In Germany, the first of three Europeans accused of involvement in the OneCoin scheme appeared before the court.
A Munich lawyer who worked for cryptocurrency queen Ruja Ignatova is accused of money laundering, fraud and banking crimes. The lawyer allegedly transferred 20 million euros ($19.7 million) to Ignatova to buy two London apartments for 75 million euros.
Now Mrs. Ignatova is on the run, wanted by US and European authorities. She and her husband have been charged with processing €320 million in payments from OneCoin customers over the course of one year.
Prosecutors read out the indictment in a German court, asserting that OneCoin was an openly fraudulent project. Ruja Ignatova misled her clients by claiming that OneCoin is a cryptocurrency and that its value is determined by market mechanisms that investors can track. According to the indictment, the scammers told investors that 50,000 new OneCoins were mined per minute.
“In fact, the ever-increasing value was fake, and the mining process was only simulated by the software,” prosecutors said in court.
The heroine of the successful BBC podcast The Lost Queen of Crypto, Ignatova created OneCoin in 2014 in the Bulgarian capital Sofia and led the organization until she disappeared from public view in October 2017. Her brother Konstantin Ignatov took over as leader. The man was arrested in the US in 2019 and later pleaded guilty. Ruja Ignatova is under investigation in Germany and charged in the United States with wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. OneCoin claimed to have over 3 million members worldwide. After generating €3.4 billion in revenue from the fourth quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2016, the project operated as a tiered market network that paid commissions to members around the world for recruiting new clients, prosecutors told a US court in 2019.
Source: Bits

I am an experienced journalist, writer, and editor with a passion for finance and business news. I have been working in the journalism field for over 6 years, covering a variety of topics from finance to technology. As an author at World Stock Market, I specialize in finance business-related topics.