Update, December 16, 2022:
Sebastian Greenwood, co-founder of OneCoin Multi-Billion-Dollar Cryptocurrency Pyramid Scheme “OneCoin” Pleads Guilty.
Department of Justice U.S. Attorney’s Office Southern District of New York
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, December 16, 2022
Co-Founder Of Multi-Billion-Dollar Cryptocurrency Pyramid Scheme “OneCoin” Pleads Guilty
OneCoin
Was a Fraudulent Cryptocurrency Marketed and Sold to Millions of
Victims Around the World, Resulting in Billions of Dollars in Losses
Damian
Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New
York, announced today that KARL SEBASTIAN GREENWOOD, who co-founded
OneCoin with RUJA IGNATOVA, a/k/a “the Cryptoqueen,” pled guilty today
in Manhattan federal court to wire fraud and money laundering charges in
connection with his participation in the massive OneCoin fraud scheme.
OneCoin, which began operations in 2014 and was based in Sofia,
Bulgaria, marketed and sold a fraudulent cryptocurrency by the same name
through a global multi-level-marketing (“MLM”) network. As a result of
misrepresentations that GREENWOOD, IGNATOVA, and others made about
OneCoin, victims invested over four billion dollars worldwide in the
fraudulent cryptocurrency. Today, District Judge Edgardo Ramos accepted
GREENWOOD’s guilty plea. IGNATOVA, who was added to the Federal Bureau
of Investigation’s Top Ten Most Wanted List in June 2022, remains at
largeU.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “As a founder and leader of OneCoin, Karl Sebastian Greenwood operated one of the largest international fraud schemes ever perpetrated. Greenwood and his co-conspirators, including fugitive Ruja Ignatova, conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that OneCoin would be the ‘Bitcoin killer.’ In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless. Greenwood’s lies were designed with one goal, to get everyday people all over the world to part with their hard-earned money — real money — and to line his own pockets to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Update, June 30, 2022:
OneCoin's founder Ruja Ignatova has been added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. FBI is offering up to $ 100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Ruja Ignatova.
FBI has created a special landing page for the public, victims and media: https://fbi.gov/ruja
Live video footage of the FBI/SDNY press conference on June 30, 2022 regarding the addition of OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
FBI posters of Ruja Ignatova on FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list:
Update, May 11, 2022:
Ruja Ignatova has been added to the public side of the INTERPOL RED NOTICE -list.
"Dr Ruja IGNATOVA, Doctor of Law, is suspected of having, as the driving force and intellectual inventor of the alleged cryptocurrency "OneCoin", induced investors all over the world to invest in this actually worthless "currency"."
German Nordrhein-Westfalen police has released a warrant for Ruja Ignatova.
Update, April 18, 2022:
Bulgarian Ministry of Interior announced on April 18, 2022, that Ruja Ignatova has been declared internationally wanted at the request of the authorities in Germany. She has been reported to the Schengen Information System (SIS) and is set to be arrested and extradited on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant issued by the Bielefeld Court in Germany. Ignatova is wanted for criminal activity related to commercial fraud, progressive customer recruitment and money laundering by creating and distributing OneCoin virtual currency. She has been released from Bulgarian citizenship according to the Ministry of Interior.
Update, October 8,2021:
Attorney Johannes Bender who represents OneCoin victims in the secondary suit in the Münster OneCoin trial in Germany which starter on September 18, 2021, wrote about the OneCoin blockchain and fraud questions covered in court. MUST READ FOR ALL ONECOIN MEMBERS!
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OneCoin company is a Bulgarian scam company operating without any regulatory financial or virtual currency licenses.
OneCoin virtual currency is a fake-value coin existing only on OneCoin's OneEcosystem MLM website. Its fake "value" is announced by anonymous Bulgarians on exactly this 1 MLM website. This virtual coin is claimed to be a cryptocurrency by its marketing, but Onecoin has no cryptocurrency properties what so ever; no secure wallets, no public/private keys, no valid blockchain for users to verify their transactions.
The scam concept is quite simple:
Declare a fake value for OneCoin on OneEcosystem web site. Lure people to join this so called "financial revolution", and sell them MLM "education packages" which contain different amounts of promotional tokens depending on the MLM package price. Promotional tokens are multiplied via promotions and "splits". Then on the member BackOffice "mine" the promotional tokens to OneCoin ("mining" is a simple automatic division calculation). This results OneCoins for the member's OneEcosystem account with purported value even 10-200x higher than the MLM package price.
This exactly same concept has been in use since OneCoin started in late 2014.
But in reality OneCoin has no real value and it can't be exchanged to any crypto or fiat currency, or to any valued asset consistently. The time when OneCoin is finally supposed to become real is always "coming soon".
OneCoin accounts are totally at the mercy of the Bulgarian OneCoin criminals, who can freeze member accounts any time they want, which they have done numerous times to members who critisized Onecoin.
"Mining" of coins in the OneCoin fraud scheme means just an exchange of intermediary "promotional" tokens from MLM packages (tokens are multiplied in numerous "splits", Wonder Wheel etc. promotions) to Onecoins using a certain ratio called "difficulty factor" by doing a division calculation. This is not the concept of a real cryptocurrency mining. OneCoin uses lexicon from the real cryptocurrency space in order to defraud members making them falsely believe that they are profitably "mining" a crypto coin.. An expert witness said at the German Münster trial in October 2021 :"OneCoin does not consist of [promotional] tokens and is not created with the help of [promotional] tokens". The members have been lied to from the beginning.
OneEcosystem recently announced their White Paper, which doesn't explain in detail how promotional tokens from the MLM packages become Onecoins. They leave out the key fact that OneCoin "mining" is a simple division calculation, not any cryptocurrency mining. The White Paper further lies that the values are based on supply and demand, while in reality OneCoin's "value" is just proclaimed internally by the Bulgarian OneCoin criminals. There's obviously also no logical explanation for the promotional token multiplying via splits and promotions, which after "mining" create purported profit in fake value Onecoins.While OneCoin may have finally a working blockchain after 6-7 years, based on the Ethereum codebase running on their private server, it's all irrelevant what comes to the fraud; storing play money coins which have a fake euro value to any ledger, be it a blockchain or any other ledger, doesn't make it real money.
By concentrating on explaining about the private Ethereum codebased blockchain in the White Paper, the Bulgarian OneCoin criminals conveniently avoid touching the core issues which make OneCoin/OneEcosystem a clear scam.
OneCoin recently appointed a new Bulgarian CEO, Ventsislav Zlatkov. Marketing and promotion of the scam is operated by OneEcosystem/OneLife MLM network, which is led by convicted criminal robber Cordel "KingJayms" James from Trinidad & Tobago.
Contrary to any legit European financial or virtual currency service company, OneCoin operates totally unlicensed and unregulated and is warned by countless financial regulatory agencies around the world. OneCoin is stated to be a "massive international fraud scheme" by the United States Department of Justice. Ex-head of OneCoin, Konstantin Ignatov, has testified in US court, testifying that OneCoin is worthless and a fraud scheme.
The Bulgarian OneCoin scam operators announce OneCoin fake value as 42.5€ and a fake market-cap of (ridiculous) Trillions of Euros on their MLM Portal, promoters claiming it to be bigger project than Apple.
In reality, OneCoin doesn't have a market defined value, there's no exchange where OneCoin could be exchanged to any real currency. Thus OneCoin has no real market-capitalization. It has Trillions of euros of fake value supply as virtual coins on member accounts, but practically no demand, which means the coin is generally worthless, just as Konstantin Ignatov testified.
This makes OneCoin also an already collapsed ponzi, which still has some active promoters left who try to attract gullible people with MLM packages claiming to create a huge value in Dealshaker, or even claiming that OneCoin will become a world currency. Despite continuing efforts OneCoin recruiting has collapsed compared to the levels what it was 3-4 years ago.
Unsurprisingly OneCoin company doesn't accept its own coin for service fee payments, but accepts euros and bitcoins. A large percentage of members have account problems, and the company is collecting service fees from them, but still many members can't access their accounts since around September 2020.
Dealshaker is OneCoin's low traffic unpopular "e-commerce" website only for the OneEcosystem members, but only a small percentage of members have ever used it. Most deals are hybrid Euro+One deals, in which the Euro part already covers or exceeds the actual value of the product.
As OneCoin has no real value, by far the most deals are not attractive and require euros as well. Fake deals have plagued Dealshaker, especially fake car and real estate scam deals, where people have lost a lot of money.
A pseudo-compliancy of the OneCoin fraud scheme's "business model" is claimed with the usual education package explanation. Of course the real reason people have been lured to pay big money for the MLM packages, are the multiplying tokens, and the claimed fake value of Onecoin and its "amazing future" which is always "coming soon".
There's an active indictment against Ruja Ignatova by the US Department of Justice. Ruja faces 85 years in prison. There is an active international arrest warrant for her issued by both USA and more recently by Germany,
"Manhattan U.S. Attorney Announces Charges Against Leaders Of “OneCoin,” A Multibillion-Dollar Pyramid Scheme Involving The Sale Of A Fraudulent Cryptocurrency.
Current Leader Konstantin Ignatov Arrested at Los Angeles International Airport":
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-announces-charges-against-leaders-onecoin-multibillion-dollar
Konstantin Ignatov (brother of Ruja) acted as the head of OneCoin after Ruja disappeared in October 2017, and was arrested on March 6, 2019, has pleaded guilty on 4 charges in United States Southern District New York :
1. Count 1 - Conspiracy to Commit Wire fraud
2. Count 2 - Wire Fraud
3. Count 3 - Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering
4. Count 4 - Conspiracy to Commit Bank Fraud
Konstantin pleaded guilty on these charges by signing a plea agreement letter on October 4, 2019.
The letter (Government Exhibit 901) can be seen here:
https://www.scribd.com/document/434747259/On-OneCoin-Cooperator-Konstantin-Ignatov-s-Plea-Agreement-for-5K1-letter
or here: https://imgur.com/a/noD3dBA
After that, Konstantin became an active Government witness against OneCoin, which he still today is.
On November 5,6 and 7 of 2019, Konstantin testified in Mark Scott trial during 3 days against OneCoin, admitting and confirming in great detail that OneCoin is a scam, the coin is worthless, and there's no valid blockchain.
The transcripts of the Mark Scott trial where Konstantin was testifying are freely available for all to read here:
November 5,2019: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7829201/187/united-states-v-scott/
(starting from PDF page 95)
November 6,2019: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7829201/189/united-states-v-scott/
(starting from PDF page 14)
November 7,2019: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7829201/191/united-states-v-scott/
(starting from PDF page 23)
At the end of February 2021, after sitting nearly 2 years in different detention centers, Konstantin was able to get to home arrest while waiting for his witness cooperation to end, and eventually his sentencing to take place.
Now that Konstantin is in house arrest and can use Internet, he has deleted all OneCoin material from his personal Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/konsti.keks
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Significant OneCoin USA Federal Court Dates:
David Pike sentencing: March 1, 2022 Sentenced - 2 years probation
Gilbert Armenta sentencing: February 16, 2023 sentenced to 5 years in prison
Sebastian Greenwood has pleaded guilty. Sentenced to 20 years in prison
Mark Scott convicted. Sentencing: January 25, 2024
Konstantin Ignatov pleaded guilty. Sentencing: March 5, 2024
Irina Dilkinska pleaded guilty. Sentencing: April 3, 2024
Ruja Ignatova: remains at large
Follow real time OneCoin scam updates: https://twitter.com/CryptoXpose