Key takeaways:
- Karl Greenwood, who founded OneCoin with Ruja Ignatova, was given a 20-year prison term and made to pay $300 million in fines.
- The multilevel marketing and Ponzi scheme duped 3.5 million people out of $4 billion.
On September 20, Karl Greenwood, who founded OneCoin with Ruja Ignatova, was given a 20-year prison term and made to pay $300 million in fines. Ignatova has not been located.
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York handed out a judgment to Greenwood, a citizen of both Sweden and the United Kingdom.
US Attorney Damian Williams referred to OneCoin as “one of the largest fraud schemes ever perpetrated” in a statement released by the Justice Department.
According to the statement, the multilevel marketing and Ponzi scheme duped 3.5 million people out of $4 billion, and it also added:
“In reality, unlike legitimate cryptocurrencies, OneCoin had no actual value.”
The OneCoin team linked their product to Bitcoin in promotional materials, but they lacked, in the phrase of the Justice Department, “a true blockchain — that is, a public and verifiable blockchain,” any mining activities, or even as many coins on their private blockchain as they sold.
In 2018, Greenwood received an extradition from Thailand and has been in detention ever since. He could have been sentenced to up to 60 years in prison after entering a guilty plea to fraud and money laundering charges in December.
Greenwood is alleged to have amassed over $300 million through a 5% fee on all OneCoin purchases and to have lavishly spent on opulent products and the lifestyle that goes along with them.
Ignatova is on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Ten Most Wanted List and has been missing since October 2017. However, several other OneCoin executives are being prosecuted.
Irina Dilkinska, the former head of legal and compliance for OneCoin, was accused in March of one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiring to launder money. According to reports, Ignatova associate Christopher Hamilton was to be extradited to the United States in August 2022 on fraud and money laundering allegations.
In August, the former OpenSea product manager received a three-month prison sentence for wire fraud and money laundering related to insider trading. On November 2, Nathaniel Chastain would have to surrender.
