As the counter approached T-minus one hour, about 200 OneCoiners were gathered at the Convention and Exhibition Centre in Melbourne, Australia. No one inside knew that Mark Scott had been arrested a month earlier, or that a US grand jury had secretly indicted Ruja Ignatova on fraud and money laundering a whole year before, or that Sebastian was sitting in prison in Thailand. As far as attendees were concerned, it was a day to celebrate. Finally OneCoin was going public; it was the day the ICO was formally concluded, which Sofia HQ had promised was the final step to getting OneCoin listed on one of the major exchange sites like Kraken or Poloniex. The dedicated ICO website was projected on a large screen and the song “The Final Countdown” by the rock band Europe played. A cruise for the top promoters around Melbourne’s coastline was planned that evening to celebrate.
“Going public” had taken on an eschatological quality over the previous four years. Although it technically referred to the moment that OneCoin would be listed on a public exchange site where it could be freely traded for real money, it was much more than that: It was vindication. For investors like Christine Grablis in Tennessee, it meant turning her roughly one million OneCoin into €30 million. But it was also about self-respect. For three years she’d insisted to skeptical friends and family that OneCoin was real, that she was most certainly not a gullible fool who’d blown everything on a Ponzi scheme.
“Three… two… one…!”
Although the audience was mostly made up of low-level promoters and investors from Australia and southeast Asia, where OneCoin had a solid network, there was still a euphoric atmosphere. They cheered and whooped. Some raised their arms in the air in celebration, muttering under their breath. Some hugged. Others could hardly believe the moment had arrived, and immediately phoned their uplines and downlines: “It’s happened! OneCoin is going public!”
Despite the celebrations, it was a long way from the halcyon days. Investors had always assumed the “going public” event would be bigger than London or Bangkok. But Ruja wasn’t there to witness it, nor was Sebastian, Juha, Nigel Allan, Kari Wahlroos, Igor Alberts. Everyone had gone. Even Konstantin didn’t make it. He told the audience via a pre-recorded message that his plane broke down in Doha. The highest-ranking OneCoiner was now a man called Simon Le, a quietly spoken Black Diamond from Vietnam who’d been sucked up the pyramid with each departing leader. He was a good seller, but not in the same league as people like Igor or Kari. But so what? There were people in the room who held thousands, millions, of OneCoin—each now worth €26.95. And they would finally be able to sell those coins for real money.
The next day, investors excitedly logged in to their OneCoin accounts, expecting to find instructions on how exactly to cash out their millions. But nothing had changed. The only difference was on OneCoin’s dedicated ICO site, www.onecoinico.io. The “countdown clock” had been replaced with a new message:
Please be informed that a new email for the Offering has been created, namely: SUPPORT@ONECOINICO.IO. In case you have any inquiries, do not hesitate to contact us. Please be patient, the Offering is about to start really soon!
OneCoin: the really-soon company. It was always the future of payments and never the present. A few days later, Sofia HQ quietly announced it wasn’t going public just yet after all: in fact, it would take at least another year for all the various admin to be completed.
The ICO, like everything else OneCoin did, was just another jam-tomorrow delay. But, for Sofia HQ, it created one final opportunity to scam a few more people before everything collapsed for good.