A long read: fascinating crypto-currency scam.

Cryptoqueen: How this woman scammed the world, then vanished
24 November 2019

Ruja Ignatova called herself the Cryptoqueen. She told people she had invented a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin, and persuaded them to invest billions. Then, two years ago, she disappeared. Jamie Bartlett spent months investigating how she did it for the Missing Cryptoqueen podcast, and trying to figure out where she's hiding.

In early June 2016 a 36-year-old businesswoman called Dr Ruja Ignatova walked on stage at Wembley Arena in front of thousands of adoring fans. She was dressed, as usual, in an expensive ballgown, wearing long diamond earrings and bright red lipstick.

She told the cheering crowd that OneCoin was on course to become the world's biggest cryptocurrency "for everyone to make payments everywhere".
Full article at www.bbc.com/news/stories-50435014

Revealed: The Cryptoqueen's £13.5m London penthouse
Published 4 days ago

A money-laundering trial in Germany is shining a light on the purchase of a luxury London penthouse by cryptocurrency scammer Dr Ruja Ignatova. Jamie Bartlett and Rob Byrne of The Missing Cryptoqueen podcast explain how she used British-based lawyers and wealth managers - who continued to offer their services after she disappeared.

A former porter at the exclusive Abbots House apartment block in Kensington remembers meeting Dr Ruja Ignatova in 2016, as she returned from a shopping trip with her Bulgarian bodyguards.

"These two poor men came behind her like overloaded donkeys, struggling, and a bit out of breath - they must've had 20 bags each," says James (not his real name).

Dr Ruja had been splashing out on designer-label goods - Jimmy Choo, Prada, and Calvin Klein - without regard for the expense.

A little later, James got a look inside her four-bedroom penthouse flat, complete with swimming pool.

"She had an Andy Warhol painting stuffed in the cupboard, and that broke my heart because I went to art college," says the ex-policeman.

That was a print of the actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Another Warhol, Red Lenin, hung above the fireplace. To the left of a sofa in another reception room was a print of Queen Bubblegum by Michael Moebius, showing Queen Elizabeth blowing a bubble.

Private Eye later estimated the flat contained works of art worth £500,000, bought from London's Halcyon gallery.

James wondered whether Dr Ignatova was deliberately spreading her suspect wealth into assets that could be easily moved, to avoid them being seized.

On 17 September Dr Ruja's German lawyer, Martin Breidenbach, went on trial in Münster, accused of money laundering for transferring 20 million euros to a London law firm to fund the purchase of the luxury property.

Two others are also in the dock, facing charges connected to the siphoning of millions of euros from Dr Ruja's €4bn scam - which consisted of selling something that didn't exist, a fake cryptocurrency she called OneCoin.

When the lease was signed in August 2016, financial regulators in at least one European country had already issued a warning about OneCoin. A few months earlier, Dr Ruja had pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges in a German court, after bankrupting a metal factory she'd bought and leaving 150 people jobless in 2011.

But this wasn't widely known.

Lawyers at Locke Lord, a US law firm with an office in London, did express concern about the source of the 20 million euros being transferred - this is apparent from internal emails revealed later in a US court case. But Dr Ruja's companies passed the firm's compliance checks, so they proceeded with the purchase of the property, along with Aquitaine Group, a Guernsey company offering tax haven services to wealthy clients.

The penthouse had been refurbished by luxury property developers Candy & Candy after a fire that broke out while it was the London home of the singer, Duffy. The estate agent was Knight Frank. But quite who had bought the flat remained unclear to the outside world, thanks to British tax haven secrecy.

According to the property deed its owner is Abbots House Penthouse Limited.

This is an anonymous Guernsey shell company - one of 12,000 such companies that own properties in England and Wales - meaning that Dr Ruja's name would not have to appear on the UK deed, or in public records in the Channel Island.

Other Guernsey firms were appointed as directors (or "nominees"), and a couple of months after Dr Ruja's offer was accepted, Aquitaine was listed as the company's "resident agent" in Guernsey. The London address of Locke Lord, meanwhile, appeared on the penthouse's Land Registry documents.

This appears to have been enough to conceal Dr Ruja's purchase of the property from the City of London Police, which told swindled OneCoin investors in September 2019 that they were "unable to identify any OneCoin assets in the UK".

The truth was only revealed two months later, in emails read out in the money-laundering trial of a former Locke Lord employee in the US, Mark Scott.
More here: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-59062959

Crypto coin scams are a dime a dozen. The scams are called rug pulls and come in various guises. Here is a brief synopsis of some of them: https://www.cybertalk.org/2021/09/02/de ... rug-pulls/

Was Juha Parhiala, the ex owner from Sharkys, who would have died in may ?? here wing-man ??? Or more the other way, she was his wing-woman ??

Somebody knwos he really died also or just dissapeard ??

From what I have read, which is everything I could find, he was under her.

Unless he was charged with the buying of laundering outlets, on her behalf, a Cambodian bar doesn't fit her modus operandi, and seems too piddly for $4B, so more likely suitable for someone down the ranks in the multi-million dollar range.

COVID meant all he could launder was the rent, and I bet that was paid up, well in advance.

"Cash, ok?"

This seems the likely pecking order to me, because she would not want the senior role during the aftermath, and it is evident that she had the skills, or the skilled people, to facilitate most any ruse. So, it was perhaps overlooked, under-prioritised, or the takeover proposition was mis-sold to other parties.

But she certainly would not want to be the Face of Onecoin, during the unveiling.

I don't believe she is atop the tree, however, and I would imagine those above her are ensuring her invisibility. I very much doubt her siblings would recognise her.