The Lacking Cryptoqueen: The Billion Greenback Cryptocurrency Con and the Lady Who Bought Away with It, by Jamie Bartlett, Hachette Books, 320 pages, $29
Newcomers to bitcoin typically dismiss the cryptocurrency as a pyramid or Ponzi scheme. The OneCoin rip-off reveals what it actually seems to be like when a pretend blockchain serves as cowl for a multilevel advertising and marketing fraud that pays early buyers with funds from new marks.
Right here we see the near-messianic pageantry frequent to overhyped initiatives. We see Matryoshka armies of worldwide holding firms and frontmen. We see starry-eyed everymen scrambling to take a position each final household greenback in “instructional supplies” that include “free” cash (to keep away from triggering laws). We see Curaçaoan banking consortia, Maltese playing issues, and a mysterious maven manipulating every thing behind the scenes earlier than absconding out of the blue into the evening.
Jamie Bartlett’s The Lacking Cryptoqueen particulars the sleazy rise and unsatisfying fall of the OneCoin con whereas investigating the potential whereabouts of the swindler behind all of it: a runaway wannabe-fashionista from Bulgaria named Ruja Ignatova.
In an business rife with swindles, OneCoin is in a league of its personal.
It’s common for cryptocurrency initiatives to overpromise on know-how or skimp on safety, resulting in giant losses in the marketplace or in person wallets. It’s not regular for a cryptocurrency to be structured like a multilevel advertising and marketing scheme, paying “buyers” extra on an outlined schedule once they recruit others. Neither is it regular for the coin to be fully managed by a for-profit firm with none precise blockchain in any respect, unbeknownst to the various keen “package deal holders.” Consequently, no different alleged cryptocurrency has managed to concoct a mammoth Ponzi scheme leading to $4 billion to $15 billion in losses. Solely Bernie Madoff can examine.
Ignatova had no experience in laptop science or know-how. Her principal promoting factors had been that she was a advisor at McKinsey—so spectacular—and favored to put on lengthy robes and crimson lipstick. This, mixed along with her unique Germano-Bulgarian accent and hyperlinks with numerous Sofia elites, proved sufficient to dazzle gullible targets into placing far an excessive amount of cash into her blockamamie scheme.
Bartlett, who chronicled the early bitcoin and up to date cypherpunk communities in his 2014 work The Darkish Web, teases out what few threads now we have on the furtive Ignatova to weave a portrait of an bold and shameless con girl who stopped at little or no to challenge the picture of herself that she wished onto the world. She wished to be wealthy, she wished to be glamorous, and she or he wished to be well-known. Precisely how she bought there was not her concern.
In 2013, Ignatova teamed up with Sebastian Greenwood, a key grifter on this story, who was at that time hawking a “new Fb” multilevel advertising and marketing scheme referred to as SiteTalk. He was impressed by Ignatova’s “bitcoin, however for pensions” convention concoction and noticed a possibility to mix the hype-driven worlds of cryptocurrency and multilevel advertising and marketing to extract most earnings. They shamelessly ripped off an present hybrid referred to as BigCoin and slapped a brand new title on it: OneCoin.
The masterminds behind OneCoin clearly thought little about such trifling particulars as launching a blockchain or coin economics. Quite, they targeted their energies on recruiting high multilevel advertising and marketing expertise: They poached high sellers from present pyramids and tried to promote them on the OneCoin thought. The pitch was mainly that this ball-gowned Bulgarian would kill bitcoin and “make you wealthy.” For no matter cause, this was sufficient to offer OneCoin momentum, and the rip-off began promoting itself.
One power of The Lacking Cryptoqueen is Bartlett’s capacity to mix gripping storytelling with the slightly dry regulatory context and legalese crucial to grasp how Ignatova pulled this off and simply how brazen the endeavor was. For instance, the OneCoin group knew that if their pyramid bought cash instantly, they may simply run afoul of securities laws, as they’d basically be paying commissions on inventory buying and selling. As a substitute, the group bought “instructional supplies” about OneCoin that had been tied to “free cash.” A “starter pack” value €100, or $138 USD, for a PDF and round 200 cash; a “Tycoon Dealer” package deal would run you $6,900 for 5 PDFs and 28,000 cash.
When you bought Tycoon Dealer packages to different marks, you’ll get a lower of any gross sales they made after that; that is your “downline,” and it is the place the actual cash is made in multilevel advertising and marketing schemes. The concept is to develop your downline as a lot as potential. In follow, this implies cajoling family and friends members into the pyramid. The highest tiny %, referred to as the “Crown Diamonds,” made off with tens of millions in downline commissions. The overwhelming majority made rooster feed, however there was at all times the promise that OneCoin would “go public”—be traded on a serious change like Binance—and get a ticket “to the moon.”
The foreign money itself was a giant pretend. Purchasers would see cash of their pockets after buying an academic package deal. However there was no blockchain there in any respect, only a database that will credit score and debit as requested—at the very least normally. The one change on which OneCoin could possibly be traded, xcoinx, was secretly owned by OneCoin, which manipulated the value. One other strain valve was Dealshaker, supposedly an Amazon killer, the place OneCoin promoters may promote tchotchkes for his or her pretend cash. The web sites had been amateurish and hardly practical, with misspelled FAQ pages.
On paper, folks had been millionaires. Xcoinx would restrict gross sales, set the value, and arbitrarily double the cash to make folks really feel like they had been wealthy. They earnestly believed they may retire to a yacht at some point. This hope was sufficient to maintain dupes holding the bag for a lot too lengthy; as Bartlett wrote his e-book, some cussed devotees had been nonetheless holding and buying and selling OneCoin. In the meantime, Ignatova and her co-conspirators handled the OneCoin financial institution accounts like private piggy banks, shopping for multimillion-dollar properties the world over and investing in sketchy initiatives nevertheless they noticed match.
Ignatova and her cronies by no means cared about OneCoin. They did not care in regards to the concepts they threw round in public, like “banking the world’s poor” or the “monetary revolution” and even killing bitcoin. They wished to earn a living and get out, and Bartlett marshals the panicked communications that present Ignatova scrambling for an exit whereas the worldwide monetary surveillance system crashed down onto her billion-dollar fraud. OneCoin stored chugging to the bitter finish, operating on fumes and a phantom employees properly after Ignatova disappeared someplace inside Greece in 2017. Bartlett’s finest guess is that she resides in worldwide waters within the Mediterranean Sea.
This e-book is full of scurrilous subplots and cheesy characters, and it provides an illuminating have a look at the world of worldwide finance and the various traps that ultimately did OneCoin in. It comes at an opportune time, given the general public’s ample urge for food lately for rip-off story. Hulu’s The Dropout and Apple TV’S WeCrashed bought loud buzz by dramatizing how narcissists can exploit techno-optimism and plain previous human greed. The previous covers Elizabeth Holmes and her bloodsucking Theranos rip-off, whereas the latter tackles WeWork, Adam and Rebekah Neumann’s kombucha-soaked and Imaginative and prescient Fund-ed workplace cult.
Maybe we’ll see an analogous streamed or televised therapy of “Dr. Ruja,” as she insisted on being referred to as, and the black gap of the OneCoin world. Like Holmes and the Neumanns, she makes a terrific villain. However Ignatova is completely different, and arguably extra sinister, than these better-known charlatans.
Theranos and WeWork humiliated elites who poured of their cash and reputations based mostly on the appeal and visions of their charismatic founders. These firms actually harm many common folks alongside the way in which; WeWork exploited its workers, whereas Theranos uncovered sufferers to presumably lethal well being misinformation. However by way of funding, it was principally the well-to-do who had been on the hook.
With OneCoin, against this, Ignatova and her group of legal professionals, moneymen, model consultants, and multilevel advertising and marketing maestros shamelessly focused and stole from common folks—in lots of instances, a few of the world’s most susceptible. Even Ignatova’s brother Konstantin, who ran the rip-off after Ruja disappeared, felt a twinge of guilt as he hawked OneCoin packages to unsuspecting farmers in Mbarara, Uganda.
The complication with multilevel advertising and marketing frauds and Ponzi schemes is that the victims are sometimes accomplices. They’re so blinded by guarantees of riches that they harangue family members to affix, utilizing the identical lies that labored on them. This may encourage folks to double down on their beliefs, as a result of admitting that you just had been suckered right into a fraud additionally means admitting that you just lured your loved ones with the identical false guarantees.
The Lacking Cryptoqueen is an enchanting look into the schematics and psychology of a rip-off. Let’s hope extra folks be taught in regards to the OneCoin debacle and the girl behind it. On a regular basis folks want to guard themselves in opposition to such predation, whether or not or not Ignatova ever sees her day in court docket.
This text initially appeared in print underneath the headline “ScamCoin”.
