It should be noted that a similar charge was also brought against the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Friede, who is now in jail in the Bahamas. And, as lawyers have pointed out, the punishment for electronic fraud alone could be as much as 20 years in prison.

Sam is also accused of conspiracy to commit fraud against creditors, money laundering and even defrauding the US along with violating campaign finance laws. Read more about the full list of claims against Bankman-Fried at the link.

FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried on the floor of Congress

And the FTX case has also been called one of the biggest financial frauds in US history.

What happened to the OneCoin pyramid scheme

The announcement of the outcome of the trial against the defendant was made by prosecutor Damian Williams. Here is the relevant rejoinder from the legal spokesman.

Carl Sebastian Greenwood, the founder and head of OneCoin, ran one of the biggest international fraud schemes ever created. Greenwood and his associates, including Ruja Ignatova, conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that OneCoin would become the “Bitcoin killer”. In reality, OneCoin was a dummy project.

Carl Sebastian Greenwood and Ruja Ignatova

According to Decrypt sources, OneCoin cryptocurrency was launched by Ignatova and Greenwood back in 2014. Coins could be earned through activity in a “marketing network” with a large number of tiers, which was an easy cover for the nature of the crypto pyramid. Participants were rewarded for recruiting new victims. Amusingly, OneCoin did not even have its own blockchain.

Greenwood was arrested in Thailand in July 2018 and extradited to the US in October that year. Ignatova, meanwhile, was last seen in 2017 when she boarded a commercial flight to Athens. She has been wanted ever since – in June 2022, she was placed on the FBI’s list of the ten most wanted criminals. With that in mind, the earlier biography of Ruzha Ignatova has begun to be adapted for the script of the series.


So far, not many people have managed to cover up Cryptocurrency's crime story - the scale of the damage it caused can only be compared to the recent collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. Incidentally, the founder of the latter, Sam Bankman-Fried, could also face extradition to the US. As The Wall Street Journal's sources pointed out the day before, Sam may stop contesting that prospect and agree to be sent to the US, where serious criminal charges, including defrauding an entire country, await him. The maximum sentence on the eight charges is 165 years.

Having said that, Bankman-Fried had previously challenged her own extradition. Apparently, spending a few days in jail in the Bahamas in poor conditions forced him to change his own attitude to the issue.


FTX crypto-exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried

Greenwood, on the other hand, acted as the “global master distributor” and head of the customer network through which the fraudulent crypto was marketed and sold. According to the Department of Justice, victims from around the world invested more than $4 billion in the scam over several years of OneCoin’s operation.

OneCoin creator Ruja Ignatova

According to Williams, Greenwood’s earlier statements were aimed purely at attracting funds from victims, with many of them losing their last savings in OneCoin. The convict and other senior members of the cryptopyramid’s leadership had a detailed escape plan in case they were persecuted. As we can see, so far only Ignatova has been able to carry out her plan to the end.

Overall, the fraud situation in the cryptocurrency industry is not getting any better. According to Solidus Labs experts, about 350 scam tokens – that is, crypto-assets aimed solely at deceiving potential investors – have been created every day this year. As the analysts point out, the total number of fraudulent projects has increased by around 118,000 units since the beginning of January.

At the same time, this figure already exceeds the total for 2020 and 2021. Here is the corresponding graph.

Number of scam tokens created in different years

There have been 1.93 million victims of scam tokens since September 2020. This figure is ahead of the number of victims due to the collapse of FTX and other crypto platforms like Celsius, BlockFi and Voyager. Here is a relevant comparison.

A comparison of the number of victims of various cryptocurrency crashes


It looks like the OneCoin case has now pretty much come to an end. The only open question in it remains the prospect of the arrest of Ruzha Ignatova, who still hasn't been caught by law enforcement. How long this will go on is unknown, but she certainly knows how to avoid the attention of the police and security services.