It is a mystery more perplexing than any airport thriller: how the woman behind one of the biggest and most blatant frauds in history could step off a plane in and simply vanish. To those on the trail of Ruja Ignatova, the glamorous Bulgarian businesswoman known as the ‘Cryptoqueen’, it was as if she had simply disappeared into thin air – just like the £3.3 billion she stole from the estimated one million people worldwide who sunk money into OneCoin, her fake cryptocurrency.When she vanished in Athens in 2017, Ignatova was being hunted by international crime-fighting agencies which said she had used OneCoin to pull off the financial scam of the century – a pyramid fraud matched only by Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme for its scale and audacity.In 2019 she was charged on five counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. And on Thursday, she was placed on the ’s ‘10 Most Wanted’ list – becoming the only woman on it – with a $100,000 (£83,000) reward on offer for any information leading to her arrest.
Load More
Load More