Everyone knows "Hey heeey heeeeey" story of BitConnect but another very interesting (and sad) story is that of the OneCoin scam and it's missing cryptoqueen founder, Ruja Ignatova.
Onecoin was advertised back then as a better and far more advanced Bitcoin (lol), and it had all the features the king Bitcoin did. It could even be mined, you could transfer money with encryption safely without leaving a trace like Monero later, all using your smartphone which was quite nice back in the day. The brand had member base of over 1.7 million people! Remember, this was in early 2016.
Ruja Ignatova was the founder and the face of OneCoin. At OneCoin’s first public event in 2016, she hyped everyone saying that Onecoin was a ‘Bitcoin killer’ and people believed. She along with her team of scammers showed to the world how the brand was progressing and expanding. Investors were waiting to make the most of the platform and in 2017. At an event in Lisbon, Ruja was being anticipated by its investors who wanted to discuss these concerns with her...but she never showed up for the event. She became a ghost. Her phone became non-responsive. She wasn’t responding to emails too. It seemed like she was gone from the planet and so was the money.
What was even more interesting is the fact that when the police investigated OneCoin, they discovered the that the coins weren’t mined! Instead, programmers actually programmed the coin to change their values. They even discovered that it didn’t really have blockchain, meaning the transactions could be easily tracked. In fact, the people running OneCoin were actually allocating fake coins to its members that didn’t really exist, completely taking away people’s hard-earned money.
Konstantin Ignatov mentioned in his testemony that Ruja’s last known location was in Bulgaria but he said that he doesn’t have any other information regarding where she could have fled. Further FBI investigations locate her last whereabouts at Athens, as she was thought to have boarded on a Ryanair flight from Sophia but since then nothing.
A few weeks ago a video appeared starring Ruja, but it was apparently a deepfake so the whereabouts of this cryptoqueen scammer are still unknow. Is she alive or dead? Who knows
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