OneCoin: the cryptocurrency that never existed

Millions of people around the world bought a cryptocurrency whose price no one could actually verify — because there was no blockchain behind it. Instead of an open ledger of transactions, the coin's price was simply "drawn" each day inside the company itself. This was OneCoin — a project its creators called a "Bitcoin killer," which turned out to be one of the largest financial pyramid schemes in the history of cryptocurrency.

In 2014, the Bulgarian national Ruja Ignatova introduced OneCoin to the world as a supposedly revolutionary cryptocurrency of the future. The project was aggressively promoted through network marketing: participants bought educational packages containing "tokens" and received rewards for recruiting new people — a classic pyramid structure disguised as a high-tech financial product. Unlike genuine cryptocurrencies, OneCoin's price was not set by the market or by exchange trading but was fixed internally by the company itself, and no public blockchain that could be independently verified ever existed.

The scheme grew for years, drawing in millions of participants across dozens of countries, until Ignatova vanished in the autumn of 2017 — she failed to appear at a scheduled event in Lisbon, and her whereabouts have been unknown ever since. Investigators estimate total investor losses at more than $4 billion.

In 2022, Ruja Ignatova was added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, where she remains to this day — no verdict has been handed down against her, and she is listed in the case as a fugitive from justice. Her brother, Konstantin Ignatov, pleaded guilty to being an accomplice and cooperated with the investigation, for which he received a comparatively lenient sentence — 34 months' imprisonment — and was released.

The project's co-founder, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, by contrast, fought the charges, but in September 2023 he was sentenced by the Southern District of New York court to 20 years in prison for organizing the scheme.

Published 15 October 2023