Fugitive: The Mystery of the Crypto Queen
Channel 4
As long as there have been humans and money, there have been scams and con artists.
The first recorded ‘pyramid scheme’ was created by Charles Ponzi after the First World War.
The ingenious, albeit illegal, ruse has been tricking the naive and the greedy out of their hard-earned money ever since.
It relies on the victims encouraging their family, friends and work colleagues to be the next bottom layer of the pyramid.
The ‘investors’ pay money into the scheme on the promise of earning a spectacular return on a claimed revolutionary, often financial product.
Each investor, having paid the person above them, must recruit the next layer of suckers to get paid themselves.
A portion of each payment makes its way up the pyramid and therefore those at the pinnacle become wealthy and are the perfect marketing example of why new recruits should invest their money.
However, at some stage the music stops and those at the bottom of the pyramid discover it’s a confidence trick and all their cash is gone.
That’s what happened at OneCoin in 2017.
Launched in 2014 as a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin, OneCoin was marketed as the uncomplicated crypto for the masses.
By the time the Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2017, it had amassed $4 billion worldwide, making it one of the biggest scams in history.
It’s Bulgarian/German CEO Ruja Ignatova disappeared when a US warrant for her arrest was filed. She’s currently the only woman on the FBI’s most wanted list and is also among Interpol’s ‘red notice’ list of wanted people.
Others were arrested and one director was sentenced to 20 years for fraud in 2022.
There have been a number of documentaries on the mystery of the whereabouts of Ignatova (Crytoqueen: The OneCoin Scam is on Prime and The Missing Cryptoqueen: Dead of Alive? Is on the BBC iPlayer) but this latest docuseries is attracting much attention.
Written and directed by Rudolph Herzog and Raid Sabbah, Variety reports the docuseries has been sold to broadcasters in 31 countries.
In the UK it’s on Channel 4. The three episodes were released on Tuesday after episode one played on TV.
It’s a rollicking good tale with interviews with some of the people involved and many of the victims. The action spans the globe as we follow what seems like a Ruja stage show as the marketing campaign tries to build the excitement.
Pyramid schemes may be a century old but social media and the complexity of cryptocurrencies mean they are becoming more common.
Many finance professionals take the view that Bitcoin is uninvestable. It’s not a currency in that there are very few things you can buy with it, neither is it a store of wealth like gold because its price is highly volatile. It’s not an equity because it doesn’t create any profits.
However, Bitcoin, founded following the financial crisis of 2008, is backed by blockchain and while its price has fluctuated wildly its trajectory has been upwards since a near fatal slump a decade ago.
It may be almost unexplainable but nor is it a pyramid scheme.
When you hear the OneCoin victims tell of how their money disappeared it seems all too obvious that it was a scam, but we should have some sympathy.
After you watch the series, ask yourself honestly if you could have believed in the hype and fallen for one of the biggest scams in history, and the only woman on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list?
As always, the best defence is the only maxim - if it seems too good to be true it probably is.
