
The Greven couple is accused of taking 320 million euros from German investors from the end of 2015 to the end of 2016 and transferring a large part of them to accounts abroad for a commission of one percent. To do this, they needed a license, whether OneCoin was a legitimate product or not. The money went to a fund in the Cayman Islands, from where it reached various tax havens through a complex network of companies and intermediaries.
The lawyer from Munich is accused of complicity in the scheme. He is suspected of sending emails to suspicious bank employees to cover up the origin of the funds. Thanks to him, 75 million euros ended up in the Cayman Islands, according to the indictment. He is accused of money laundering in two cases.
According to his lawyer, this case mainly concerns a person who is absent. “Some call her the crypto queen,” and she’s the one to be questioned. Nowhere in the indictment is it written that his client knew about the fraud, the lawyer argued. And without a crime, without fraud, the charge of money laundering falls. As the crypto queen is not sitting here now, despite many years of investigations, the prosecutor’s office attacked his client. “There’s evidence that other people should be sitting here.”
And the man’s defender from Greven uses a similar argument. His client believed in the legitimacy of OneCoin and the value of the currency, otherwise he would not have sold his company to Ruzha Ignatova for millions, some of which were paid in OneCoin.
Multilevel Marketing: How Does This Scheme Work?
The field in which the man from Greven worked is called “Multilevel Marketing”. The OneCoin system also functioned on this principle – investors became traders and could sell OneCoin packages, including training materials for cryptocurrencies, as well as the so-called “tokens” that could turn into OneCoin. For the sale of the packages, which cost up to 118 thousand euros, they received a commission. When the people to whom they sold packages, in turn, managed to make sales, the first seller also received part of their commission. Thus the pyramidal structure was completed and the money always went “up”.
It may sound incredible, but even today, despite the collapse of OneCoin, the pseudo-currency itself still exists – now under the name OneLife. And tens of thousands of people around the world still hope that one day they will get rich – as promised by Ruzha Ignatova.
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