How the Cryptoqueen Stole Billions | Investigators

1 two 3 Applause please, within 18 months, approximately one million people from 175 countries had invested something like €4 billion in one currency, their cryptocurrency, thinking they had moved on to the next big thing. It is really a pleasure for me to be here. A year and a half after we launched our cryptocurrency coin she traveled the world speaking at large stadiums, concert venues and seminars, the sky really is the limit for us, we want to be the number one cryptocurrency and then in October 2017, we make roua boards. a Ryan Air flight from Sofia, Bulgaria to Athens, Greece and disappears into thin air, never to be seen again.

Ignatova founded and ran one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history, she ran a fake cryptocurrency called onecoin and collected

billions

of dollars from her victims throughout the entire affair. It was false, except for the

billions

of euros that had been invested, we are trying to find out where it went, what happened and where it is now. I'm Jamie Bartlett, I'm a technology writer and for the last four years I've been researching the history of a currency and its founder, Dr. Rouer Igna, for The Missing Crypto Queen podcast and book. Dr. Rouer igna is a German-Bulgarian entrepreneur who in 2014 announced to the world that she had created the next Bitcoin, the next cryptocurrency that was going to appear. to be bigger than Bitcoin, it was going to revolutionize global finance.

She meets a man who specializes in multi-level marketing called Sebastian Greenwood and multi-level marketing is a sales technique where you sell products to your friends and family and earn a small commission. and then you recruit your friends and family to sell to their friends and family and you will earn a commission for everyone you recruit or are recruited by people you recruit, so this kind of gigantic pyramid of sellers is formed and in 2014 they decide to launch a coin and it starts very, very slow, very, very small, no one is sure if it is going to take off or not.

The thing about multi-level marketing is that everything depends on momentum and in a few months a billion euros have been invested in a currency, that quickly. took off Dr. Rouer made sure I looked like I had, she had an incredibly impeccable educational background, she was on the cover of Forbes magazine, except it wasn't the cover of Forbes magazine, it was the cover of Forbes Bulgaria, but in in fact it was sponsored content for which she paid, a few weeks later she spoke at an event organized by The Economist magazine and made sure that the photograph of her next to the economist's logo was in all her presentations like a coin grows, something like that As Dr.

Rouer herself grows up with her, she has seen her at all the lavish parties where she goes out with politicians, she wears millions of necklaces and soon she starts calling herself the Queen of Cryptocurrencies, so her birthday parties birthdays were always very, very luxurious, I mean the most expensive pink champagne and Cuban cigars and free sushi and everything you can imagine in 2016 his birthday party was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum a huge expense Tom Jones made a private concert this is Dr. Ro ignatova I am very happy to see you, I am now in the new Onecoin office, join me at the global event.

We have very, very good news for all Onecoin members, for all Onecoin users and for all of you it will be a very, very interesting and inspiring event. Probably the biggest event she did was at Wembley Arena in London in the summer of 2016. First of all, it was a big event, there were 3,000 people and she came on stage, very, very well choreographed to "This girl is on fire ", by Alicia Keys, which was you know, one of the songs she liked to play when she came on stage with a coin behind her pyate Technics and Flames rouer tells the crowd, okay, I'm going to increase the amount of coins from 2.1 billion to 120 billion, so 50 times more coins will be produced this way, but here's the good news: the price will not decrease, the price will stay exactly the same and she said as a small reward because I know that you will be worried about everything. this all the coins in your account will double overnight I'm going to double the coins what we will do as a company we will double the coins in your account none of this makes any sense this is not how Economics Works investors of all people really were professions, all religions, rich and poor alike, but there were people who sold everything they had to invest their money in this.

I spoke to a nurse. I spoke to a doctor. I spoke to a dentist who had left her job to just promote one. coin to buy a coin and promote it I talked to people who had invested her father's inheritance, she had promised so many people that they would get rich, but they actually believe that she could do this and that it would work towards the end of the summer of 2017 17 the pressure is starting to build on her, there are regulators all over the world who seem to be sniffing out what's going on and she panics and realizes she has to get out, as it turns out she's absolutely right, the Department Justice at the beginning of October issued a sealed arrest warrant for her, she asks her younger brother Constantine, who works as her personal assistant, to book her two flights, one to Vienna and one to Athens, she takes the one going to Athens and at that point judgment is completely dead, we just don't do it.

I don't know exactly what happened to her. Ignatova predicted all of this in 2014, when she was just starting out with a coin, back then she wrote an email titled exit strategy and listed a series of options on how to get away with it, the first one. Money and Run and for months and months we are trying to piece together from clues, sightings, knowledge of their lifestyle, private

investigators

helping us and believe me I have had sightings in every country you can imagine has had sexual relations. change and she lives in Brazil and we have to investigate these things.

I had a very credible sighting at Heathrow airport about 6 months ago, someone told me they had been sold a car. I mean, literally, she's everywhere and nowhere, but this is what I. I think it probably happened, she arrives in Thessaloniki, she stays there for a couple of days and then she does the one thing that people wouldn't expect, which is to return to Bulgaria again. I think she thought Bulgaria was a smart place for her. she was down for a while to see what happened, but then in early 2018, the German police who had also been investigating Dr.

Roua raided her office and she thought, "Oh man, this is really serious, I'm not going to get my way," so she goes again and this time I think she's going to Dubai. She had an attic there. She had a residency card in Dubai. She had many of her businesses in Dubai. She knew a lot of people there. In 2019, the US released her arrest warrant against her. her accusation and her brother was arrested and I think at that time she thought that Dubai is no longer a safe haven for me, not the one I thought, so I'm moving again and now she's going back to Europe.

Note for her At this point, she underwent a lot of plastic surgery. She has very, very good false documentation. Fake passports. She travels under a different name, so I believe she was able to return to Europe and all the different sightings I've had are very, very credible. Also put her in and around the Mediterranean, particularly in and around Greece, so our theory is that she spends a lot of time at sea on a large superyacht of some kind, and being at sea is actually a safe place to fishing. Since it's quite difficult to police international waters, the fun thing about doing this podcast was that we went to Sfia, of course, where the headquarters was.

We went to her head office, which was still open, there were staff coming and going, a huge security guy standing there. looking angry, coin logos were plastered all over the walls and she couldn't believe it was still open. Then we went to his beach mansion in Sopo on the Black Sea, we went to see his yacht and then we found out that he might be in Frankfurt somehow, so we moved to Frankfurt and started walking through all the expensive streets, we went in to the casinos, we went to the best restaurants with pictures of this woman, have you seen this woman?

She has blonde hair there, now she looked. Have you seen her? Have you seen her? No one had seen her except a postman who vaguely recognized her name and her face. We went to Uganda, where we traveled 400 miles west of Campala to Tiny Villages, where almost everyone had invested in onecoin and still believed in it. I turned up at a onecoin office in Uganda spoke to someone who was still promoting a coin and he was still telling me that everything was going to be fine. Rouge will return one day. We started working on the podcast in late 2018, but the first episode came out in September 2019.

She did a follow-up episode in mid-2020 because her brother showed up in court testifying against her investment manager. He had been arrested and pleaded guilty to fraud. She agreed to work with the government in June 2022. She published a book, The Missing Crypto Queen, which brings it up. Right up to date, I thought anyway because a week after the book came out, the FBI added her to the list of the 10 most wanted fugitives and we've been inundated with more sightings and clues that we're now investigating, so the story keep going. Our hope is that naming her on our 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list will draw attention to her and her alleged crimes and allow us to bring her to justice here in the United States.

Do you think so? I think she's becoming a race between us and the FBI as to who will find her first. I'm not even kidding. A currency is still valid today. There are still people promoting it. Anyone right now, if they wanted to, could go to her website. You might find Facebook groups promoting it. And I do not. I know even when Dr. Rouer is finally caught, maybe that's the moment it will all end and that's why finding her is so important.