CHAPTER 31

ALWAYS PLAY STUPID

Los Angeles International Airport, March 6, 2019

As he dawdled around Los Angeles airport waiting for his now delayed Turkish Airlines flight back to Sofia, Konstantin told Duncan Arthur—the South African Dealshaker boss—that he was planning to slow down. His partner, Kristina, was pregnant, and Konstantin was tiring of the MLM world, just like his sister had two years earlier. He liked seeing new places, but 2018 had been exhausting. He’d only just recovered from a mammoth trip around Latin America, trying to arrange a deal to sell apartments that had been built for the Olympic Games using 100 percent OneCoin. He was hoping to do what Ruja had attempted just before she vanished: sell off the MLM side of the business.

Ever since Konstantin had taken over OneCoin in June 2018, he and Duncan had become unlikely friends. Duncan was a heavy-drinking IT guy and Konstantin was a vegan tee-total fitness fanatic but for some reason they got on. The pair stopped off at the duty-free shop, where Konstantin bought a baseball cap. They talked breezily about the game they’d watched a couple of days earlier at the Staples Center: the Los Angeles Lakers lost to their local rivals the Clippers in a tight match. But at least Konstantin had seen the legendary LeBron James score 27 points. He sent a couple of posts on social about heading home.

Konstantin should have known something was wrong when they landed at San Francisco a few days earlier. Duncan, who always carried both a South African and Irish passport, sailed through passport control on the latter. When he looked around, Konstantin wasn’t behind him. Ten minutes later, the younger man emerged, carrying his passport in a ziplock bag, looking worried. He was wanted for some enhanced questioning. Duncan waited around until a tough-looking border patrol officer told him to “fuck off” unless he “wanted some of what your friend is getting.”

Duncan flew to Las Vegas, where he got into the silver stretch limo waiting for him and headed directly to the Bellagio hotel, where some top American OneCoin promoters were waiting. Six hours later, Konstantin finally arrived, having talked his way in by saying he was in America to train at a specialized mixed martial artist gym. Homeland Security returned his laptop but kept his phone and all his clothes. “How did you get in?” asked Duncan when they reconvened at the Bellagio reception. “Always play stupid,” Konstantin replied, with a smile.

Little did he know that the FBI had downloaded the entire contents of his mostly unencrypted laptop. Including a power of attorney, signed by Ruja on February 8, 2018. Four whole months after she’d disappeared.

Rather than realizing the game was up, Konstantin got straight to work.

Over the next couple of days, in one of the hotel’s innumerable meeting rooms, there was the usual business talk about how to grow Dealshaker in the US. Other leaders turned up. When one of them asked Konstantin when OneCoin would finally go public, he exploded. “If you are here to cash out,” he responded, “leave this room now, because you don’t understand what this project is about.”

Duncan thought the American promoters seemed twitchy. Although Konstantin and Duncan were here to discuss Dealshaker, one of them kept changing the subject to a strange new idea called “priming the pump,” which seemed to involve some kind of complicated price manipulation. Every time Duncan and Konstantin tried to go for lunch or a walk around Las Vegas’s famous casino “strip,” the Americans insisted on joining them. The only time Konstantin could escape was when he borrowed Duncan’s AC/DC T-shirt and went for a jog. During a coffee break, Duncan took Konstantin to one side and said he thought they were being set up. “Do not agree to anything,” Duncan told him. “Especially this priming the pump plan.”

Once the meetings were over, Duncan wanted to get back to London as quickly as possible. But Konstantin insisted the pair spend a couple of days relaxing in Los Angeles first. After flying to LA, Konstantin dragged Duncan to Chinatown, to the Walk of Fame to see the film stars’ names in the pavement, to the famous Hollywood sign, to the Lakers game. Eventually, they were ready to return home. But now their flight was delayed too.

“Would Konstantin Ignatov and Duncan Arthur please report to the counter?” blasted the airport speaker system.

That was the moment the FBI agents pounced. As three of them whisked Konstantin away, two IRS agents calmly walked Duncan Arthur into a second interrogation room. “Oh fuck,” thought Duncan, as he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.

They sat him down at a long steel table. He wasn’t being arrested, they said sternly. Just questioned. At least for now.

“Where is Ruja?”

“I have no clue,” Duncan replied in his thick South African accent.

“How does the blockchain work?”

“It’s a centralised immutable add-only database, which is mined by super computers, and tokens buy you computing power.” Duncan noticed the agents actually looked slightly embarrassed for him. “They know more about this company than I do,” he thought to himself.

“How is OneCoin priced?” It was question, question, question. They weren’t messing around.

“I have no direct knowledge, but I was told that it is a complex algorithm.”

“You’re a fucking idiot,” said one of the agents.

After about 40 minutes, the agents took a photo of Duncan’s passports, warned him that he might be summoned back to the US soon, and let him go. They accepted that he was only responsible for the Dealshaker platform, not OneCoin itself. He wasn’t the person they were looking for.

“Where’s Konstantin?” Duncan politely asked one of the agents as he left.

“Don’t worry about him,” he replied, and firmly suggested Duncan stop asking questions and get the hell out of the country.

Duncan boarded the next flight back to London via Istanbul, alone. Sofia HQ rushed out a press release, saying that “Mr Ignatov has not been formally charged with a crime.” That was another lie, of course. He’d been charged with wire fraud. Duncan never saw Konstantin again.

BehindMLM was, as usual, the first website to break the news. Konstantin arrested, criminal charges filed against Ruja Ignatova, ran Oz’s article, a couple of days later. “FINALLY,” wrote WhistleblowerFin, one of the regulars, in the comment thread below.

Every investor had their own breaking point. For some it was the coin doubling in London, for others it was Ruja’s disappearance or xcoinx shutting down. Typically, though, there wasn’t a single trigger or epiphany. Instead, their psychological defense mechanism, which had shielded them from the consequences of the hard truth, was gradually worn down by the weight of evidence.

Christine Grablis had a nagging feeling ever since xcoinx was shut down, but she preferred the excuses. Her doubts grew when she logged on to the ICO website in October 2018 to find it would be another whole year before going public. But Konstantin’s arrest was the final straw. A friend forwarded her the BehindMLM article, and she immediately texted her upline, the person who’d recruited her. “Why did they arrest him[?] R we still safe with onecoin[?] That article is frightening.”

“The charge is wire fraud,” he replied. “Everything is business as usual for the rest of the world.”

Christine carried on reading more and more BehindMLM articles—the stuff she’d dismissed as “fake news” for so long. In the same way she had once searched for and found comforting evidence that OneCoin was real, as soon as the spell was broken, the reverse happened, and she found proof everywhere that OneCoin was a scam.

“Is this true about onecoin? Being exposed as a Ponzi scheme?” she texted.

“Only allegations. OneCoin and OneLife still operating globally… as far as I know everything is moving forward.”

“This is the first time I’m nervous. I put in $135k. When can we start taking money out[?] Any news on going public[?] Is this a Ponzi scheme[?]” Deep down, Christine already knew the answer, but she wanted him to tell her himself.

“All I have done is try to help you and others to understand what’s going on and why we must all be patient.”

Something snapped. Not only was the money gone, she had to accept she’d been a naïve fool.

“You are one pathetic asshole,” wrote Christine. “May you rot in hell.”

It suddenly all seemed so obvious. “I just couldn’t believe I fell for it,” Christine said later. “I’m not the sort of person who would fall for a scam.”

Nearly everyone who lost money to OneCoin described the moment of realization in the same way. It was a physical sensation, an actual feeling. All Layla Begum could think was that her upline, her friend Saleh, was “a bastard.” She felt let down, sick, betrayed and anxious. She cried and screamed down the phone demanding her money back, to little avail. “Why didn’t I look into this before sending my money?” she asked herself over and over. It wasn’t just money that was gone, though. A whole future went up in smoke. “My world was over.” The immediate physiological experience was often followed by an even worse thought. Pyramid scams incentivize people to recruit people they care about. Most OneCoin investors, whatever their exact moment of realization, were angry with the people who’d recruited them. But they also faced the dawning realization that they had recruited people too. How do I explain this to the people I recruited? they wondered. Will they be as angry as I am? “I felt like I’d let my whole family down,” Layla said later.