Fugitive.The.Mystery.of.the.Crypto.Queen.S01E02

  • 2 months ago
Fugitive.The.Mystery.of.the.Crypto.Queen.S01E02
Transcript
00:00So, this is it.
00:11This is the limit.
00:12I mean, it's nice, it's good, I can walk around, but it's obviously better than a prison courtyard,
00:26but it's still a prison.
00:27So, this is the gizmo, the device that monitors my whereabouts, and here is the parameter,
00:37so where the fence is basically, the thing would signal my absence if I were to go beyond
00:43this.
00:44So, what would happen if you actually physically went over the fence?
00:48I don't know, I haven't tried it.
00:52As tempting as it is, you know, freedom is over there, I can look at it.
01:19Our creator, our founder, Dr. Ruja.
01:26I've been called a lot of things, and probably the best thing that the press called me was
01:40the Bitcoin killer.
01:41She was definitely a visionary.
01:43She's got this magnetism about her that just draws people in.
01:47Are you fired up?
01:48One coin, one coin, one coin, one coin.
01:52Everybody was buying one coins.
01:56A lot of people made money.
01:58They made millions.
02:05We are the monsters of the VIPs.
02:09These guys are really expert fraudsters, especially the ones at the top.
02:15We went after them because they were operating as a Ponzi.
02:18Sixty million dollars a week was going through one coin.
02:21That's insane.
02:22It had already taken its victims, it had to be stopped.
02:24They want you to shut up, they want you to go away, and the only way they can do that
02:28is intimidate you, and they do it through intimidation, it's through fear.
02:32So for all the haters, let us live, or you die.
02:36Hello, I'm anxious to tear out your insides, you'll have a slow and painful death.
02:42Shit, that was, that was scary.
03:03Hello, this is Dr. Róża Ignartowa.
03:05I'm the founder of OneCoin and of the OneLife Network.
03:09We want to make this the biggest cryptocurrency ever.
03:12And now I think the time has come that we all go out and show actually the world who
03:18we are, how big we are, and what the huge potential of OneCoin is.
03:24Upon understanding that this was a scam and seeing how it's growing exponentially, there's
03:29more and more posts on Facebook, there's more and more events, there's, you know, just a
03:33growing number of victims that are falling for this scam.
03:37It really hit me that this company was picking up legs and that this is going to be bad for
03:45the public perception of Bitcoin and even other cryptocurrencies.
03:50It just, you know, it had to be stopped.
03:53So myself and some of the other scam busters were stocking OneCoin pages in groups.
04:00And that's what we started doing is try to engage and expose Róża and her history with
04:06OneCoin.
04:12There was John Walsh.
04:14Over the past decade or so, I've been helping to expose multilevel marketing Ponzi schemes
04:21as a hobby.
04:22There was Lynn Edgington.
04:24Back in 2002, I had started becoming aware of online Internet investment Ponzi's and
04:28scams. And so I formed a nonprofit corporation called Eagle Research Associates.
04:34So we found a platform where we could kind of all get together and take information and
04:38putting documents and photos and all this other stuff and videos and links and put it
04:42in a circle and all of us could kind of look through it so that hopefully we could implode
04:45this giant scam.
04:48It's like the old saying goes, you're going to tell a lie, tell a big one, because the
04:51more you tell it, the more people will believe you.
04:53And the bigger it is, the easier it is to believe.
04:55I want to make it extremely successful and I want to see this coin in one year to be
05:01the number one coin on the market.
05:04In fact, when all these things do collapse, the financial damage is only one part of it.
05:09It's the real world damage of families being torn apart, divorces and even suicide.
05:17That's why we want to warn everybody, because we don't want it happening to you.
05:22The victims of OneCoin didn't realize they were victims because that was just conditioned
05:28into these people, because Ruch is a double doctor.
05:30She worked for McKinsey.
05:32She has a 200 plus IQ.
05:34That's all they see.
05:37Then at some point, a little bit more media started to kind of step in and publish things
05:42about OneCoin.
05:43And that was important.
05:44That was the only way to really move forward and to get above this.
05:47And one of the persons who did that was Nikolai Stoyanov from Bulgaria.
05:53Probably I was a bit skeptical and critical from the start.
05:59It would be hard to convince me.
06:01I'm not a prospective investor.
06:03I'm somebody looking for plot holes in her story.
06:07So we requested an interview with Dr.
06:10Ruzsa.
06:11And this meeting happened, I guess, sometime in August 2015.
06:18If you're making a real crypto-currency, you want it to be used by people.
06:222015
06:42If you're making a real cryptocurrency you want it to be used by people and you couldn't use one coins for anything
06:50You couldn't transfer it to anyone freely. You couldn't buy anything with them. So for me
06:57Even if it was not a scam, it was a huge risk
07:20You know where I am, so this is one of the most risky things you can invest in, which means that if I tell you something, you're going to lie to me for a long time.
07:27Yes, the risk of the investment itself, which is the most difficult risk of a scam, right?
07:34Yes, it can happen.
07:50While one coin being centralized is run on the servers of the company, if Ruja simply plugs them off, one coin is down and disappears with the money.
08:04After we stopped taping, the next thing she said was, be careful what you write because we have quite good lawyers.
08:12We published the interview alongside our article, but we put all the possible red flags that this might be fishy and you should be careful.
08:25I don't remember the exact time, but at a certain point I received this invite.
08:33What Nikolai did was able to kind of look under the hood and together we were pushing together puzzle pieces in order to get the bigger picture.
08:44There's two factors that were involved in people exposing one coin. There was a side that came from the crypto side. We really didn't focus on that.
08:51We were focusing on the Ponzi element of it because we're saying to ourselves, wait a minute, all these things doesn't match up with what you have to do as a legitimate company.
09:00This is all smoke and mirrors.
09:01With one coin and with any financial MLM, which pretty much must be a Ponzi, there is no product. What you're selling is dreams of get rich.
09:11If you look here, the person at the top, they would be recruiting, they would bring in two people with dreams of you can get rich by this product, but also you can make even more money by simply telling people that they can do the same.
09:25And they go out and recruit two on each side and then those people recruit.
09:30And the problem is that their money's gone from the moment they invested it, but they don't realize that.
09:35It was simply old investors being paid with new investors' money. It's simply robbing Peter to pay Paul.
09:41So the seminars and the webinars that you see wasn't about training on actual one coin.
09:46What it was really about was how do you recruit more people? How do you garner more investment? That's the heart of it.
09:53There was a lot of money that was going through. At one point, there was like $60 million a week that was going through one coin. $60 million a week, that's insane.
10:01And so we did the backgrounds and we look at the people and we dig deep into these people. Who are they? Where did they come from? What do they do? What's their track record?
10:09We did a real thorough look into Ruja. She may have all these credentials, but who is she?
10:23We really created this company and our currency two months ago. One coin is the name of the better Bitcoin, so please remember this.
10:34In two months, we did over 10,000 customers, over 2.5 million euros. We are amazing and we're here to stay.
10:44And we found out she was friends with a interesting and flamboyant personality called Lord Yevgeny Minchev.
10:57Yevgeny ran some fashion magazines and ran in all the cool circles, attended all the best parties through them, photographed all the most wonderful models, etc.
11:09In trying to dig up this information, turns out that Yevgeny offered these types of services like, do you want to be the businessman or businesswoman of the year? I got you.
11:39When I started talking to Ruja, and let's say that this was in 2010, Ruja was a smart, delicate and transparent woman. She owned a small hair salon.
12:03And when I saw Ruja, she was a complete, slightly disfigured, with an unclear idea of ​​what she wanted to achieve.
12:15Ruja was an immigrant with her parents, who are nice, ordinary people. Probably these are people who left somewhere, but Ruja had her own plan for things.
12:27She made OneCoin and I started working on it so that I could show off these talents and be able to make her intentions come true from what she imagined it could be.
12:48So she started wanting to be popular at all costs.
12:55And I started taking her to London, I started introducing her to my friends. This gave certain contacts, of course, at a very high political level.
13:08After a few months, she disappeared and this Ruja appeared, which was a top model.
13:15We sat down one day to talk about her and what her plans were for the next year and a half after we met.
13:25And then she said to me, do you know anyone who makes businesswoman contests?
13:31I said, yes, this is me, this is my business, I am the sole owner of the businesswoman of the year contest.
13:38And then she said, how can I get the big prize?
13:41I said, Ruja, I said to myself, everything has a price.
13:54The businesswoman of the year 2014 is Ruja Idragova.
14:11Thank you so much for playing with me.
14:14The deal was made. Ruja became the businesswoman of the year in 2014.
14:21I am the one who created Ruja and Ignatova.
14:26And I'm like, whoa, what is going on? This is crazy.
14:32Ruja's whole persona was built on fabrication. Did she have her degree? Yes.
14:37But was she as successful as she claimed she was? No.
14:41One of the most brazen was the Forbes cover.
14:45There's this Forbes magazine with Ruja Ignatova on the cover, right?
14:50What OneCoin would do, they would hand this out to people and say, look, our founder is on the cover of Forbes.
14:57So many people sent money because of that.
15:00We saw this and we're like, how in the heck is Ruja Ignatova of OneCoin on the cover of Forbes magazine?
15:08And it took a couple of days before someone had kind of gotten to the bottom of it and actually contacted Forbes Bulgaria.
15:16But this was the real cover. That was Marcus Pearson from Minecraft.
15:21And this was the second page advertisement.
15:26She can be anything to anybody and everybody.
15:29And that's the thing that made her so successful.
15:34One of the moments that really got a lot of people hooked as far as the victims and investors was in 2015.
15:44Ruja spoke at The Economist's Eastern European Summit.
15:49This was a prestigious event thrown by The Economist.
15:54You know, they interview presidents, they interview financial superstars, trying to figure out why, what is going on?
16:04How could The Economist make such a terrible mistake?
16:07Cryptocurrency sounds very, very complicated, hidden, complex. Can I do it?
16:13My future or my vision actually is the OneCard, making cryptocurrency, one currency like the euro, like the dollars, that you just can go and spend with your card, which can be a Visa, MasterCard, China Union Pay, whatever.
16:29Make it a real currency that people just can go and spend out there.
16:33It turns out that OneCoin was the platinum sponsor of this event.
16:38This was a pay to play type of situation.
16:43I mean, they are dropping a lot of money, pushing this scam in order to steal everyone's money.
16:49She figured if she was able to speak on this stage, people are going to believe her.
16:54I hope I'm right, that the future is with technology and with us. Thank you very much.
16:59Ultimately, this thing is going to collapse, everyone is going to lose money.
17:03So we were just doing everything that we could to capture and document and then share.
17:08People just weren't reading it.
17:10So that's when I started making memes, because a picture is worth a thousand words.
17:15And we're posting that they were title sponsor, that she wasn't invited, that this is a fake Forbes cover, this was a lie.
17:23We're posting her lies, we're gathering them, and as we're engaging on social media,
17:27we would have sourced information and the people would hate it if it wasn't breaking through.
17:32The problem is there were millions of people who are pro-OneCoin, who'd been sold the dream.
17:39How it's the most amazing thing, how you should shut off any negative views that you hear from the press
17:46or from anyone else in the world.
17:47How it's the most amazing thing, how you should shut off any negative views that you hear from the press
17:53or from anyone that you know. They don't know, how could they know?
17:57And then I came across a post by someone kind of newer that had popped up online, who went by CryptoExpose.
18:03And it alerted me to a really interesting court case in Germany involving Roja.
18:10Wait a minute, that was, you know, the aha moment for all of us, we were going, whoa.
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21:08The fact that she was a criminal, it shed light on OneCoin's intentions even further.
21:15That thread is not an isolated event, it's a continuation. It's who she is, it's her character. We had the documentation to prove it.
21:25But the apologists and the people that were stuck were just like, don't tell me you haven't done anything bad in the past. People change.
21:33Most of the victims that we reached out to refused to believe it was real. And that's typical in any Ponzi we've ever been involved in, and we've been involved in hundreds.
21:42The thing is, is that they don't, number one, they don't want to believe. They've been conditioned not to believe. You're not to believe anything but what the people are telling you that we're part of.
21:51And so they come up with all these excuses as to why you shouldn't listen to anybody like ourselves and myself. And so we're standing there and we're hitting our head against a brick wall.
22:02I thought everything was OK. I'm 22 at the time. What do I know? Because I was on social media all the time just looking up stuff and simply trying to find information.
22:12I just don't know for how many bloggers or wannabe websites we are just providing a huge living.
22:19So keep this in mind before you all go crazy with rumors and so on. We as a company always inform you if something happens. You can get all the news from us. Do not trust strange websites who just want to make money with you.
22:33I'm thinking to myself, there's no way there's a million and a half people that are that stupid to invest into a scam.
22:40I used to see Tim Taishan writing stuff against OneCoin. But then I was very strong because at the offices they told us those are haters of success. Those are actually Bitcoin believers and they are so scared that OneCoin is coming to take them off.
22:59It is a gang and it is a cult. Once you're in it, they figure, OK, now you realize where you're at. The only way you can get your money out is by recruiting others, by bringing them into the gang. So now they have corrupted you. So everyone in there is corrupt. No ifs, ands or buts.
23:30Yeah, probably not accidental. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. We have a lot of that surveillance. Mm-hmm. Every step along the way.
23:52Do you feel OneCoin are still out for you?
23:53Oh, totally. I know it. Yeah. But I know they're losing. Yeah.
23:59Angelina Lazar was an eccentric person who'd been in the MLM business for some time. And this was the first time that I recall somebody actually coming out that was an insider with OneCoin who began questioning things.
24:17I could see that things are just not right. And I was asking questions. I put two and two and two together. And so I met with all the other OneCoin members. I said, guys, you need to stop this. This is a scam.
24:31They blocked me after that. They wouldn't let me anywhere close. They were so afraid of me. And right after that, I came out online. I put up a page, Team Charisma exposing OneCoin. And so Tim discovered that because he was tracing, following everything online with regards to that. So he reached out to me. Yeah.
24:52I'm alive and well. Just laying low here until we take the One Life OneCoin Mob Squad down.
24:58The thing about Angelina is, is that she was very charismatic. And that seems appropriate. OneCoin Charisma. Right. But she was also very much an early insider.
25:12For her to open up and say, I can't believe I fell for this and I want to help any way I can. I mean, it was like, yes, she was high enough in the organization that she knew what was going on behind the scenes.
25:24MLM or multi-level marketing or network marketing. It is a good concept only if you have integrity, competence and reliability in the management team. But these guys are really expert fraudsters.
25:42OneCoin didn't just fall out of the sky.
25:45Before OneCoin, Ruzia Ignatova had become involved in something called BigCoin.
25:53By taking the tokens and converting them into shares, you convert your tokens from the virtual world into real assets.
26:02She had met this brilliant, young, multi-level marketer named Sebastian Greenwood.
26:08Every transaction happens in one second.
26:11Ruzia was introduced to Sebastian in March 2014. Put the timeline together and we come up to June and we now have OneCoin being filed with her and Sebastian Greenwood.
26:21They were plotting behind the scenes, unbeknownst to the people that were leading BigCoin.
26:26BigCoin went down because they couldn't keep the charade going anymore and there weren't enough new people signing up. That's why they collapsed.
26:33They were looking at BigCoin and they're saying, OK, here's what we did wrong.
26:36You look at the original people that came into OneCoin, we're all part of BigCoin.
26:42All the major players that were at the forefront of OneCoin, they all know each other. They've known each other for years.
26:48They were making two and a half, four million dollars a month from the referral fees that they were getting from people signing up in this thing.
26:55They're all about just stuffing their pockets. That's the kind of people that they pulled, that gravitated towards them, that became their leaders.
27:02So that's easy to buy anyone. This is why they were certain that everyone has their price. Until they met me.
27:08Until they met me. Yeah.
27:13Our creator, our founder, Dr Rouge.
27:28I flew to London because I wanted the London Metropolitan Police to raid their event, that global event at Wembley Stadium.
27:37Anytime you can disrupt that, it's a good thing because it breaks the momentum.
27:42You take the pyramid that they built and you start it from the top and you start crumbling the pyramid.
27:47When the guys showed you today the market capitalization, we had a big, big Bitcoin, a bit smaller OneCoin and the other coins were non-existent.
27:56I could not even see the line. This is how I want us to be. I want Bitcoin to be the invisible line one day.
28:04OneCoin to be the market leader.
28:07I went to Charing Cross. I'm trying to explain to them and they said, no, no, no, this is just, you can report this to action fraud. This is just a cyber crime.
28:14And I said, no, no, no, you don't understand. These people are global mob bosses. These people are so dangerous.
28:20They refused to accept the case after I was arguing with them for a long time.
28:23And we want to provide low cost transactions for everyone, everywhere.
28:29We are transparent.
28:34I did not hear this, but it sounded good.
28:38Only victims can report these kind of crimes.
28:41They ask you questions, how much money did you lose? Where did you hear about it from? Who brought you into this? What's their name?
28:48I don't have any of that. I'm an observer.
28:50And to everybody who tells me that I violate the philosophy of cryptocurrency, guys, we are a bigger community. We decide what the philosophy of cryptocurrency is.
29:02And I made calls through to Wembley Arena in order to alert them to who they were allowing to use their premises.
29:10I spoke to the lady there. I explained to her who I was. Didn't mean anything to her.
29:16I explained to her what OneCoin was. She wasn't really that interested.
29:22And I thank you very much for being here, sharing my vision and just making this happen. Thank you very much. Thank you.
29:32She is protected by some very serious powers. Let me just word it like that.
29:47After the big Wembley event, the leadership of OneCoin was actually taking notice and getting pissed off.
29:56So now they had a known and identified movement against them to expose them.
30:04That's when a lot of people started really coming out of the woodwork.
30:08And one of those persons on the dark side was Frank Schneider.
30:13I used to be an intelligence officer for the Luxembourg government.
30:18After I left the service, I saw an opportunity for me to set up my own consulting firm, which was Sandstone.
30:28We had a varied clientele, wealthy individuals with some strategic problems, but also organizations, governments.
30:40In October 2015, one of my clients contacted me and said that he had a friend who has become extremely successful very, very quickly with a project.
30:57And because of that rapid success, there are problems and she needs someone like me to look into it.
31:04But in hindsight, do I regret having taken this job on? Yes, of course I do.
31:11We initially tried to see where are the problems.
31:14We tried to understand what are we dealing with.
31:17Obviously, if libelous information is spread, you try to find out who are these people.
31:23We hired quite quickly some top firms in this world.
31:27Some of the work was to identify who these people are and more so, what motivated them.
31:35My handle is Temptation.
31:37And what's really terrible about this is that it's grown to be a massive company.
31:43It's a massive company.
31:45It's a massive company.
31:47It's a massive company.
31:49It's a massive company.
31:51My handle is Temptation.
31:53And what's really terrible about this is that it's grown to be a massive, massive Ponzi scheme.
32:00Freedom of speech is there.
32:02On the other point is slander and all these negative, let's say, news that are fake news.
32:11The company takes it really seriously.
32:14How do you deal with someone who is clearly extremely irrational?
32:24I can prove that OneCoin is a scam, that the people that are running it and that have run it and that founded it are serial scammers and criminals.
32:37We dealt with sort of an anarchist in this entire world who just clearly just wanted to destroy as much as he could of this crypto thing.
32:49The attacks were extremely vicious and personal.
32:53She was described as a gypsy witch.
32:56It was in fact defamatory.
33:07We have now also spoken to an English law firm simply because in the last two months there have been so many attacks and unspeakable attacks against us.
33:19You can't do anything against the internet.
33:21It's almost impossible to find all the bloggers and so on.
33:26Anyone can write what they want on the internet.
33:29But we just don't want to tolerate this anymore.
33:31And we will not tolerate slander and we will also take action against it.
34:01He was, you know, showing me how to set up a Bitcoin wallet.
34:04I'm like, okay, cool, man.
34:06And so he comes in and comes up, a big dude comes up and says, Tim Curry?
34:12And I go out to shake my hand and he goes, boom, and hands me a paperwork and says, you've been served.
34:19Gotcha. I've been trying this for so hard for so long.
34:23And I'm like, hmm.
34:26And I was like, oh, man.
34:28Okay.
34:30Now I'm getting sued.
34:32I was charged on 77 counts of defamation and obstruction of business in federal court.
34:42I mean, that was some intimidating shit.
34:45As we became more of a threat, we began getting serious pushback in the form of threats of violence, death threats and intimidation.
34:58For instance, this one day I heard kind of a little faint kind of buzz and looked outside and almost directly above me was a drone.
35:12I stared at it for a minute and it stayed right there.
35:16It was clearly looking at me.
35:18There was nothing else around.
35:20And as I was walking, it was kind of mimicking my movement, which freaked me out.
35:26I tried to walk towards the gate on the side of my house, but it immediately took off super fast and it was just gone.
35:34There was no way that I could have followed it or found out where it went.
35:42That's when a lot of people started really coming out with the threats and stuff like that.
35:46I got a lot of threats.
35:47For all the haters, leave the network alone, you hater.
35:52Let us live or you die.
35:57They want you to shut up.
35:59They want you to go away.
36:01And the only way they can do that is intimidate you and they do it through intimidation, it's through fear.
36:05Hello.
36:07When are we going to meet?
36:09I'm anxious to tear out your insides.
36:10You'll have a slow and painful death.
36:12I'm getting closer in my search.
36:14It's been months, but soon we'll be face-to-face, my friend.
36:17I'm going to rip out your tongue with my teeth.
36:20I was like, shit.
36:23There were some months going through this that I slept with one eye open.
36:28It was pretty frightening.
36:30I was like, shit.
36:32I was like, shit.
36:34I was like, shit.
36:36I was like, shit.
36:37I was like, shit.
36:53I remember when we invested in, each one coin was 7 point something euros.
37:00But then it grew up to 21 euros each coin.
37:04It was all amazing.
37:05But you could not use it for anything or exchange it into other cryptocurrencies.
37:11We had 1.8 million coins altogether.
37:16It's 30 something millions.
37:18It's a lot of money.
37:20I was, you know, hopeful and I was content.
37:24And I just couldn't wait for it to happen, to go public.
37:28When is the coin going on the exchange?
37:32And that's what I was waiting for.
37:35So I can cash out.
37:37I started asking them, how can I withdraw this money?
37:41What is it that I have to do?
37:43How does it work?
37:45Ruja had a problem, which is money coming out from their coffers back into the hands of the victims.
37:52She doesn't really want that.
37:54But Ruja knew that she had to do something in terms of trying to create the mirage that this is real.
38:05I'm worse than a hater. I'm a traitor.
38:08I'm in my own category.
38:10I'm a snake, a rat or whatever.
38:14I must have done something really horrible in a previous life to have been caught up in this.
38:21I had a solid blue chip career in banking.
38:26Then one day I got a call saying, you know, are you interested in cryptocurrency?
38:31Well, who isn't interested in cryptocurrency?
38:35Crypto at the time just had this kind of magic that was appealing to everybody.
38:41So within three days I was in Kyiv being interviewed by Ruja.
38:48I very quickly became the head of DealShaker.
38:51Hello, this is Dr. Ruja. I'm the founder of OneCoin.
38:56And today we promised you amazing news.
38:59We are coming up with our own big deal platform.
39:03So you have 12 million people who can see your deals.
39:0812 million people who can spend their coins on the deals that you offer.
39:13The more usable the coin becomes, the more also its value can increase.
39:18DealShaker was built as a copy of Groupon.
39:21And that's an idea I had in the shower.
39:24It was there to encourage and promote OneCoin as a means of exchange.
39:32As soon as they announced DealShaker, I'm like, yes, here it is.
39:36This is what she said. It's happening. It's real. We're here.
39:40All of you can start spending coins on the most exciting deals that you see.
39:44Thank you very much.
39:46There was not a lot of products on there. It was mostly cheap Chinese trinkets.
39:49And anything that was on there was priced double what you would find on Amazon or Alibaba or anywhere else.
39:56One of the things that DealShaker did was that you were selling products partially in OneCoin and partially in real money.
40:03You'd find that the real money, the euros or the dollars that you're spending on there, that was actually the cost of the product.
40:09And the OneCoins on top were just there for show.
40:14Because at the heart of it, OneCoin doesn't exist.
40:17There is no blockchain. There is no real money. It isn't worth anything.
40:20There's so much smoke and mirrors that you can believe just enough that this is real.
40:27This whole thing was, let's get as many people on board as we possibly can before it's going to all collapse. And it was over.
40:39Hello, this is Dr. Ruja Ignatova.
40:41Last week, my little daughter was born.
40:44And I want to thank all of you for the support, for the great wishes, for the presents.
40:50For all the flowers. Thank you very, very much for thinking of me and my family.
40:55The baby had just been born through a surrogate in the Ukraine.
40:59She told me she was too busy to have a baby herself.
41:02Ruja's daughter's christening in Sozopol was excessive.
41:10In banking generally, everything is excessive.
41:13But this was taking it to a new extreme.
41:17With fireworks, cake, catering like you cannot believe, and more champagne than anybody could drink.
41:26Eventually, I just jumped into the swimming pool and splashed some of her guests.
41:31I was told there will be consequences, but she disappeared, so I never had those consequences.
41:36So how did you hear that she was gone?
41:39Well, I couldn't get hold of Ruja.
41:41So I spoke to Konstantin. I said, you know, where's your sister?
41:44So he goes, no, she's decided she's on sabbatical.
41:48She wants to be a mother.
41:50Ruja was always coming back. She could be back in two minutes, she could be back in two months, she could be back in two days.
41:55She's just off.
42:07Then one day I have a meeting with somebody representing Frank Schneider,
42:11who says to me, do you want to take over?
42:14I say, evidently Konstantin does because he stepped into the job.
42:18Hello everyone and greetings from Sofia.
42:21This year is a symbol of new beginnings,
42:24a milestone of the change when we enter the next stage of the One Life evolution.
42:29Were you surprised when Konstantin took over?
42:32A little bit, yes, because he had nothing to do with the company actually.
42:36He was only like bringing coffee or tea to us at the office.
42:41So that's why it was kind of a surprise for me that he was taking a lead.
42:46But then the system still went the same way, so it didn't make a big difference there.
42:53We hit the three million milestone, which is really an amazing achievement.
42:59Whenever Konstantin went to an event, I had to go to an event with Konstantin in order to promote Illshaker.
43:05All of you out there created this amazing, great network by the biggest trend.
43:11He started off as a very clumsy public speaker, but he made it work.
43:16He was absolutely convincing.
43:18Stand up, go out. Together for more. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
43:26Eventually we got invited to the US.
43:29We first land in San Francisco, then we go to Los Angeles.
43:34We were there for three days.
43:36Then on the final day, we go to LAX.
43:40We're standing around in this airport, and eventually there was an announcement.
43:45Can Duncan Arthur and Konstantin Ivanov please come to the desk?
43:48And Konstantin says to the lady, are we going first since you're boarding business class first?
43:55And she said, well, nobody's going where you're going.
44:00So we got pushed through these doors and there were five big guys there.
44:05All dressed in blue, all with badges around their necks.
44:09Two of them swung Konstantin around and cupped him.
44:13And he had this look of absolute terror on his face, absolute terror.
44:18Like a deer in headlights.
44:20Now then I felt a shoulder, then a hand on my shoulder, then I felt another hand on my shoulder.
44:26And then they said to me, we want to talk to you.
44:30Now, I get interrogated.
44:34And they ask me things like, how is the coin priced?
44:38How does this work? Where's the blockchain? All the rest of it.
44:42I gave the answers as I understood them.
44:45And the one guy said to me, well, you're very lucky that stupidity isn't a crime.
44:51We find out that Konstantin Ignatov has been arrested.
44:54Oh my gosh, this is like everything we've been working for.
44:58And the dominoes started with him and they just went after another after another.
45:03One of the founders behind OneCoin's pyramid scheme pled guilty to federal U.S. charges.
45:09Greenwood has admitted to federal wire fraud and money laundering charges in the $4 billion scam, according to the Department of Justice.
45:17We had unmarked cars coming from left, right and center.
45:21We had police officers holding guns at not just me, but my wife and particularly my then 13-year-old son.
45:33My house arrest was agreed on the 18th of November last year.
45:38I haven't left the property today for just over a year.
45:42I haven't left the property today for just over a year.
45:46And yes, I do have cabin fever. The ceiling is falling on my head quite often.
45:52Everything was falling apart for them and we're just watching and enjoying.
45:56We thought that was it. We were celebrating.
45:58But Ruzsa was just nowhere to be found.
46:01I think that that was for sure the moment that we realized that chick's gone.
46:07You know, she's gone.
46:09Dr. Ruzsa Ignatova, the Bulgarian businesswoman who went missing after convincing 1.5 million people to invest in her cryptocurrency.
46:20Ruzsa Ignatova was like a queen and she branded herself like a visionary of OneCoin.
46:28So when she was nowhere to be seen, it was rumors all over internet, all over OneCoin WhatsApp groups that, you know what?
46:35Ruzsa Ignatova had disappeared.
46:38Where the hell is Ruzsa and the billions of dollars?
47:05OneCoin.com