Dr Ruja Ignatova convinced people to hand over their life savings (£3.5BILLION), then vanished without a trace
As Alicia Key’s Girl On Fire began to fade, an electrified silence swept across the auditorium and Dr Ruja Ignatova took to the stage dressed in a flowing silk ballgown, and with bright red lipstick and spectacular diamond drop earrings.
Then, with thousands of eyes locked on her, the glamorous German-Bulgarian began to spell out an extraordinary vision.
The future, she said, belonged to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which had made millions for some small investors and were free of rules, regulations and the costly fees of traditional banks.
True, Bitcoin was complex and cumbersome for ordinary people.
But Dr Ruja, as she styled herself, was offering a radical new alternative that warm June evening in 2016 – a perfectly safe cryptocurrency of her own devising called OneCoin.
The charismatic 36-year-old told the crowd that it was not too late to join a financial revolution that would become bigger than Bitcoin within just a couple of years.
She urged them to invest. And the audience lapped it up, as they did at similar events in Dubai, Macau and Singapore. OneCoin promoters were hard at work in seminars and computer chatrooms around the world, in fact, and the reward was spectacular.
By March 2017, more than £3.5 billion had been invested in the OneCoin system from 175 countries. It is thought around £100 million of that came from the UK.
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