CHAPTER 24
FLIGHT
Paris, September 26–October 3, 2017
Anyone lucky or rich enough to be staying at the Four Seasons Hotel on Avenue George V during Paris Fashion Week might have spotted the well-dressed businesswoman deep in thought in La Galerie, the hotel’s see-and-be-seen dining room. How much trouble was Gilbert in? What might he tell the FBI? Did they already know about Fenero, the fake blockchain, the phoney price? All her other worries—Igor Albert’s questions, one million investors, the ICO—seemed insignificant.
Ruja had booked this trip months earlier when things were calmer. Her interest in fashion hadn’t waned since school: seeing Dior, Louis Vuitton or Chanel model their latest was one of the few ways Ruja relaxed. One time in Hong Kong, her office manager Fernando Rhys turned up at the Ritz-Carlton and handed her a backpack with one million Hong Kong dollars cash—and she beelined to the nearest luxury mall and blew it on jewelry. To get in the mood for Paris, she’d been on one of her infamous sprees, spending thousands of dollars on a gold crocodile Hermès Birkin bag and a Carolina Herrera Mikimoto emerald-diamond-pearl necklace.1 Sometimes she wished she’d just opened that cosmetics company “RujaNoir,” like she’d planned back in 2011. Instead she was tangled up in this crypto MLM mess, trying to figure out what to do about Gilbert.
Ever since that angry phone call on September 24, Gilbert and Ruja continued to speak almost every day. Given he was now working for the FBI as an informant, it’s probable that the authorities insisted Gilbert call regularly and tease her with morsels of information to keep her curious. But Ruja wanted to talk face-to-face—like she always said: phone lines weren’t secure. Gilbert agreed to travel to Paris to meet Ruja and talk it over, adding that his teenage son would also join. (Konstantin agreed to come to Paris and entertain him so Ruja and Gilbert could be alone. While there Konstantin managed to get a selfie with Cindy Crawford, which he posted on Instagram.)
No matter how impossible the situation, Ruja always thought things could be fixed with enough time and money. Maybe she hoped to sweet-talk Gilbert, maybe to confront him. As a bare minimum she needed to know whether this extortion case involved her, and make sure he didn’t do anything stupid. But just before he was due to arrive, Gilbert told Ruja he wouldn’t be coming to Paris after all. He didn’t mention the reason: the Southern District of New York court had granted him a $5 million bail subject to a curfew, regular urine tests and GPS monitoring. The Department of Justice confiscated his passports and forced him to move from Florida to Manhattan (where he stayed, ironically, at the Four Seasons). He wasn’t allowed to leave the borough of Manhattan, let alone fly to France. However, his teenage son did still travel to Paris, and maybe that was what gave it away. Perhaps he let it slip that his dad now lived in Manhattan and was banned from travelling. Maybe one of Ruja’s people contacted Gilbert’s lawyers and learned about the bail hearing. (The government didn’t object to his bail, which is often a sign that a defendant is cooperating.) However it happened, when she should have been enjoying the catwalk, Ruja realized Gilbert was in deeper trouble than she thought. He might already be working for the FBI.
Ruja always tried to keep Konstantin out of her trouble. She cared a lot about her little brother and he was just the PA. Although he travelled everywhere with her, often doubling up as an extra bodyguard, she sometimes ushered him out of the room if anything sensitive was being discussed.
“Something bad has happened,” she told him, uncharacteristically worried. “Travel back to Sofia without me.”
“What is it?” Konstantin asked.
“I can’t tell you,” she replied, trying not to worry her brother. “I will see you back in Sofia.”
Ruja needed to start planning.
Lisbon, Saturday October 7, 2017
Igor Alberts was pacing up and down in his hotel near Lisbon’s popular events venue, the Congress Centre. Ruja wasn’t answering her phone, which wasn’t like her. He phoned Konstantin, Irina, anyone he could think of from Sofia HQ. No one knew anything. No one had seen her.
“Where is she?” Igor kept asking himself. “Where is Dr. Ruja?”
Two hundred and fifty OneCoin investors and promoters, including some of the biggest names in the network—Kari the hype guy, Latin America’s only Black Diamond José Gordo, even co-founder Sebastian himself—had come to Lisbon for the weekend corporate event. Everyone had the same questions that had been festering away for weeks: When are we going public? Will you show us the blockchain? What’s happening with the ICO? Igor had told his downline what Ruja had promised him, that she would answer everything in Lisbon.
“How can she not be here?” Igor fretted to Andreea. She’d never been late.
It was true—Ruja did not tolerate tardiness. One time, two promoters had travelled halfway across the world to meet Ruja for a routine meeting. They arrived four minutes late and she sent them all the way back home again. But minutes passed, and then hours, and there was no sign or sound from Ruja—nothing. Emails, WhatsApp messages and phone calls all went unanswered. For the first time ever, Ruja just didn’t turn up.
Could it be that those OneCoin critics on BehindMLM were right all along, that this was all just a massive…? No, that was impossible. It would be the biggest scam since Bernie Ma—well, it didn’t bear thinking about.
It was too late to cancel so apologies were made and excuses were given. Pitt Arens also failed to show up and resigned shortly after. The event continued as if nothing was wrong. Saturday was all-day sales training where promoters wore lanyards that read “live the life of your dreams” and learned the latest pitching techniques. Sunday was motivationals and recognitions. Kari did his usual turn: OneCoin was the “opportunity of a lifetime” and Dealshaker will be “bigger than eBay.” But without Ruja the event had lost its oxygen. Kari didn’t charge onstage like a steam train saying “the future’s so bright I wear sunglasses” like before. Igor noticed that Sebastian—who for three years had been Mr. Positive, Mr. We-can-do-it—seemed distant and distracted. His speech at the gala dinner the evening before was rambling and vague. More importantly, there was no new information about going public, no proof of the blockchain, no answers about this strange new ICO plan.
Offstage all sorts of theories were bouncing around the senior promoters. Ruja had been kidnapped. Killed. Igor had told her before that she needed more bodyguards. “Oh, those fuckers from the traditional banks,” he said to Andreea, between frantic calls. “This is the trick they do!”
Sofia, October 8, 2017
Ruja sat in her Sofia mansion and watched the missed calls come in from Lisbon.
Ten, twenty, fifty.
It was too risky to go to Lisbon now she knew about Gilbert—and by now she was convinced he’d snitched. With all her connections, she felt relatively safe in Sofia, but if she left Bulgaria, there was a chance an officer with an Interpol red notice would snap her up at the airport.
Konstantin didn’t know the details but he knew his sister was extremely worried. Ruja flew off the handle at Konstantin practically every day over minor infractions—the stationery was the wrong color, her Diet Coke wasn’t sufficiently chilled—but she’d always apologize soon after. This was different. She was depressed and lacking energy. To cheer her up, Konstantin turned up at her mansion unannounced with some food, but she’d lost her appetite and looked like she hadn’t slept properly in days. Ever since they were kids she was the smart one who always fixed everything. Through all the problems of the last three years she’d never cracked. For the first time, he was genuinely worried about her.
“Ruja, tell me what’s wrong,” he said. He’d accepted her vagueness in Paris. But judging from her appearance, whatever it was, it was serious. He wanted answers.
“Gilbert had some problems with the FBI,” she finally replied. “He wants to make some kind of deal with them. He’s planning on giving me to the FBI in exchange.”
Konstantin glanced over at the table and saw a printout. It was a transcript of Gilbert talking about working with the police.2
“What’s going to happen?” he asked. What the hell were the FBI involved for?
“Don’t worry,” Ruja replied, noticing Konstantin’s worried expression. “Everything will be OK. Gilbert’s plan isn’t going to work.”
Bernie Madoff’s biographer Diana Henriques wrote that he had a “well-defended mind.” He believed he would get away with it, even while simultaneously knowing that was impossible. Madoff sometimes thought that some awful calamity, maybe an earthquake or power outage, might befall New York and his crimes would be forgotten. Ruja also had a well-defended mind. She thought she would get away with it too. But this wasn’t New York. It was Bulgaria, the most corrupt country in Europe.
Sofia, October 11–24, 2017
For the next two weeks, little happened. There wasn’t much more news from Gilbert. Her Fenero money man Mark Scott was still walking around freely in Florida—if the FBI really knew everything, surely they would have got Mark too? Sebastian also got back safely to his Ko Samui home in Thailand from the Lisbon event. Maybe Gilbert had kept his mouth shut after all. Ruja started to relax a little and even got back to business, working on the ICO with Irina, talking to Gary Gilford about a partnership with the Ugandan government, and looking for a replacement for Pitt Arens, her recently resigned CEO. She ordered earrings and ceramic flowers and asked Konstantin to pick them up for her. In the background, Ruja also started pulling a few strings. Irina Dilkinska wired €200,000 into one of her Maltese casino bank accounts, called Infinityplay, from the B&N company that had been used to move money into the Fenero Funds.3
But there was a lot going on; Ruja just didn’t know about any of it. Less than a week after the Lisbon event, a grand jury in New York secretly indicted Ruja on charges of wire fraud and money laundering. In other words, the US legal system had concluded that, with the fresh evidence from Gilbert, she should face charges in America. The indictment was under seal, meaning no one should have seen it. But the net was closing in. It seems likely that at this point—around the middle of October 2017—the US Department of Justice issued a request for assistance, known as a Mutual Legal Assistance Request, to the Bulgarian justice department. (The other possibility was to issue an Interpol arrest warrant, which would be triggered if she tried to travel on her passport, but given the authorities knew where she was at the time, and Interpol’s bad reputation among law enforcement professionals, it seems probable that the MLA route was the preferred one.)
Coincidentally, it wasn’t only the Americans that were on to her at that precise moment: German prosecutors had also been quietly investigating OneCoin for some time. The North Rhine–Westphalia police had first been notified by a local bank in late 2015 about a large number of suspicious payments connected to one of Frank Ricketts’s IMS accounts—and although that specific investigation was ultimately dropped, in September 2016 the investigation was expanded to cover OneCoin and Ruja herself. In the summer of 2017, they formally requested mutual assistance from the Sofia prosecutor’s office to raid the OneCoin head office based on the suspicion of unregulated selling of financial and payment services, false advertising and money laundering. In September 2017, the offices of her long-time German lawyer, Martin Breidenbach, were raided. The following month—around the same time as the US Mutual Legal Assistance Request—the German request was also handed up the chain to the more senior Special Prosecutor’s Office.4
Perhaps unaware that two of the most important police forces in the world had her in their crosshairs, on October 21, Ruja scheduled a meeting with RavenR boss Gary Gilford for October 31 in Sofia to discuss who should fill the vacant OneCoin CEO role. “She wanted me over there urgently,” Gary recalls. “It was really really important to her.” But that meeting would never happen.
By late 2017, Ruja had been a member of the Sofia business set for almost a decade, during which time she’d become one of the most well-connected people in the city. Now was the time for that to come good. The US authorities would later say that they had evidence Ruja had been making secret payments to government officials in Sofia, and—according to more than one source—on or around October 22, Ruja was informed, possibly by a junior police officer, that she faced a choice: either get arrested or get out of the country.
The thought of it! The two-time Bulgarian businesswoman of the year, the Oxford graduate, the Cryptoqueen herself, flown in handcuffs to New York or Münster and dragged through the courts. The whole world watching her humiliated on the stand by lawyers raking over her old emails, her love life, everything. And followed by what? Eighty years behind bars in prison scrubs?
Five years earlier that might have been a simple decision. But Ruja was now a mother. Getting out of the country at short notice would mean being separated from her daughter, which, according to close friends, would have been unbearable. “Ruja absolutely loved that daughter,” recalls Gary Gilford. “She would have been heartbroken.”
But she had finally run out of options.
Ruja immediately called an emergency meeting of her top people from the Sofia office. None of the MLM network like Igor or Kari were invited and Sebastian was in Thailand. The London RavenR Capital office didn’t know either—she liked Gary but didn’t want too many people knowing what was happening. Konstantin sat in her kitchen (which had the best Wi-Fi signal) and let each of her most trusted colleagues in one at a time: Irina Dilkinska; Momchil Nikov, the long-standing IT guy; Veselina Valkova, her head of compliance (Valkova claims she has “never heard” of these meetings but was invited to Ruja’s house before she disappeared and asked to work on a “casino project unrelated to cryptocurrency”). For three years, Ruja had more or less run OneCoin from her head, and now she needed to download so things could tick over in her absence. There was so much to discuss: the ICO was still going ahead, the banking issues, the coin price, the Fenero Funds. She promised them she would be back before Christmas. She just needed things to settle down and let this trouble pass.
As soon as the meetings were concluded, Ruja told Konstantin to book her a flight to Vienna in two days’ time, October 25.
“What are you doing there?” he asked. Recently all Konstantin seemed to do was ask his sister questions she only half-answered.
“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’ll be back soon.”
The very next day, Ruja changed her mind. She phoned Konstantin and told him to book another flight for the 25th. This one to Athens.
“Shall I cancel the flight to Vienna?” he asked. He was still technically her assistant, after all.
“No!!” Ruja screamed, flying into a rage. “I need them both!”
Konstantin quickly logged on and found there were two flights to Athens that day: a Ryanair flight departing at the ungodly hour of 6:50 AM; and a slightly later, slightly more upmarket Aegean Airlines flight, which took off at 10:45 AM. With the later one, she might even get a bit of much-needed sleep. But Ruja wanted the earlier flight.
She always knew this day might come. Even before the first coin was mined or the first package sold, Ruja had emailed Sebastian about what would happen if OneCoin didn’t work out in the way they hoped. “Exit strategy,” she’d written. “Disappear and let someone else take the blame.” She’d never really thought about who that “someone else” might be. The first president Nigel Allan? Pyramid boss Juha Parhiala? RavenR Director Gary Gilford?
It was never meant to come to this, fleeing her own country, her company, her family at a moment’s notice. But the hype of Bitcoin, combined with a million people’s fear of missing out, had turned OneCoin into a €5 billion monster that was too big to disappear under the radar. It was the scam of the century by mistake.
Sofia International Airport, October 25, 2017
When Ruja woke at around 4 AM, it was still dark. Outside, a cold drizzle blanketed the city as she waited for one of her Bulgarian security guys to pick her up. Carrying nothing except a purse and at least two passports, the pair headed to Sofia Airport. At this time of morning, the usually gridlocked roads were empty and the drive took just 15 minutes, barely enough time for her to reflect on the crazy events of the last few weeks.
When she arrived at the airport, there was no one waiting for her: no Interpol red list, no arrest warrant, no agents in suits. At just before 7 AM, Ruja and her head of security boarded Ryanair flight FR6300 to Athens. Ruja hadn’t always been rich—she used to take budget flights all the time as a student. Even in the early months of OneCoin, money was tight. But nowadays she was used to business class and charter. It must have been strange for the Cryptoqueen to sit in a box seat for the package holiday people, but she didn’t have much choice.
When she landed at Athens just over an hour later, there were no FBI agents waiting for her there either. Her head of security came back that same evening, alone.
“What happened to Ruja?” Konstantin asked him. He’d booked the flights to Athens. Normally he was in charge of sorting taxies and hotels too—but not this time.
“At Athens airport she was met by some Russian-speaking men,” he replied. “Then she carried on travelling with them.”
She’d made it out.4