The Daily Dazzling Dawn

Crime |

7 year hunt for cryptoqueen who stole £3.6bn

by DD Report-

November 23, 2024

Ruja Ignatova has allegedly been spotted in South Africa

key takeaways

The search for a Bulgarian "cryptoqueen" involved in one of the largest fraud cases in history has extended to South Africa. The lone female on the FBI's top ten most-wanted list is Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian national who attended Oxford University. She allegedly used the phony cryptocurrency OneCoin to defraud millions of investors out of £3.6 billion. In a recent documentary on her case, German authorities disclosed that, while they are unsure of her whereabouts, they are concentrating their search on Cape Town.“We are working with the hypothesis that Ruja Ignatova is still alive,” Sabine Dässel, German investigator, said in the documentary, rejecting earlier theories that Ms Ignatova was killed and dismembered by Bulgarian ex-accomplices in October 2017.

The Daily Dazzling Dawn understand the search is complicated by a recent FBI update on Ms Ignatova, which said she may have had plastic surgery to change her appearance, and which raised her arrest bounty to $5 million (£4 million).The documentary cites security forces in Cape Town, who stated that Ms Ignatova had recently been spotted in Cape Town, although her exact whereabouts were unknown.

Fled on flight to Athens

Ms Ignatova fled Bulgaria in 2017 on a flight to Athens, and then disappeared. But her brother Konstantin is known to have taken over her business and to have spent a lengthy period in Cape Town after she vanished. At the time, he posted pictures of his visits to the city’s best sight-seeing spots on his Instagram account.Konstantin has since co-operated with the FBI investigation and has claimed that his sister carries half-a-billion pounds in stolen investor funds, which may have been used for plastic surgery, bribing officials and creating a new identity.

Ms Ignatova founded the OneCoin cryptocurrency with Karl Sebastian Greenwood, a joint Swedish-British citizen. Last year, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said Greenwood had been jailed for 20 years over the scam and is required to pay back $300 million.

“Karl Sebastian Greenwood operated one of the largest fraud schemes ever perpetrated. Greenwood and his co-conspirators, including fugitive Ruja Ignatova, conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars with promises of a ‘financial revolution’ and claims that OneCoin would be the ‘Bitcoin killer’,” the office said.

“In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless, and investors were left with nothing.”