Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

While I’ve been on board with cryptocurrency since Day 1 of Bitcoin, a part of me acknowledges that the whole concept is kinda ridiculous. You’re forcing a computer to do multiplication flashcards until it pukes, at which point you receive some numbers that you can trade for automatic weapons from a guy living under an alias in Mozambique. If it weren’t so silly, it’d be brilliant. Still, the scamming potential is almost as high as the electricity requirements. As soon as I’m back into some coaching fold somewhere, I’m absolutely turning part of the weight room into a crypto-mining array.

Still, as much as the digital world can be exciting, there’s always a few people out there who are ready and able to scam people on a massive level. That’s why, dear listener, you’re doing a very sensible thing and purchasing cassette tapes. Nothing can ever happen to these – they’ll always be there for you, just as I am for your money- sorry, I meant “time.” How’d that happen? At any rate, pay no mind the man driving behind your house with a giant electromagnet on top of his van. That was just your eyes playing tricks on you. Let’s listen on, to learn some possibilities and perils of the sketchy world of crypto…

RUJA IGNATOVA: CRYPTOCURRENCY QUEEN

BORN: May 30, 1980, Sofia, Bulgaria

Women in technology have it rough. From the earliest days of computers, Lady Ada Lovelace had a variety of brilliant innovations using Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, while Grace Hopper’s skill in developing has been invaluable for the advent of modern programming. Everywhere people turn, women have been an essential part of the advancement of computer science as an important field of technology – despite the fact that so few have any sort of name recognition. As such, it is thus expected, and unfortunate, that women involved in crypto scamming are also not properly recognized – I am doing my best to change this for you now. RECOGNIZE WOMEN FOR THEIR SKILL IN BREAKING THE LAW, DAMMIT!

Ruja Ignatova was born in Bulgaria, but emigrated to Germany as a child, along with her parents. She has a pretty murky background, but we do know she went on to study at Oxford, and in 2005, earned a PhD in law from the University of Konstanz in Baden-Wurttemberg. We also know that she’d previously been married, and has a five-year-old daughter living with her ex-husband in Frankfurt. Other than these few scant details, there’s still much to be learned about Ruja Ignatova as a person.

Even with a ton of privilege in her educational opportunities, her whole family soon became involved in complex, organized crime. In 2012, Ignatova got a 14-month suspended sentence in Germany for her involvement in her father buying a metallurgical manufacturing company that mysteriously went bankrupt shortly after acquisition.

That probably should’ve been a prison sentence, rather than probation for Dr. Ignatova. The scams just got exponentially bigger from there. In 2013, she embarked on his first of two major Ponzi schemes – a cryptocurrency known as BigCoin. Based out of Hong Kong, it had some fairly significant Chinese investment, but ultimately ended up collapsing. The issue with BigCoin was that investors in BigCoin tokens had absolutely no way of using the cryptocurrency outside of its own market – and after some of the “value” was transferred into shares into a public holding company, the currency collapsed. Investors pulled out quickly – but a significant splinter group of BigCoin executives, including Ruja, decided to take their initial BigCoin plans and establish a new and improved version.

With the launch of OneCoin in late 2014, the stage was set for one of the most impressive Ponzi schemes in history. Like with other cryptocurrencies, users were told that all transactions were securely stored on the blockchain, which is to say, the data set that verifies all parts of the transaction securely… however, OneCoin was also marketed with the message that it would be straightforward to make impressive sums of money by recruiting others to invest in the scheme. Investors would pay for “educational packages” consisting of plagiarized material on crypto investing, as well as “tokens” that could be set up on computers in order to “mine” for newly-created OneCoins. The more people invest… the more tokens they receive… the more chances they have to create new crypto coins and get wealthy! Perfect, right?

One problem: only place you can actually use these coins was on the OneCoin network. Nobody else was accepting them anywhere on the internet. And the only useful thing you could do on the OneCoin network was exchange these crypto coins for euros. That’s it. Investors were paying for a promise… and like all Ponzi schemes, would eventually discover it too good to be true.

Another problem: as mentioned previously, cryptocurrencies need to be constructed on a blockchain in order to track and verify all transactions. Despite thousands of users and a gigantic amount of investment… OneCoin never even had a blockchain to begin with. Users who saw values of OneCoin rising were really just seeing a bunch of completely arbitrary numbers typed into a spreadsheet by a series of semi-trained monkeys with keyboard skills, presumably.

OneCoin was a complete sham from the get-go, and many law enforcement agencies knew it right away. Bulgaria banned OneCoin from operating in late 2015, followed by Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Latvia in 2016, but it still attracted over four BILLION dollars’ worth of investment, especially from China, the US, the UK and Germany. In January 2017, the OneCoin exchange promptly shut down, though the company still happily continued to take investments. In October of that year, Ruja Ignatova, who was supposed to be attending a conference in Lisbon, Portugal, instead boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia, Bulgaria headed to Athens… never to be seen again.

Authorities still have no clue where she is today. While some other key figures have been arrested for their participation in the massive fraud – including Simon Greenwood, a notable Swedish businessman, and Konstantin Ignatov, Ruja’s brother – Dr. Ignatova remains completely off the radar to this day. Over $4 billion of crypto money is stashed in some offshore account somewhere… and Ruja is living under an assumed identity somewhere, presumably sipping a mojito on the beach… or, more likely, somewhere back in Frankfurt to be closer to her daughter. Her brother Konstantin faces up to 90 years in US prison for his role in the scam… so we can only imagine what kind of charges that Ruja is facing if she ever turns up again.

If you want to learn more about the story of Ruja Ignatova and OneCoin, there’s a great podcast series from the BBC entitled The Missing Cryptoqueen… though I think you’ll need internet access for this. It unfortunately doesn’t appear to come in the far superior audio cassette format, like my own stories. Oh well. There’s still time for them to learn from the real master here.

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This woman is a queen. Were I not happily married myself, I would be all over trying to woo her and/or work with her. We need more equal gender representation in scamming! I’d propose a committee to oversee this, similar to what the NFL did in hiring more women as coaches and officials… but apparently crime is a bit different than playing football*. Thanks for listening – and don’t forget to call 1-900-FAST-BUX to get your limited-time offer of 100 HueCoins included free of charge with your audio cassette lessons subscription!

*Unless you’re Vontaze Burfict, then it’s identical.

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.