Dr Ruja Ignatova scammed investors out of billions with fake cryptocurrency OneCoin.
A missing cryptoqueen considered to be the ‘world’s most wanted woman’ now has a £4,000,000 bounty on her head.
Bulgarian-born Ruja Ignatova, who has German citizenship, is accused of running one of the biggest cryptocurrency scams of all time, defrauding investors out of $4bn (£3.3bn) by selling a fake cryptocoin called OneCoin in 2014.
The 43-year-old disappeared without a trace in 2017, and has been on the FBI’s Most Wanted List since 2022.
FBI officials previously offered a bounty of $100,000 for information on the woman believed to have masterminded ‘one of the largest global fraud schemes in history’, but have since upped the payout to $5,000,000.
‘Ignatova is believed to travel with armed guards and/or associates,’ reads her FBI most wanted poster. ‘Ignatova may have had plastic surgery or otherwise altered her appearance’.
The FBI believes she may be using a German passport to travel to countries such as the UAE, Russia, Greece and Eastern Europe.
But there is also speculation she may have been murdered by the Bulgarian mafia, who are suspected of masterminding the OneCoin scheme.
Ignatova was last seen boarding a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens on 25 October 2017, after fleeing a flat belonging to her American boyfriend upon learning he was cooperating with the FBI.
When she was first added to the most-wanted list, the FBI said she had escaped with a ‘tremendous amount of cash- enough to buy a lot of friends’.
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