Ruja Ignatova allegedly defrauded victims of $ 4 billion in a cryptocurrency fraud in what a US prosecutor described as “one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in history”. She disappeared in 2017 after discovering that her boyfriend was involved in an FBI investigation into OneCoin’s company. Ms Ignatova, a German national, was last seen boarding a flight from Bulgaria to Greece. OneCoin began offering buyers a commission if they sold the self-described cryptocurrency to other people in 2014. But according to the FBI, OneCoin was useless and was not protected by blockchain technology used by other cryptocurrencies. Her story was the subject of a BBC podcast entitled “The Missing Cryptoqueen” in 2019 that tried to locate her. Federal prosecutors say it was a Ponzi scheme disguised as cryptocurrency. “She perfectly dated her plan, exploiting the frantic speculation of the early days of cryptocurrency,” said Damian Williams, Manhattan’s attorney general.
