U.S. Authorities Arrest One of the Masterminds Behind OneCoin
New York prosecutors have arrested one of the "masterminds" of OneCoin, accusing him of stealing "billions" from investors through an alleged pyramid scheme.
The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) charged Ruzha Ignatova and Konstantin Ignatov with securities fraud and money laundering, claiming the siblings defrauded investors of “billions of dollars” using a fraudulent cryptocurrency. Konstantin Ignatov was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport earlier this week as part of the investigation.
According to a press release, prosecutors allege that OneCoin is a pyramid scheme where members receive commissions for recruiting others into the project. These recruits are required to purchase crypto packages and OneCoin currently claims to have 3 million members worldwide.
While OneCoin claims that their tokens are mined from servers run by the company and that the price growth is organic, it turns out that neither of these claims are true.
Furthermore, Ruzha Ignatova claimed in an email that she had an “exit strategy” from the company.
SDNY U.S. attorney Jeffrey Berman said that “these defendants have created a multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency company based entirely on lies and deception“, adding:
“They promised great returns and minimal risk, but as alleged, this business is a pyramid scheme based on deception, not numbers. Investors were victimized while the defendants got rich.”
While Konstantin Ignatov was arrested, Ruzha Ignatova remains at large. Another defendant, Mark Scott, was arrested last year in Massachusetts.
READ MORE: OneCoin – The Pyramid Scheme That Shook the World
Authorities in a number of countries – including Belgium, the United Kingdom, Uganda, Italy, Nigeria, Germany, India, Hungary, Belize, Vietnam, Austria, Finland, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, China and Samoa – have warned about or investigated the OneCoin project since 2016 over similar suspicions of a pyramid scheme or fraud.
Prosecutors in China have charged more than 100 individuals with defrauding investors and successfully convicted several of those defendants. Indian authorities have also arrested some of the promoters of the project.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
