BBC News reports that the FBI has increased the bounty on missing CryptoQueen Dr. Ruja Ignatova to $5 million. Bulgaria-born German national Ignatova went missing in 2017 after a federal warrant was issued for her arrest. She is accused of wire fraud, money laundering, and related offenses while operating a Ponzi scheme dubbed OneCoin and defrauding over $4 billion from victims.
OneCoin wasn’t even a cryptocurrency, according to crypto investor sites like CoinDesk. Instead, it was a Ponzi scheme riding the coattails of investor enthusiasm during the height of the crypto craze. There was no blockchain technology behind OneCoin, with its internally managed and opaque functionality. Like any Ponzi scheme, existing investors were incentivized to bring in fresh blood, garnering billions in capital before the fraud was unmasked.
