If you would like to know more about this huge scam, I can recommend the BBC podcast "The Missing Cryptoqueen", hosted by the author that wrote the referenced book (which probably contains most of the same information).
That true crime podcast started in late 2019 and is still running. It's entertaining, informative and provides much more background information in eleven 45-minute episodes to date (if you can look past Bartlett's narrative style, which I found a little... childish?).
Having binged that podcast a few months ago, nothing in this article is new, but it's a decent summary.
What the article doesn't express well is how widespread this scam was... the podcast episodes situated in Kenya are mind-blowing in that regard.
OneCoins were not mined like other cryptocurrencies, federal investigators said. Instead of armies of powerful servers, OneCoin was generated by a piece of software, court documents said.
It's hard to even call it a cryptocurrency. One crazy revelation in the show is that Ruja tried to procure someone to build a real blockchain (distributed ledger) for their "cryptocurrency", a few years in, while they had already sold millions of $ of their coin. OneCoin was and had always been a simple centralized database. People were literally buying a number in an arbitrary table controlled by OneCoin, without any value backing it. I guess you argue that BitCoin is also just a number in a distributed, hopefully tamper-proof database, but with OneCoin there was never even a possibility to exchange it for fiat currencies, let alone other coins! A pure scam.
OneCoin has shut down and its website is no longer active.
The last episode from October 2022 showed that scammers are still operating under the name of OneCoin... hard to kill this multi-headed dragon.
“Get rich quick” is fascinating on both sides of the story.
If you would like to know more about this huge scam, I can recommend the BBC podcast "The Missing Cryptoqueen", hosted by the author that wrote the referenced book (which probably contains most of the same information).
That true crime podcast started in late 2019 and is still running. It's entertaining, informative and provides much more background information in eleven 45-minute episodes to date (if you can look past Bartlett's narrative style, which I found a little... childish?).
Having binged that podcast a few months ago, nothing in this article is new, but it's a decent summary.
What the article doesn't express well is how widespread this scam was... the podcast episodes situated in Kenya are mind-blowing in that regard.
It's hard to even call it a cryptocurrency. One crazy revelation in the show is that Ruja tried to procure someone to build a real blockchain (distributed ledger) for their "cryptocurrency", a few years in, while they had already sold millions of $ of their coin. OneCoin was and had always been a simple centralized database. People were literally buying a number in an arbitrary table controlled by OneCoin, without any value backing it. I guess you argue that BitCoin is also just a number in a distributed, hopefully tamper-proof database, but with OneCoin there was never even a possibility to exchange it for fiat currencies, let alone other coins! A pure scam.
The last episode from October 2022 showed that scammers are still operating under the name of OneCoin... hard to kill this multi-headed dragon.