The first individuals in Europe to be charged with a crime for taking part in the Onecoin cryptocurrency scam are a husband and wife from Munich and an attorney. According to Bloomberg, they appeared in a German court on Tuesday.
The three have been charged with fraud, money laundering, and banking offenses related to the massive fraud operation. Ruja Ignatova, a German citizen of Bulgarian ancestry known as the “Cryptoqueen,” established and ran the pyramid.
Ignatova’s connection to a Munich-based attorney who will testify in court on October 18 is accused of transferring $19.7 million to the Cayman Islands on her behalf to buy two London apartments. In addition, according to a Bloomberg story, a husband and wife are accused of managing $315.4 million in payments from OneCoin users.
OneCoin was first introduced by Ignatova in 2014 as a cryptocurrency and trading project. However, it was quickly discovered to be a pyramid scheme that attracted users with fraudulent business and technological claims that were false, such as a token mining system that was nonexistent, according to enforcement organizations, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Whereabouts of CryptoQueen
Ignatova, the person who founded OneCoin in 2014, has been missing since 2017.
Earlier this year, she appeared on the FBI’s and Europol’s most wanted lists.
She has gained notoriety in the crypto community and beyond as the topic of a well-known BBC podcast called The Missing Cryptoqueen.
Another of her suspected collaborators, Christopher Hamilton, had his extradition to the United States authorized by a British judge in August.
