Bulgaria lodges organised crime, money laundering charges against OneCoin’s Ignatova
The Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office has lodged charges of leading an organised crime group and of money laundering against Ruja Ignatova, founder of the OneCoin large-scale fraud scheme, the Bulgarian Prosecutor’s Office said on August 12.
The statement said that Ignatova had been ordered detained for up to 72 hours, “which will be carried out when she is found”.
The whereabouts of Ignatova, whose OneCoin Ponzi scheme is estimated to have fleeced the public of about $4 billion, have been unknown to authorities since October 2017 when she travelled from Sofia to Athens a few days after being charged in the US District Court, Southern District of New York and a federal warrant issued for her arrest.
The Prosecutor’s Office said that Ignatova had been named as an accused in pre-trial proceedings in connection with materials received from foreign law enforcement agencies.
It said that Ignatova had been charged with having formed and led an organised crime group in Bulgaria from 2014 to 2017, created with the aim of committing investment fraud under the Ponzi scheme.
The money laundering charges cover the same period. A guilty verdict may result in imprisonment from five to 15 years and a fine.
Ignatova has been on the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitives list since 2022.
There have been various claims in the media about Ignatova, one being that she has been murdered, while others have made various claims about her whereabouts, including the United Arab Emirates and Russia. It has been claimed that Ignatova has had cosmetic surgery to substantially alter her appearance.
On April 4 2024, it was announced that US District Judge Edgardo Ramos had sentenced Bulgarian national Irina Dilkinska to four years in prison for her role in the massive OneCoin fraud scheme.
In September 2023, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, who co-founded OneCoin with Ignatova, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his orchestration of the OneCoin scheme. In addition to his prison term, Greenwood, a citizen of Sweden and the United Kingdom, was ordered to pay approximately $300 million in forfeiture.
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