The “cryptoqueen’s” reign was short-lived, but it was, however, very lucrative. In 2014, Bulgarian businesswoman Ruja Ignatova launched OneCoin, a new cryptocurrency whose goal was to compete with Bitcoin. Conferences were organized to promote this new digital Eldorado, business was booming and investors were flocking in. But in just two years, everything collapsed. OneCoin turned out to be just another pyramid scheme, having bilked millions of hapless investors out of over $4 billion (€3.69 billion).
The US authorities reacted very quickly: they charged Ignatova with fraud and money laundering, then issued a federal arrest warrant for her on October 12, 2017. But the cryptoqueen moved faster than they did. “Take the money and run and blame someone else for this,” she suggested to the scam’s co-founder at the launch of her fake digital currency. Putting her money where her mouth was, she liquidated her OneCoin companies, hopped on a plane to Athens and disappeared into thin air. Listed among the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted, the cryptoqueen did not resurface. Some said she was dead.
Seven years later, the “Dubai Unlocked” data leak, obtained by Norwegian media outlet E24 and investigative consortium OCCRP, traced the money that flew out of OneCoin back to Dubai. The leak, made up of confidential cadastral information from the small emirate, revealed that Ignatova and her close associates invested the fruit of their pillaging in villas and apartments in Dubai’s upmarket districts – showing, in a nutshell, the laissez-faire attitude of Dubai’s real estate brokers and authorities towards dirty money.
Laundering currency with real estate
At the end of April 2015, while the OneCoin success story was still in full swing, Ignatova – hiding behind Oceana Properties Limited, a Dubai company created from scratch a month earlier – bought a gigantic apartment with terrace on the top floor of a building overlooking the artificial island of Palm Jumeirah. The operation cost 10 million dirhams (€2.5 million).
Like her, a dozen key figures in the scandal invested in Dubai real estate. Karl Sebastian Greenwood, with whom she co-founded the cryptocurrency, shelled out €3.5 million in January 2017 for a villa in an affluent Dubai neighborhood. Finnish businessman Kari Wahlroos, who presented himself as OneCoin’s “European ambassador,” owned up to seven apartments and a villa in the emirate. Stephan Steinkeller, one of the main promoters of the fake cryptocurrency, owned at least two apartments, which – until recently – he rented to one of his brothers, who was also at the heart of the scam. Former Luxembourg spy Frank Schneider, who coordinated OneCoin’s public relations, spent €1.8 million on a 270-square-meter apartment in 2018, shortly before being targeted by the US authorities’ investigation: they suspected he “had provided confidential police information” to Ignatova to help her escape.
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