OneCoin promised to be the “Bitcoin killer.” Between 2014 and 2016 it pulled in more than USD 4 billion from at least 3.5 million investors worldwide. Behind it stood Ruja Ignatova, the self-styled Cryptoqueen, and a multi-level marketing machine that recruited friends to recruit family. Among the people it reeled in was a Glaswegian called Jen McAdam, who became the scheme's most public whistleblower.
From investor to whistleblower
McAdam invested her father's £15,000 inheritance in OneCoin in 2015 and, as the company's playbook required, brought in friends and family. The faster she recruited, the more OneCoin held her up at its London and Macau conferences. About a year in, the questions started. When she pressed her up-line on how OneCoins were actually mined and when they would become tradable on a real exchange, the answers turned into warnings about being demoted off the leader board.
In late 2016 McAdam walked through OneCoin's own slide decks and trader-package screenshots on a public webinar and concluded, on camera, that OneCoin had no real blockchain, no mining, and no path to becoming convertible into anything. Within weeks she went from being celebrated at OneCoin events to being treated as the scheme's most dangerous customer.
Carter-Ruck and the SLAPP that didn't stick
Three weeks after that webinar, McAdam received a defamation letter from Carter-Ruck, the London libel firm whose reputation for chilling speech has its own legal subgenre. Partner Claire Gill, acting for OneCoin and Ignatova, demanded a retraction; in McAdam's account, the only way to avoid a court fight was to delete the recording and apologise. She refused, and threats to her and her family escalated through 2017.
By August 2023 her book tour for Devil's Coin was being cancelled venue by venue over what her publisher described as “serious security concerns.” On 18 September 2025, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal ruled that Carter-Ruck's retainer with OneCoin had been entered into in furtherance of fraud, vacating the legal privilege the firm had been hiding behind ever since.
Cooperation that built the case
McAdam's documentation, by this point thousands of pages, went to investigators in the UK, Germany and the United States. On 12 October 2017 the Southern District of New York unsealed a federal warrant for Ignatova's arrest; she boarded a flight from Sofia to Athens on 25 October and dropped off the map. The case against her co-founder kept moving without her.
“The so called ‘mining’ of coins is a concept that is very familiar in the industry and a story we can sell to the members.”
Karl Greenwood, internal email to Ruja Ignatova, cited in United States v. Greenwood (SDNY)
As with Theranos, the prosecution leaned on insider documentation rather than expert reconstruction. Karl Sebastian Greenwood, OneCoin's “global master distributor” and architect of its MLM pyramid, was arrested in Thailand in July 2018 and extradited that October. On 12 September 2023, U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos sentenced him to 20 years in prison and ordered the forfeiture of approximately USD 300 million, roughly the cut he had taken from the scheme.
“1.3 billion fake coins. We are fucked, this came unexpected and now needs serious, serious thinking.”
Ruja Ignatova, internal email to Karl Greenwood (August 2015), cited in United States v. Greenwood (SDNY)
The DOJ filings reproduced enough of the founders' own correspondence to make a “we didn't know” defence impossible.
The Cryptoqueen, still missing
Ignatova has not been seen publicly since that 25 October 2017 flight. The FBI added her to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on 30 June 2022, only the eleventh woman in the list's 72-year history. In June 2024 the State Department's Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program raised the bounty for information leading to her arrest from USD 250,000 to USD 5 million.
A 2023 Bulgarian investigation alleged she was murdered in November 2018 on the orders of Christoforos “Taki” Amanatidis, a Bulgarian organised-crime figure who had been providing her security; the body, in this account, was dismembered and dumped from a yacht in the Ionian Sea. The FBI continues to operate on the assumption Ignatova is alive, and reported sightings have continued.
The wider net
Recovery is not just a US story. German prosecutors in Bielefeld, working with the Royal Court of Guernsey, traced two of Ignatova's London properties (a Kensington penthouse sold for £10 million and a smaller flat for £1.4 million) through shell companies registered in the Channel Islands. After Ignatova ignored a 28-day ultimatum, the Royal Court on 16 January 2026 registered an overseas forfeiture order and released £8,590,200.92 plus interest into the Seized Asset Fund, to be claimed by Bielefeld for OneCoin victims.
Frank Schneider, a former deputy chief of Luxembourg's foreign-intelligence service who advised Ignatova through his firm Sandstone, fled French house arrest in May 2023, was returned, and in April 2026 saw the Nancy Court of Appeal side with Washington's extradition request; he has indicated he will appeal. As with the FTX prosecution, the crypto-fraud net keeps tightening on the consultants.
Books and further reading
McAdam's own account is in Devil's Coin: My Battle to Take Down the Notorious OneCoin Cryptoqueen; for the wider scheme, Jamie Bartlett's The Missing Cryptoqueen began as the BBC podcast that first put the OneCoin story in front of a mass audience. McAdam now sits on the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition's roster of victims' advocates, where her decade-long fight with Carter-Ruck has become a reference case for how libel law gets weaponised to protect financial fraud.
- “Devil's Coin: My Battle to Take Down the Notorious OneCoin Cryptoqueen” by Jen McAdam
- “The Missing Cryptoqueen: The Billion Dollar Cryptocurrency Con and the Woman Who Got Away with It” by Jamie Bartlett
OneCoin's empire was built on a pitch deck. Pulling it apart took prosecutors on three continents, a courtroom of MLM lieutenants, a libel firm hauled in front of its own tribunal, and an investor in Glasgow who, after losing her father's inheritance, decided to burn the scheme down on a public webcam. The book trail keeps growing; the work that triggered it started with one webinar and a refusal to take it down.
