Ruja Ignatova
Ruja Plamenova Ignatova, also known by the nickname "Cryptoqueen", is a Bulgarian-German entrepreneur and con artist best known as one of the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, and as the founder of the fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme OneCoin, which The Times described as "one of the biggest scams in history." She was the subject of the 2019 BBC podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen and the 2022 book of the same name. Ignatova boarded a Ryanair flight to Athens on October 25, 2017, and has not been seen since.
Since her disappearance, Ignatova has long been presumed to be on the run from various international law enforcement agencies. The FBI has offered up to five million dollars for any information leading to her arrest. On March 7, 2019, an indictment was unsealed in which the United States charges Ignatova with wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. The FBI added Ignatova to the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in June 2022. Ignatova is the subject of an Interpol warrant issued by German authorities.
Reporting in 2023 and 2024 suggested that Ignatova may have been murdered in 2018 on the orders of Bulgarian organised crime figure "Taki" Hristoforos Nikos Amanatidis, who is suspected of initially sheltering her.
Early life and education
Ignatova was born on May 30, 1980, in Ruse, Bulgaria. Her father, Plamen, was a mechanical engineer; her mother, Veska, was a nursery school teacher. Her family was Romani. She has a younger brother, Konstantin, known as "Konsti". After the fall of the Iron Curtain, Ignatova emigrated to Germany with her family in 1990 and spent the remainder of her childhood in a small Schramberg apartment.Ignatova performed well in school, skipping a grade, and was described by a Schramberg teacher as the smartest student he taught. She was considered arrogant by her classmates; in a schoolbook, she described herself:
At the age of 18, she received a scholarship to the University of Konstanz. While a student, she was briefly a student representative for the Christian Democratic Union. She graduated in 2005 with a PhD in private international law with the dissertation Art. 5 Nr. 1 EuGVO – Chancen und Perspektiven der Reform des Gerichtsstands am Erfüllungsort, which discusses lex causae in conflict of laws. She later earned a Master's degree in European law at Oxford University. She then returned to Bulgaria and worked as a consultant in the Sofia office of McKinsey & Company. After the Sofia office closed in 2009 amid the Great Recession, Ignatova purchased property near Frankfurt and contemplated returning to Germany, but ultimately stayed in Bulgaria.
Criminal activities
In 2012, she was convicted of fraud in Germany in connection with her father Plamen Ignatov's acquisition of a company that shortly afterwards was declared bankrupt under dubious circumstances; she was given a suspended sentence of 14 months' imprisonment. In 2013, she was involved with a multi-level marketing scam called BigCoin.In 2014, she founded a pyramid scheme called OneCoin. Inspired by the success of Bitcoin, she claimed that OneCoin was a simpler and safer alternative to the more well-known cryptocurrency. She claimed that investors simply had to send money into a bank account to receive OneCoin. Due to its structure as a pyramid scheme, the scam rapidly grew in popularity across the world. OneCoin was not a real cryptocurrency, and the claims she made about the coin's increasing value were lies. Wealthy investors lost millions of dollars and investors in rural Uganda lost their homes. The vast majority of investment came from China, although investments had also been made from countries such as Brazil, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Norway, Canada, Yemen, and Palestine.
Investigation and disappearance
On October 25, 2017, Ignatova was scheduled to speak to an audience of OneCoin investors in Lisbon. Instead, she traveled from Sofia, Bulgaria to Athens, on a Ryanair flight, then disappeared after she may have been tipped off about increasing police investigations into OneCoin. In 2019, her brother Konstantin Ignatov pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering in connection with the scheme. According to Bulgaria's Bureau of Investigative Reporting and Data, which is an independent journalistic organization, allegedly a Bulgarian organized crime kingpin, Krasmir Kamenov, wanted to support a United States investigation into Ignatova’s disappearance, but was killed before he could assist American officials.In 2022, prosecutors in Darmstadt, Germany confirmed an investigation of "a lawyer from Neu-Isenburg" for possible money laundering: the transfer of 7.69 million euros by Ignatova into one of her private accounts in 2016. In January 2022, police searched apartments and offices in Weilburg, Baden-Baden, Frankfurt am Main, Bad Homburg, Neu-Isenburg and Vaihingen.
Afterwards, the North Rhine-Westphalia Police and German Federal Criminal Police Office announced that Ignatova is sought for fraud charges. The Federal Criminal Police Office announced a €5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. An Interpol Red Notice followed. This listing was reciprocated by Europol adding Ignatova to its 'most wanted' list; however, Deutsche Welle notes that the Europol listing was removed under unknown circumstances.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation added Ignatova to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, replacing Octaviano Juarez-Corro, and announced at a joint press conference with IRS Criminal Investigation and United States Attorney's Office Southern District of New York. The FBI followed up with an episode of its podcast and YouTube series Inside the FBI devoted to Ignatova and the OneCoin case. As of May 2022, there was a reward of up to $250,000 for information leading to Ignatova's arrest; in June 2024, the reward was increased to $5,000,000. In August 2024, a "UK court ordered a global asset freeze for and her OneCoin associates".
While a 2022 interview with FBI Special Agent Paul Roberts noted that the agency's investigation into Ignatova was "operating under the assumption that she is still alive" and that the agency had "no information" to counter that belief, Bulgarian investigative reporting site Bureau of Investigative Reporting and Data – BIRD published a 2023 report on Bulgarian police documents in which a police informant had overheard Georgi Vasilev, the brother-in-law of the Bulgarian drug lord "Taki" Hristoforos Amanatidis, saying that Ignatova was murdered in November 2018 on Taki's orders. The alleged murderer, Hristo Hristov, who is also Bulgarian, is serving a sentence in a Dutch prison for drug trafficking. According to the report, Ignatova was murdered aboard a yacht in the Ionian Sea, and her body was dismembered and thrown overboard. The alleged motive for the murder was to conceal Taki's involvement in the OneCoin scam.
Ignatova was the subject of a 2022 book titled The Missing Cryptoqueen by journalist Jamie Bartlett.