The FBI today added Bulgarian-born Ignatova – accused of defrauding investors of about $ 4.1 billion in a counterfeit cryptocurrency scheme – to the list of most wanted. The 41-year-old has been in the throat since October 2017, a few days after the issuance of her arrest warrant in the USA In a press release, the FBI described OneCoin as a “massive fraud scheme” and offered up to $ 100,000 for information leading to Ignatova’s arrest. “There are so many victims around the world who have been financially devastated by this,” said Special Agent Ronald Shimko. “We want to bring her to justice.” According to federal prosecutors, Ignatova — a German citizen with a doctorate in private international law — founded OneCoin in 2014 and began promoting it worldwide as a “Bitcoin Killer.” It is believed to have attracted billions of dollars in investments from more than 3 million people in 175 countries. But the currency he made never existed on a public blockchain – only in the minds of its creators, prosecutors said. Blaming Ignatova and her business partners in 2019, federal prosecutors in Manhattan described OneCoin as a “pyramid system based on smoke and mirrors, more than zero and one.” They claimed that Ignatova, her brother and others who worked for the company advertised the cryptocurrency as mining on computers and it was priced based on market demand. In fact, prosecutors said, the creators never mined a single coin and set up the company “with the full intention of using it to deceive investors”. In an email to her co-founder, prosecutors said, Ignatova described her OneCoin exit strategy as follows: “Take the money and run and blame someone else for it.” For a time, Ignatova lived off many of OneCoin’s profits by buying a 7,000-square-foot apartment in 2016 in a busy London neighborhood formerly owned by British singer Duffy. He filled the apartment with works of art worth about .000 500,000, including two authentic Warhols, according to the BBC, and had a lavish 36th birthday party at the Victoria and Albert Museum. But Ignatova’s rich public life stopped on October 25, 2017, when she flew a flight to Athens, Greece and disappeared. He is wanted by both Interpol and Europol and was the subject of the BBC podcast “The Missing Cryptoqueen”. German researchers warned earlier this year that she may have changed her appearance with plastic surgery to avoid detection. While Ignatova remained on the radar, her co-founder, lawyer and brother were arrested and prosecuted in connection with the plot. Her brother, Konstantin Ignatov, even filed lawsuits against her as part of a plea deal in 2019. Her lawyer, Mark Scott, was convicted of conspiracy to launder money and bank fraud the same year. An indictment against Ignatova was unleashed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2019, accusing her of one count of remittance fraud, conspiracy to commit electronic fraud, title fraud and conspiracy to launder money laundering. “I’m sure we’ll find her,” Mike Driscoll, the FBI’s deputy director of the New York office, told a news conference Thursday.
