Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are
not just looking at a scam. We're looking at
the scam. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
And I don't say that lightly. You know, we cover
a lot of failed startups, bad investments, tech
that just, it just didn't pan out. But usually,
those start with good intentions, right? Exactly.
Someone has a dream, they try to build it, and
it crashes. Most failures are tragedies of incompetence
or bad timing. What we are looking at today is
a tragedy of intent. A $4 billion tragedy of
intent. We are talking about one coin. And if
you were anywhere near a computer or a financial
discussion between, say, 2014 and 2017, you probably
heard the noise. It was deafening. That was everywhere.
It was pitched as the Bitcoin killer. It was
supposed to be the democratization of finance
for the little guy. Right. But as The Times put
it later, it ended up being one of the biggest
scams in history. And that figure $4 billion,
that's probably the conservative estimate. Some
investigators think it could be much, much higher.
That's insane. But what makes OneCoin so fascinating
to me and why I think it's the perfect subject
for a deep dive is that it wasn't just a financial
crime. It was a psychological masterpiece. How
so? It leveraged the two biggest drivers of human
behavior. The fear of missing out and the complete
confusion around new technology. Right. Because
2014 was a weird time for crypto. Bitcoin had
just had that massive run up in 2013. You remember
it hit a thousand dollars for the first time
and then it crashed. Right. It crashed hard.
But the public consciousness had shifted. People
knew that magic Internet money could make you
rich, but they had absolutely no idea how it
worked. Precisely. And into that gap, that gap
between I want to get rich and I don't understand
how blockchains work, step Dr. Ruja Ignatova.
The crypto queen herself. And we have to spend
a second on her because she was not your typical
scammer. No, not at all. She wasn't some kid
in a basement with a hoodie. She had the credentials.
Oxford educated, a stint at McKinsey. She showed
up in ball gowns and diamonds. She looked like
the CEO of the future. She projected ultimate
competence and she was flanked by this guy, Sebastian
Greenwood, who we will discuss a lot today. He
was the engine, the the master distributor. So
they launched this thing in late 2014. And while
it feels like a decade ago, the fallout is still
raining down on people right now. Oh, yeah. We
are talking about court cases and sentencing
happening in 2024 and even into 2025. This isn't
a history lesson. It's a current event. It's
still unfolding. So here is the mission for today.
We have a massive stack of documents. We're talking
court filings, FBI warrants, investigative reports
from journalists. We're going to unpack how a
centralized pyramid scheme managed to masquerade
as a decentralized technological revolution for
years. And we need to explain the mechanics of
the lie because it is surprisingly technical
on the surface. And yet. It's shockingly simple
when you pull back the curtain. And we need to
answer the big questions. Where did all that
money go? And where in the world is Ruha Ignatova?
The billion dollar question or five million dollar
question now, I guess. Exactly. I promise you
by the end of this, you are going to have a massive
aha moment about the difference between. a real
blockchain, and what OneCoin actually used. Spoiler
alert. If your blockchain can be edited by a
guy named Steve in an office park, it's not a
blockchain. It definitely involves a lot less
cryptography and a lot more just typing numbers
into a SQL database. So let's get into it. Segment
one, the product that wasn't. Because in any
business, even a fraudulent one, you have to
sell something. Right. You can't just ask for
money for nothing. Well, you can, but that's
just begging. To make it a business, you need
a product. And OneCoin's legal structure was
actually, I have to say, it was quite clever
in a devious way. Okay. They explicitly claimed
they were not selling cryptocurrency. Which sounds
insane for a company called OneCoin. It does.
But legally, if you sell a currency or a security,
that requires licenses, audits, and intense scrutiny
from regulators. So, OneCoin marketed itself
as a company selling Educational material. Financial
education. Exactly. They were in the business
of knowledge. Okay, I've seen some of these materials
in our research stack. They called them educational
packages. And they had these grand names like
Tycoon Trader or Infinity Trader. Yeah, they
sounded very impressive. And the pricing structure
was designed to catch whales. It was a classic
funnel. How did that work? The packages start
small, around 100 euros, which is accessible
for almost anyone who's curious. It's a low barrier
to entry. Get them in the door. Exactly. But
they scaled up aggressively. You could buy packages
for 5 ,000 euros, 10 ,000, 27 ,000 euros. And
it went even higher. I'm looking at sources here
that show the top tier packages, sometimes they
bundle them together, reaching 118 ,000 euros.
And some reports I've seen indicate there were
special promotional packages that could hit 225
,500 euros. 225 ,000 euros. Let's just pause
on that. That is a house in many parts of the
world that is a Ferrari. It's life -changing
money. It's someone's entire retirement savings.
And in exchange for that, you are receiving...
PDF files. Ostensibly, yes. You are paying for
the knowledge. You are investing in yourself.
So for the price of a Harvard MBA, surely this
content was groundbreaking. Was it proprietary
trading algorithms, insider secrets from, I don't
know, the Wolf of Wall Street? This is the first
big aha moment of the scam. And it's almost funny
if it weren't so tragic. When investors and later
investigators actually opened these files, they
found something laughable. The content was. Right.
It was generic. It was basic explanations of
economic theory. Stuff you could get in an econ
101 textbook. And not even original basic explanations.
No, this is the best part. Lawsuits filed by
former investors revealed that huge swaths of
the text were just plagiarized. From where? We
are talking copy -paste jobs from free sources
available all over the internet. Including Wikipedia.
I saw that in the filings. Can you imagine? You
mortgage your house to buy the tycoon package,
you open the first module all excited, and you
realize you could have just googled what is inflation
and gotten the exact same text for free. It's
just, it's so tragic. But it speaks to the fact
that the product was never the point. The education
was what they call a MacGuffin. in film. It was
just the object that allowed the money to change
hands legally. So what was the real hook? The
real hook, the reason anyone paid 100 ,000 euros
for a Wikipedia article, was the tokens. Right.
Because when you bought the education, you got
these free tokens as a bonus. Yes. And the pitch
was that these tokens were the raw material used
to mine one kind. They're co -opting the language
of Bitcoin here. Completely. In Bitcoin, as you
know, mining is this competitive, energy -intensive
process where computers solve complex math problems
to secure the network and create new coins. It's
real work. It's difficult. It is. So one coin
told its users, you don't need to buy expensive
hardware. You don't need to be a coder. Just
give us your tokens and we will mine the coins
for you on our powerful servers. It's mining
as a service, a hands -off approach. In theory.
But in reality, it was a simulation, a complete
fiction. This is the part that feels like a video
game to me. You know, in a mobile game, you tap
a button to build a castle and a little timer
appears that says building. four hours left and
then four hours later ding you have a castle
but you didn't build anything a line of code
just changed a zio to a one in a database that
is a perfect analogy it's exactly what happened
investors would log into their one coin back
office which by all accounts was a very slick
looking website and they would see a dashboard
right they would click mine and a progress bar
would start chugging along they would watch it
for days or weeks and then the numbers in their
one coin account would go up They felt like they
had accomplished work. They felt like they were
part of the digital revolution. Look, I'm mining.
But what was actually happening on the back end?
Was there anything? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
There were no mining servers. There were no complex
cryptographic puzzles being solved. The company
claimed to have these massive mining farms in
Bulgaria and Hong Kong. But investigators found
that these were ghosts. So what was it? It was
just a standard SQL database. OK, for the listeners
who aren't tech heavy, let's really distinguish
between a SQL database and a blockchain, because
this is the absolute crux of the lie. Right.
It's the most important distinction. A blockchain,
like bitcoins, is a decentralized ledger. It
lives on thousands of computers. We call them
nodes all over the world. No single person or
company controls it. So if I wanted to cheat
the system. If you wanted to change a record,
say you want to give yourself a million Bitcoin
out of thin air, you would have to convince more
than half, 51 % of the entire global network
to agree with your lie. Which is? It's computationally
and economically impossible. It's what makes
it secure. A transaction is immutable. Once it's
written, it's written forever. Okay, so that's
a blockchain. What's a SQL database? A SQL database,
on the other hand, is what your local library
uses to track overdue books. It's what a standard
corporate website uses for its user accounts.
It lives on a private server. And someone has
the password. Exactly. And if you have the admin
password, you can go in and change anything you
want, whenever you want. So Ruja Ignatova and
her team had the admin password to the money.
They did. OneCoin wasn't a cryptocurrency. It
was a loyalty points program hosted on a private
server in an office in Bulgaria. They could issue
as many coins as they wanted. They could freeze
accounts. They could revert transactions. They
had total control. And they did. They controlled
the supply completely. Which meant they could
rig the price. In a real market, like for Bitcoin
or stocks, the price is determined by supply
and demand from millions of buyers and sellers.
Right. In one coin, the price went up because
Arusha said it went up. leaked internal documents
show they would hold meetings and literally decide,
okay, next week the price of one coin goes from
five euros to six euros. And the users log in,
they see the graph on their dashboard go up and
to the right, and they think, wow, I'm a genius
investor. Exactly. It creates this powerful feedback
loop of euphoria. You see your account value
doubling. then tripling on paper, why would you
question the technicals when you feel like you're
getting rich? That leads us perfectly into the
structure of the scam because we call it a scam,
but experts usually debate between two specific
terms, Ponzi and pyramid. Right. And one coin
was this weird Frankenstein's monster of both.
It was a hybrid for sure. And understanding the
difference helps explain why it grew so big so
fast. Okay, let's unpack the definitions for
everyone. Let's start with Ponzi. A Ponzi scheme,
named after Charles Ponzi of course, is fundamentally
an investment fraud. You take money from new
investors and you use it to pay returns to earlier
investors. There's no actual profit being generated
from a business. You're just robbing Peter to
pay Paul. The Bernie Madoff special, exactly.
OneCoin had elements of this. They needed a constant
flow of fresh capital to keep the lights on and,
crucially, to allow the very few people who are
actually cashing out to do so. But a pure Ponzi
usually collapses when the flow of new money
slows down, right? It does. And that's where
the pyramid scheme structure comes in. Okay,
so what's a pyramid? A pyramid scheme is defined
by recruitment. The primary way you make money
isn't by selling the product, because remember,
the product here is a plagiarized PDF, but by
recruiting other people to sell the product.
Hang on. Do you want to be your own boss and
work from your phone? It's that. But on a global
billion -dollar scale, OneCoin was a recruiting
machine. They used a classic multi -level marketing
or MLM structure. If you brought someone new
in, you got a commission on the package they
bought. And if they brought someone in? You got
a piece of that, too. And so on down the line.
It creates this massive incentive to evangelize.
And this is where the rallies come in. We've
all seen the footage. It's incredible. We're
talking Wembley Arena in London, huge arenas
in Bangkok and Macau. These weren't boring financial
seminars. No, these were rock concerts. There's
fire, lasers, pumping music. Ruja comes out in
a silk ball gown. And notice the focus of those
meetings. They barely mentioned the educational
packages. No one was on stage saying, check out
this great chapter on supply and demand economics.
They were screaming about the coin, the price,
the Bitcoin killer. They were selling the dream.
And leading that charge, whipping up that frenzy,
was Sebastian Greenwood. We mentioned him earlier,
but we need to look at his incentives. He was
the global master distributor. What does that
actually mean in terms of money? It means he
was at the absolute apex of the pyramid. The
compensation plan was incredibly lucrative for
those at the top. Greenwood took a percentage
of the entire network's sales. The entire global
network? Yes. Some estimates suggest he was taking
up to 5 % of the global volume in one capacity
or another. 5 % of $4 billion. It's an obscene
amount of money. Personally, investigations suggest
he made over 300 million U .S. dollars. 300 million.
And he didn't exactly bury it in the backyard,
did he? No. Part of the calm is looking the part.
If you are selling the future of money, you have
to look like you own the future. Greenwood spent
lavishly. What did he buy? International real
estate apartments in Dubai, properties in Thailand,
a place in London, luxury clothing. He had a
collection of high -end watches that would make
a professional collector weep. And the boat.
We have to talk about the boat. The Sunseeker
yacht. He put a down payment of 6 .5 million
Swedish krona on it. You know, there's a specific
kind of hubris to buying a super yacht with money
stolen from people who are just trying to save
for their kids' education or their own retirement.
It really paints the picture of who these people
were. They weren't deluded idealists who got
in over their heads. They were looters. Absolutely.
And while Greenwood was buying yachts, the investors
were facing a very different reality. This is
the part that always confuses people. If my account
says I have a million dollars in OneCoin, why
can't I just withdraw it? Right. The Hotel California
problem. Yeah. You can check out anytime you
like, but you can never leave. So how did they
trap the money? This was managed through the
OneCoin exchange, which was called Xcoins. This
was an internal marketplace. Internal only. Yes.
You couldn't take your one coin and sell it on
a real exchange like Coinbase or Binance because,
again, it wasn't a real crypto. It didn't exist
outside their server. So you had to sell it back
to other users on their exchange. And they controlled
the rules of that exchange. Brutally. They had
selling limits. For example, if you bought the
basic starter package, maybe you were only allowed
to sell 12 euros worth of coins per day. So even
if you're a millionaire on screen, you can only
get lunch money out. Exactly. They drip fed the
liquidity to prevent a collapse. And then whenever
the selling pressure from the community got too
high, they would just pull the plug. The maintenance
excuse. A classic. On March 1st, 2016, suddenly
the exchange closes. The official notice says
it will be closed for two weeks for maintenance
and better integration with the blockchain. Which
we now know is a complete lie because there was
no blockchain to integrate with. Precisely. But
it bought them two weeks where no money could
leave the building. Meanwhile, money was still
coming in from new recruits buying packages.
And they did it again later, right? It wasn't
a one -time thing. Oh yeah. January 2017. The
exchange shuts down again, this time for good.
But they had a brilliant excuse. What was it
this time? They claimed they were preparing for
an IPO, an initial public offering. They were
going to take the company public in 2018. So
they told everyone. They told everyone, don't
sell your coins now. That's a terrible idea.
Convert your coins into OFC certificates for
shares in the future company. You'll be even
richer when we're on the stock market. That is
genius in a truly evil way. I can't give you
your money back, but I can give you this other
piece of paper that promises you more money later.
It completely prevented a bank run. If everyone
tries to cash out at once, the Ponzi collapses
instantly by locking people in and dazzling them
with future promises of a huge IPO. Russia and
Greenwood bought themselves another year to siphon
off the real cash, the euros, dollars and yuan
into their labyrinth of offshore accounts. It
creates this artificial scarcity and keeps the
hope alive. But surely with an operation this
massive operating in almost every country on
Earth, the regulators weren't blind. I mean,
four billion dollars doesn't just move through
the banking system unnoticed. It didn't go unnoticed
at all. And that's the real tragedy here. The
warnings were loud and they started surprisingly
early. This wasn't the case where the government
woke up in 2017 and said, whoops, we missed one.
They were screaming about it. Let's look at that
timeline of suspicion. This is segment three
because it starts right in their own backyard.
Bulgaria, September 2015. OneCoin is barely a
year old at this point. The Bulgarian Financial
Supervision Commission issues a public warning
explicitly citing OneCoin. What did it say? They
effectively said this is a risky new asset. It
isn't regulated. Be careful. It was a clear red
flag. And how did OneCoin respond to this? Did
they hire lawyers? Did they try to comply? They
just moved. They ceased their main activities
in Bulgaria and started moving their bank accounts
to foreign jurisdictions. They played a game
of jurisdictional whack -a -mole. If one country
got suspicious, they'd just open accounts in
another. And then 2016 comes around and the dam
really starts to break. It really was a global
chorus of warnings. In February 2016, the Daily
Mirror in the UK ran a big investigation. And
they didn't use soft language. No, I read that
one. They called it virtually worthless. And
interestingly, they described the community as
a cult. That word cult matters. Because when
you looked at the OneCoin believers, the OneLife
Network, they call themselves, they defended
Ruja with religious fervor. Absolutely. If you
criticize the coin, you are a hater. You didn't
get it. You were part of the old system that
was trying to hold them down. That's the classic
defense mechanism of the pyramid. If the outside
world is the enemy, you only trust the leader.
But the warnings kept coming. March 2016, Norway's
direct selling association flat out calls it
a pyramid scheme. Then December 2016, Italy's
antitrust authority issues an interim injunction
and then later bans it completely. So Italy actually
shut it down within their borders. They did.
And then there's China. We have to talk about
China. China is a massive market for these kinds
of schemes because of the gambling culture and
the strong desire to move money out of the country.
But the Chinese authorities do not mess around.
No. In 2016, they started prosecuting members
and seizing assets. How much did they get? 30
.8 million U .S. dollars seized in one go. In
total, over the course of their prosecutions,
they recovered something like 1 .7 billion yuan.
That's hundreds of millions of dollars. So by
the end of 2016, you have public warnings in
Bulgaria, investigations in the U .K., a pyramid
scheme designation in Norway, a ban in Italy
and mass arrests in China. Right. And yet the
money kept flowing in from other places. Why?
Because of the narrative. OneCoin told their
followers that the governments were scared. The
banks are fighting us because we are the future.
They are trying to stop the revolution. Every
warning, every arrest was spun as proof that
OneCoin was a genuine threat to the establishment.
That is some twisted, brilliant logic. But then
we get to the Vietnam story in 2017. And this,
to me, is the moment where the sophisticated
businesswoman mask slips and you see the desperate
criminal underneath. This is the Vietnam forgery
scandal. It's so clumsy. OneCoin desperately
needed a win. They needed to show they had some
kind of government legitimacy. So Rouge's team
announced that OneCoin had been officially licensed
by the Vietnamese government. And not just licensed,
but as the first legal crypto in all of Asia.
A huge claim. They posted photos online of the
official document. It had the government seal,
the signature, everything. Looked legit. It looked
official to the untrained eye. But the Vietnamese
government reacted with incredible speed. The
Ministry of Planning and Investment issued a
statement just four days later. They said flatly,
we never signed this. This document is a forgery.
And didn't they find out the signature itself
was impossible? Yes. This is the best part. The
official whose signature was supposedly on the
document. wasn't even in that position on the
date the document was supposedly signed. So it's
just a clumsy Photoshop job? A terrible one.
It reeks of desperation. That's not a 4D chess
move by a genius. That's a panic move. The walls
were closing in? They were. Around the same time
in India, the police actually went undercover.
They attended a big recruitment seminar in Navi,
Mumbai. I love this detail. Just imagining the
police sitting in the audience, clapping along
with everyone else, taking notes on who the main
promoters are. And then, after gathering the
evidence, they raided the event. They arrested
the leaders and seized millions in rupees. But,
and this is the recurring theme of the OneCoin
story, when they went to freeze the main bank
accounts, most of the money was gone. Ten million
U .S. dollars had been transferred out just moments
before the seizure. Someone had a tip -off. Or
they were just moving money so fast, constantly,
that the law couldn't keep up. It was a global
money laundering operation on an industrial scale.
They were using shell companies, banks, and tax
havens, layers and layers of obfuscation to stay
one step ahead. Which brings us to the climax,
segment four, the disappearance. Because you
can only run a scam for so long before either
the math breaks or the handcuffs click. And late
2017 is the turning point. The U .S. justice
system had been quietly building a massive case.
They had filed a secret warrant for Russia Ignatova's
arrest. Do we think she knew about the warrant?
Almost certainly. Whether she had a mole inside
law enforcement or just sensed the heat was getting
too intense, she ran. On October 25, 2017, she
boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia, Bulgaria
to Athens, Greece. Ryanair. It's such a mundane
detail. The woman who stole billions of dollars
flying a budget airline for her escape. It's
the last time she was confirmed to be seen in
public. She landed in Athens and then nothing.
The trail goes cold. But she left her family
behind to face the music. Her brother, Konstantin
Ignatov. Konstantin. He's a tragic figure in
his own way. He was always seen as the party
brother. He wasn't the mastermind. Not the brains
of the operation. No, he was the guy with the
tattoos and the gym membership. But when Ruja
vanished, he stepped up. He became the new face
of OneCoin. He took the captain's chair on the
Titanic right after it hit the iceberg. That's
a perfect description. He continued the lies.
He kept telling investors, Ruja is working on
big things in the background. The IPO is still
coming. But he lacked her polish. And more importantly,
He lacked her escape plan. The raid in 2018 in
Sofia must have been the reality check for everyone.
It was. German prosecutors working with Bulgarian
police stormed the OneCoin headquarters. They
seized servers, documents, everything. This was
the moment the tech was physically dismantled.
But Konstantin kept touring. He even came to
the U .S. Which was a fatal mistake. In March
2019, he was at Los Angeles International Airport,
LAX, getting ready to fly out, and the FBI was
waiting for him at the gate. Wow. Imagine that
moment. You think you're a crypto mogul, you're
about to board a flight, and suddenly you're
in federal custody. And the dominoes fell very
quickly after that. Constantine, facing decades
in prison, flipped. He pleaded guilty in November
2019. He started cooperating. He turned on the
whole organization. He gave up details about
Ruja, about the money laundering networks, everything.
He's facing up to 90 years in prison, though
his cooperation will likely reduce that sentence
significantly. And it wasn't just him. A scam
this big needs professional help. Let's talk
about Mark Scott. Right. Mark Scott wasn't some
street hustler. He was a partner at a major international
law firm. Lock Lord. Yeah. A very prestigious
firm. Mark Scott was the guy who made the money
disappear. He was the master launderer. How did
he do it? He set up a series of fake private
equity funds. They were called the Finnero funds
in places like the British Virgin Islands. He
took $400 million of one coin money and pretended
it was investment capital from wealthy European
families. He laundered nearly half a billion
dollars and for his trouble. He reportedly made
about $50 million in fees. And what did he do
with it? He bought a yacht, of course, and several
high -end properties in Cape Cod. The greed is
just universal in this story. He was found guilty
by a jury in 2019. And then there's the co -founder,
Sebastian Greenwood, the man with the Sunseeker.
He was hunted down, arrested in Thailand in July
2018. He was living on a private island, I believe.
Wow. They extradited him to the U .S. He held
out for a while, maintained his innocence, but
eventually pleaded guilty in December 2022. And
the sentence was heavy. 20 years. He was sentenced
in September 2023. He also had to forfeit billions
in assets, though collecting that money is a
whole other story. And just recently, this year,
the head of legal and compliance, Irina Dalkinska.
The irony is just... It's too much. The head
of compliance was actively laundering money for
the company. She was extradited from Bulgaria
in 2023 and was just sentenced to four years
in prison in April of 2024. So let's recap the
players. The brother is singing to the feds.
The co -founder is doing 20 years. The big shot
lawyer is found guilty. The compliance officer
is in jail. The whole inner circle is dismantled.
Except for the queen, Ruja. She is still the
ghost in the machine. Which brings us to today.
Segment five, the current state of affairs, because
the story hasn't ended. Ruja Ignatova is currently
one of the most wanted human beings on the planet.
Literally, she is on the FBI's 10 most wanted
fugitives list. She's the only woman on there
right now, I believe. She was added in June 2022.
It's a very exclusive club you don't want to
be in. And Europol has her on their most wanted
list as well. And there is a bounty on her head.
A massive one. Initially, it was $100 ,000. But
in June 2024, the U .S. State Department, through
their Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program,
raised the reward to up to $5 million. $5 million
for information leading to her arrest? That kind
of money makes friends turn on friends, makes
bodyguards and accomplices rethink their loyalty.
It does. And it leads to the two prevailing theories
about where she is. Theory one, she is alive,
well, and looking very different. You mean plastic
surgery? Extensive plastic surgery, a new face,
new hair, a new identity, a new high -quality
fake passport. Maybe living in a place like Russia
or Dubai, somewhere with no extradition treaty
with the U .S. She took enough money, likely
billions, to pay for silence for a very, very
long time. But then there's the darker theory,
the theory that she isn't paying anyone anymore.
The dead theory. This has been pushed heavily
by investigative journalists, particularly in
Bulgaria. They've uncovered sources suggesting
she might have been murdered as early as November
2018. Murdered by who? By the very organized
crime figures who are allegedly protecting her
and helping her launder money. There are strong
allegations connecting her to a notorious Bulgarian
drug lord known as Taki. So the theory is? The
theory is that she became a liability. She knew
too much. She was bringing way too much heat
from the FBI and international law enforcement.
So they closed the account permanently. There
were those gruesome rumors that she was killed
on a yacht in the Ionian Sea and dismembered.
That's the story, yes. It's incredibly gruesome.
But we have to stress, legally. Officially, she
is a fugitive. The FBI doesn't put dead people
on the Pop 10 list unless they have definitive
proof. They believe there is still a chance she
is out there. And while that international hunt
goes on, the assets are slowly being clawed back.
Very slowly. In 2024, the Bulgarian prosecutor
general initiated proceedings to confiscate her
properties in Sofia. We are talking about office
buildings, luxury apartments. It's a dismantling
of the physical empire she left behind. But the
idea of one coin, that seems a lot harder to
kill. It is. It's like a zombie. Yeah. Even after
all the arrests, the convictions, the disappearance,
the network tried to pivot. They rebranded. What'd
they call it? They called it One Ecosystem. One
Ecosystem. It sounds so benign and friendly.
Exactly. They claimed it was a completely separate
entity, just using the same community and some
of the same, well, technology. They tried to
migrate the users over. It's a zombie brand.
Wow. It proves that once you have a community
that believes. a community that's been radicalized
into a certain worldview. You can keep milking
them even after the original cow is long gone.
It's terrifying. It shows that the scam wasn't
just about the money. It was about the belief
system they created. It was a movement for many
people. So let's wrap this up. We have covered
a lot of ground here. The fake education, the
SQL database masquerading as a blockchain, the
billions of dollars, the yachts, the prison sentences,
the manhunt. It is a cautionary tale in every
single sense of the word. For the listener, what
is the one single thing they should take away
from this? Aside from, you know, don't buy crypto
from a woman in a ball gown at a rock concert.
I think it comes back to that old saying that's
become popular in crypto circles. If you don't
understand where the yield comes from. You are
the yield. I love that. Say that again. If you
don't understand the mechanism of the profit,
you are the profit. Yeah. OneCoin thrived on
the black box model. Put money in here, magic
happens inside, more money comes out there. Don't
ask questions. Don't ask questions. And in the
age of AI and even more complex crypto, we're
going to see this again and again. People will
say it's a quantum trading bot or it's an AI
-driven decentralized finance protocol. Buzzwords
as camouflage for a scam. Exactly. If they can't
explain it to you in plain English, or if the
code isn't open source and verifiable by third
parties, you have to assume it's a spreadsheet
in a basement in Bulgaria. And assume the mining
is just a progress bar on a screen. Precisely.
Assume it's a game. I want to leave everyone
with a thought to chew on. Ruša Ignatova. Five
million dollars on her head. Right now, as you're
listening to this, she is either at the bottom
of the sea or she is sitting in a villa somewhere,
maybe with a different nose and different hair,
watching the news. Maybe she's even listening
to this deep dive. That is a chilling thought.
If she is out there, she pulled off one of the
greatest heists of the 21st century and got away
with it. But if the circles she moved in, the
drug lords, the international money launderers,
if they decided she was a loose end, then she
paid the ultimate price for that fake coin. A
very dark end to the story, if true. And for
the rest of us, the next OneCoin is probably
being launched right now on a Telegram group
somewhere with a new charismatic leader and a
new set of buzzwords. The question is, have we
learned enough from this to spot it this time?
I really hope so. Thanks for listening to The
Deep Dive. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and
whatever you do, keep your keys safe. We'll see
you next time.