Channel 4 has turned its documentary spotlight on missing ‘cryptoqueen’ Dr Ruja Ignatova.
Fugitive: The Mystery of the Crypto Queen is the channel’s new docu-series looking at the rise and fall of the Bulgarian businesswoman, who has been missing since 2017 when she became wanted by the FBI and other US and international authorities for her OneCoin cryptocurrency scam.
The three-part series explores how Ignatova conned ordinary people out of their life savings and then disappeared without a trace along with billions of dollars.
It follows hard on the heels of the BBC’s documentary The Missing Cryptoqueen: Dead or Alive?, which aired last month, and the BBC podcast series The Missing Cryptoqueen which started in 2019.
We take at a look at the woman behind the cryptoqueen title and the theories about where she may be now.
Who is Ruja Ignatova?
Born in Bulgaria in 1980 and raised in Germany, Ruja Ignatova is reported to have studied at the University of Oxford before earning a PhD in private international law from the University of Konstanz in 2005.
After pursuing a career in finance, she was convicted of fraud in Germany in 2012 and given a suspended sentence of 14-months’ imprisonment in connection with a company declaring bankruptcy soon after it was acquired by her father.
The following year, she was involved in a multi-level marketing scam called BigCoin, but it was another scam that began in 2014 that landed her in hot water with authorities and led to her disappearance.
Pledging to better the returns enjoyed by early-bird Bitcoin investors, Ignatova launched the cryptocurrency OneCoin a decade ago, and shot to worldwide notoriety.
For years, what eventually turned out to an elaborately disguised Ponzi scheme – OneCoin lacked the digital record, or blockchain, that serves as the foundation for legitimate cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin – drew in billions in investments from millions of people around the world.
The scam’s value is estimated to be at least $4bn (£3.1bn).
In October 2017, with US and German investigators closing in, Ignatova vanished after taking an early morning Ryanair flight from Sofia, Bulgaria, to Athens in October 2017.
Despite various reports and theories as to her whereabouts in the nearly seven years since her disappearance, she has never been seen again.
Ignatov’s brother, Konstantin, was arrested in Los Angeles in March 2019 and charged with fraud in connection with OneCoin, while Ignatov herself was charged ‘in absentia’ with wire fraud, security fraud, and money laundering.
Konstantin reportedly signed a plea deal on several of his fraud charges in October 2019, and in November 2019, testified in a money laundering case in a New York court related to OneCoin revenue in the US.
OneCoin co-founder Sebastian Greenwood, meanwhile, pled guilty in New York to fraud and money laundering charges in December 2022 and last year was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the scam.
Ignatova was added to the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted List‘ in June 2022 and remains to date the most wanted woman in the world, with a reward of up to $250,000 USD (£196,000) on offer for information leading to her arrest.
She was also reportedly married to a German lawyer called Björn Strehl, with whom she had a daughter in 2016.
What happened to Ruja Ignatova?
With the self-proclaimed ‘cryptoqueen’ still missing almost seven years on from her last confirmed sighting, there have been numerous theories about where she may be or what has happened to her.
For years after her disappearance – and still, depending on who you talk to – Ignatova was rumoured to be on the run.
In 2019, the BBC reported a multi-level marketing kingpin Igor Alberts said he’d heard she had Russian and Ukrainian passports, which she was using to travel back and forth between Russia and Dubai.
The BBC have also chased leads of varying credibility over the years alleging that the fraudster had been sighted everywhere from Athens to Bucharest to Frankfurt, likely staying hidden with help from some combination of plastic surgery, fake identities, and expensive private security linked to the Bulgarian underworld.
Ignatova’s brother reportedly alleged that his sister had also misled him, and that she had disappeared after getting hold of a “big passport” and asking him to get her plane tickets to Vienna and then Athens.
That would appear to line up her last confirmed movements – being the Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens in 2017 – as well as with a consensus among some investigators that she had been traveling around Greece as recently as 2022.
Yet recent reports suggest she may have been murdered, allegedly by major Bulgarian organised crime figure Hristoforos Nikos Amanatidis, more commonly known as Taki, who is understood to have served at one point as Ignatova’s head of personal security.
Leaked Europol documents – shared with the BBC by former spy Frank Schneider, an adviser to Ignatova, who has also since disappeared – have shown that Bulgarian police established connections between the two prior to Ignatova’s 2017 disappearance. Meanwhile, a retired US Internal Revenue Service investigator, Richard Reinhardt, recently named Taki as a key character of interest for the first time.
Former Bulgarian deputy minister Ivan Hristanov has described Taki – who is believed to be living in Dubai – as the “head of the mafia” in Bulgaria and “the ghost”, adding: “You’ll never see him. You only hear about him. He’s talking to you through other people. If you don’t listen, you just disappear from Earth”.
Bulgarian investigative journalists at the news outlet bird.bg meanwhile published details of a police report found at the home of a murdered Bulgarian police officer, which reportedly held details of a police informant overhearing Taki’s brother-in-law drunkenly revealing that Ignatova had been murdered in late 2018, on Taki’s orders.
It was alleged that her body was dismembered and dumped from a yacht into the Ionian Sea.
The bird.bg journalists, namely Dimitar Stoyanov, said associates of Taki, including Krasimir ‘Kuro’ Kamenov – who was assassinated by as yet unknown assailants in 2023 – believed this to be a credible theory, as Ignatova had reportedly become a liability to the suspected crime boss.
Mr Reinhardt says he believes Ignatova is likely dead and that the details of the allegations linking her death to Taki fits with the operations of drug cartels.
But he added that the FBI “don’t just keep people in [the] Top Ten [Most Wanted] list for fun” and that someone would only be removed from that list if there was “definitive proof” they were dead.
The BBC also reports that some of its tips and reported sightings of Ignatova have been received from credible sources in the years since that alleged 2018 killing, casting further doubt on the theory that she has been murdered and may never be found.
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