It should be noted that today the cryptocurrency industry is still in hiding from the authorities. Admittedly, this is now due to legal action rather than direct prosecution for defrauding investors.


Especially popular among such people is Do Kwon, the creator of the Terra ecosystem. We’re talking about a project that consisted of the cryptocurrency LUNA and the associated stablecoin UST. Both crypto-assets experienced a crash in May 2022, causing investors to lose tens of billions of dollars.

Do Kwon is believed to be in Serbia, where he has not already been reached by prosecutors from South Korea who are searching for him. Last week, a lawsuit was filed against Kwon and Terraform Labs by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, with the parties being accused of “securities fraud” in this case.

Kwon has managed to withdraw more than 10,000 bitcoins after the project collapsed, according to the case file. In addition, some of the money was exchanged for fiat with the help of an unnamed Swiss bank. Read more about this story in a separate article.

What happened to Ruja Ignatova?

Ignatova was at the helm of the OneCoin fraud scheme, which caused billions of dollars in losses for investors. The so-called “cryptocurrency queen” disappeared after it was revealed in 2017 that she had defrauded scheme participants of around $5 billion. With that in mind, Ruja was placed on international lists of the most wanted criminals in both the US and Europe.

Bird journalists Dimitar Stoyanov and Atanas Chobanov published an article on the subject. They refer to police documents stating that Ignatova was allegedly murdered by drug baron Christoforos Amanatidis on board his yacht. Her killer, according to an anonymous source in the police report, was Ignatova’s accomplice. It is not known, however, whether he was directly involved in OneCoin business or whether there were other cases in mind.

According to Decrypt sources, Ignatova’s body was dismembered and dumped in the Ionian Sea between Italy and Greece. Coincidentally, the same week, Ignatova’s former boyfriend named Gilbert Armenta was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in OneCoin.

Police documents mentioned in the article say that the police informant found out about Ignatova’s murder when one of Amanatidis’ relatives, in a drunken state, let it slip to his friends. At the same time, Sofia deputy prosecutor Hristo Krastev said that the aforementioned documents could not be considered as evidence in the court case, as the testimony of the anonymous informants was not supported by anything.

As a reminder, the fraudulent OneCoin platform was launched in 2014. The creators of the project claimed that their token, with a maximum offering of 120 billion and the ability to mine, was "the next Bitcoin". The scheme gained widespread publicity, luring thousands of investors as a result. In reality, OneCoin didn't even have its own blockchain, and the scheme worked as a pyramid scheme.

Previously, it was assumed that Ignatova was in deep hiding, and that she might have changed her appearance through plastic surgery. However, if the Bird journalists’ article reveals the truth, it is now clear why no one has yet received a reward of $100,000 for the capture of the “cryptocurrency queen” from the FBI.

At the same time, the version is questionable, as the said data from the informant has not been corroborated in any way. In addition, Ruzha is still in the list of ten most wanted criminals from the FBI, and the officers of this agency would obviously know about the change in the situation with Ignatova.

Here is the relevant screenshot from the FBI website. As can be seen, two representatives of the list have already been detained.


We believe that this version of events is not fully confirmed. Although such information may indeed have been in the possession of the police, this fact alone is too little for all the information presented to be true. In addition, representatives of the prosecutor's office have also stressed this feature, while FBI officials are still searching for Ignatova all over the world. So it is possible that the story with Rouge and the OneCoin cryptocurrency pyramid is not over yet.