How This Crypto Queen Stole $4 Billion and Vanished

“Let’s give a warm applause for our creator, our founder, our lovely Dr. Rouja. Where are you?”

“In the last two years, I’ve been called a lot of things. Rouja Ignatova, who became known as the Missing Cryptoqueen, has been accused of defrauding victims out of more than $4 billion, and probably the best thing that the press called me was the Bitcoin killer.”

“Ignatova is a German citizen who lived in Bulgaria, but now she sits side-by-side on the top 10 list with cartel leaders, kidnappers, and murderers. That’s no accident.”

“We want to be the number one cryptocurrency out there.”

“Rouja Ignatova tricked 3 million people with a spectacular cryptocurrency fraud. She looted several billion, then she disappeared and took the money with her.”

“It was kind of an unbelievable world, of course. Nobody could imagine that this was kind of a scam.”

“Rouja disappeared in October/November 2017. That was Rouja’s last hurrah, the last time anybody actually saw her.”

“Well, it’s a bit difficult to say how it all started because it’s never one event or… it’s always a lot of things.”

“Today, intelligence services, investors, former employees, and crime syndicates want to find out where Rouja is and what happened to the money. Some call it the biggest investment fraud of all time.”

“There are two things how it all started. One is cryptocurrency. I was always very, very interested in cryptocurrency, and I was working with McKinsey, and I was doing their very traditional and very big sector—banking and insurance. So, Bitcoin somehow popped up and we were discussing it. So, cryptocurrency, yes, was very, very clear to me. I think end of 2013, maybe beginning of 2014, and then I was thinking how to bring this to the masses.”

“Rouja Ignatova sold her story everywhere: ‘So you missed Bitcoin, now you have a new opportunity. And if you miss this opportunity, it’s your fault. The decision is yours.'”

“People fell for this ploy.”

“Clearly, a new era is born in digital currencies, and today you have the unique chance to participate in this success through a new currency called OneCoin.”

“It all started in Bulgaria. After graduating from university in Germany, Rouja Ignatova moved to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. There, she worked hard at establishing contacts. She got help from Asdis Ragnars, an Icelandic photo model. Her nickname, Ice Queen.”

“I met Rouja in 2009. I think it was in a magazine party for some Bulgarian woman magazine. It was a huge party. I was there as a special guest, and it was a lot of media around me, a lot of photographers, and at this point, I was one of the biggest stars here in Bulgaria, and Rouja spotted me in the party, and she came to me, and she was amazed by my appearance. So, this was what she was seeking. She wanted to be famous.”

“At the time, Rouja Ignatova was working for the consultancy firm McKinsey. With Asdis Ragnars’s help, she made contacts with Bulgarian business people and politicians. She wanted to establish her own cryptocurrency and called herself the Cryptoqueen.”

“Through Asdis Ragnars, she also met Sebastian Greenwood, a Swedish businessman. Whether Greenwood was peddling food supplements, anti-aging creams, or cryptocurrencies, he was always a flashy salesman.”

“Hi everybody, this is Sebastian Greenwood, your 001 of OneCoin.”

“She had a crush on Sebastian, and they started to work together. They had a love adventure, and then they started to build up this idea of OneCoin.”

“Sebastian was very clever also; he was like a mastermind in selling people something.”

“It was nobody else that was in control of the company. It was only Rouja and Sebastian.”

“Rouja Ignatova grew up in a small town called Schramberg in southern Germany. After the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the Ignatov family moved from Bulgaria to Germany. Rouja Ignatova was 9 years old at the time and her brother, Konstantin, was four. Even back then, she stood out because she was clever and wanted to get to the top.”

“So the idea was how to bring a good concept, an interesting concept, out to the people, and I have a personal friend, his name is Sebastian Greenwood, who has been active in network marketing for quite a while. He was the one actually who suggested, ‘Let’s do network marketing.’ So when we started, and he convinced me that network marketing might be exactly the right thing, so we said, ‘Let’s do network marketing,’ but let’s not sell the cryptocurrency, let’s do an education package.”

“OneCoin customers can make their own money. It worked like this: Stefan sells Michelle and Sarah a Tycoon Trader package for €5,000 each; that’s €10,000 in total. Stefan receives 10% commission on this sale; that’s €1,000. One week later, Michelle and Sarah sell a total of four Tycoon packages to Chen, Larissa, Bogdan, and Paul. For this, they get €2,000 commission. The trick: without having to sell anything, Stefan now receives a further €2,000. He’s paid a commission on all sales in his downline. So if Stefan has 1,000 people below him who every week sell OneCoin packages for 1 million, Stefan receives €100,000 commission per week. 40% of the commission is paid in OneCoins, but 60% is paid in real money. So Stefan earns €60,000 every week—a lucrative business for a tiny number of people at the top of the pyramid. Everyone else earns very little or nothing at all—a classic Ponzi scheme.”

“With the first month when this was starting and the money just started to flow in, and another business meeting after another business meeting that was very successful all around the world, then it was like… first it was like…”

“In June and July 2016, Rouja Ignatova ordered IMS Limited to transfer €75 million to Georgetown in the Cayman Islands. There, she kept a fund called the Fero Fund, where money from some of OneCoin’s subsidiaries was collected. The fund was set up by her lover, Gilbert Armenta, by a shell company in Ireland. She then transferred money to Dubai and established a new fund there, the Phoenix Fund. Only Rouja had access to it.”

“Early September 2022, OneCoin’s office in the Bulgarian capital. The name has been changed a bit, but it’s the same scam run by the same people.”

“Well, first of all, my name is Tom Midwin, I’m coming from Finland, and I’ve been in this business already since 2014, amongst the 300 first ones.”

“Rouja Ignatova, yeah, I have met her many, many times, and then we had very good relationships, but also then I feel sad that she has paid a huge, huge price about this.”

“This is OneCoin, One Ecosystem. OneCoin was the former currency and the company, but today it’s a totally renewed brand. We have a totally new company behind everything, and we only use word ‘One’ about our currency, but the database and the people, partly the same, of course, from the past. Everyone has their coins as they had before in OneCoin.”

“It’s a rebranding, it’s a rebranding still with the same coin, as you call it, but it’s the name of the company. It’s a whole network, it’s not one product, it’s a couple of products inside one network. It’s an entire system, it’s a closed environment, it’s an amazing project.”

“Nowadays, I don’t really think too much about her anymore, and actually, one mistake what I think there has been is that it’s too much about Rouja.”

“If you say that okay, company has sold education with 4 billion euros or company has scammed 4 billion euros, total difference. So who has been scammed and which way? And they have got, of course, their educational materials what they have bought. So I can’t understand this is like a total, you know, misunderstanding, you can say, a misunderstanding from medias worldwide.”

“A misunderstanding that authorities all over the world view as a scam, and this scam has made some people very rich indeed. It’s still unclear how much money OneCoin generated in the US; investigators believe the damage to be at least 4 billion, but some documents suggest 12 or even 15 billion.”

“And who’s right now the owners of the company? The owners of the company, there is a corporate, it’s a group of people, simple as that. Like investors call them investors. And who are these people? Some of them you know them, some of them you don’t. I prefer to keep it private for the moment.”

“The OneCoin scandal is still a mystery. Some of the kingpins are in Bulgaria, others in Dubai. Many of OneCoin’s sellers and promoters have become multi-millionaires. None of them are being investigated at the moment, but some of the key figures are on trial. Sebastian Greenwood, who built up OneCoin with Rouja Ignatova, is in pre-trial custody in New York, as is Konstantin Ignatov. Gilbert Armenta, Rouja’s lover and chief money launderer, is under house arrest in the US, also awaiting trial.”

“The investigators are also trying to get their hands on OneCoin’s fortune in order to compensate the victims, but finding the people behind the scam is proving difficult, and there’s still no trace of Rouja Ignatova.”