Cryptoqueen wanted for R89 million suspected to be hiding in South Africa

German police believe that OneCoin cofounder Ruja Ignatova could be alive and are following leads in South Africa to trace her whereabouts, Der Spiegel reports.

US authorities have said that Ignatova spearheaded OneCoin, and that it was a $4 billion (R71 billion) Ponzi scheme.

OneCoin offered commissions to members for recruiting others to buy packages of its worthless cryptocurrency.

At its height, OneCoin claimed to have more than 3 million members worldwide.

The FBI and US State Department increased a reward for information leading to Ignatova’s arrest and conviction to $5 million (R89 million) earlier this year.

The reward was initially set at $100,000 (R1.8 million) when she was added to the Federal Bureau of Investigations’ list of the ten most-wanted fugitives in June 2022.

Ignatova was indicted in federal court in New York in October 2017. Two weeks later, she travelled from Sofia, Bulgaria, to Athens to evade arrest.

She remained a fugitive even after several other participants in the scheme were convicted or pleaded guilty and received lengthy prison sentences.

Her brother, Konstantin Ignatov, who became the de facto leader of the organisation after she disappeared, pleaded guilty in 2019 and agreed to cooperate with the government.

He was sentenced to time served in March for the 34 months he had already spent in jail.

Ruja Ignatova had hired her brother away from a job as a forklift driver in Germany to work as her personal assistant.

Konstantin Ignatov was a key witness in the case against Mark Scott, a former Locke Lord LLP partner who was found guilty in November 2019 of helping launder $400 million from the fraud and sentenced to 10 years in prison in January.

Scott appealed his conviction based on evidence that Ignatov had given false testimony during his trial.

Karl Sebastian Greenwood, the cofounder and main promoter of OneCoin, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison last September.

In April, Irina Dilkinska, the former head of legal and compliance, was sentenced to four years after admitting to wire fraud and money-laundering conspiracy charges.

Christopher Hamilton, a UK national accused of laundering millions of dollars for OneCoin, won a bid to block his extradition to the US to face criminal charges after a London judge ruled in November 2023 that his home country was the best place for him to stand trial.

Reports of Ruja Ignatova’s alleged murder and ties to South Africa emerged last year during the investigation of the murder of fellow Bulgarian Krasimir Kamenov.

Kamenov, his wife Gergana, and two others were shot on 25 May 2023 in Constantia, Cape Town.

Daily Maverick reported that Bulgarian public prosecutor Ivan Geshev had named Kamenov as a co-conspirator against him in a state capture-like plot.

Kamenov was also wanted for his alleged involvement in the murder of Lyubomir Ivanov, a former policeman who was shot dead in Sofia in March last year.

Ivanov reportedly had documents in his home which suggested that Ignatova had been murdered in November 2018 on a yacht in the Ionian Sea.

Allegedly, Bulgarian drug lord “Taki” Hristoforos Amanatidis had ordered the murder to cover up his involvement in OneCoin.

However, Der Spiegel reported that the Düsseldorf Landeskriminalamt (LKA) — the State Criminal Police Office — found a crucial contradiction with the documents Ivanov had.

Ignatova’s alleged murderer was in custody in the Netherlands in November 2018.

Therefore, the LKA is working under the assumption that “The Cryptoqueen” is still alive.

There is also other evidence linking Ignatova to South Africa.

Daily Maverick reported that when her brother was arrested at the Los Angeles International Airport in March 2019, he was with a man named Duncan Arthur.

Arthur has dual citizenship in Ireland and South Africa, and he lived and worked in Johannesburg until around October 2023, according to his LinkedIn.

His CV includes serving as the legal custodian for Nedbank electronic banking, compliance officer at the Financial Intelligence Centre, and risk and compliance manager at BankservAfrica.

After that, he served as head of compliance and money laundering control at Standard Bank, and was the principal specialist for money laundering control at Vodacom from April to December 2009.

Daily Maverick reported that Arthur wrote a document for Bulgaria’s Department of Justice in which he said Ignatova personally recruited him.

Arthur told the Bulgarian government that reports of Ignatova’s 2018 murder were false because her brother had remained in contact with her as late as the month he was arrested — March 2019.

Konstantin Ignatov had also visited Cape Town in 2018, based on photos he posted on Instagram.

According to Der Spiegel’s report, South African security sources had tipped off filmmaker Johan von Mirbach, who made a documentary about Ignatova, that she had been spotted in an affluent area of ​​Cape Town.

The LKA said it does not know for sure where Ignatova is but that some clues lead to South Africa.

MyBroadband reached out to Ignatov over Instagram for comment. He did not respond and blocked us.

Arthur did not immediately respond to a request for comment.