CHAPTER 33

THE MISSING CRYPTOQUEEN

In November 2018, just a few months before Konstantin’s arrest, I received an email from a BBC audio documentaries producer called Georgia Catt. Earlier that year she and her partner had been out for dinner with some friends and one of them had told them about an “exciting new cryptocurrency” he’d just bought. He even suggested they consider investing themselves. But they quickly realized there was something off—even in the wild west of cryptocurrency. Money couldn’t be withdrawn, it just sat there in investor’s accounts. Its promoters drove Lamborghinis but knew little about technology. Events were like religious conventions, and wide-eyed investors seemed more ordinary than the typical crypto-enthusiast. And, above all, the enigmatic visionary behind it hadn’t been seen in public for over a year.

For the next six months, Georgia became obsessed with understanding what had happened—why so many had put their faith in a coin they couldn’t spend—barely believing the testimonies of those who’d been roped in. She also realized the story could be the perfect way into the niche, hyped world of cryptocurrency. Her editor, Philip Sellars, agreed. Over the next few months, they dug more into the story.

Georgia had read a few articles and books I’d written on Bitcoin and told me about OneCoin and its missing founder “Dr. Ruja,” asking if I’d like to team up on the investigation and go in search of the missing cryptoqueen.

When we started working on BBC’s The Missing Cryptoqueen podcast series in January 2019, neither of us imagined how it would take over our lives. We spent the next three years travelling all over the world, trying to piece together the scam and the whereabouts of its mastermind: to Sofia and the OneCoin HQ, of course; to Sozopol where her €6.9 million yacht was anchored and manned by a handful of unfriendly staff; to Igor Alberts’s eight-story mansion near Amsterdam; to Scotland to interview Jen McAdam, who’d lost her father’s inheritance to OneCoin; to Uganda to pin down the dodgy pastor Fred Ntabazi, and meet Daniel in his mother’s small village; to the Waltenhofen Gusswerks and its angry union boss Carlos; to an enormous OneCoin event in Bucharest where we somehow managed to talk our way in. We reviewed hundreds of leaked documents and interviewed almost as many people. Lots of them wanted to stay anonymous, like the husky-voiced debt collector who’d spent months tracking down stolen OneCoin money in south Asia and wouldn’t tell us his name.

We wanted to understand how so many people could fall for such an audacious scam and how promoters blinded investors with techno-babble and false promises. But, above all, we wanted to know what happened to Ruja after she took Ryanair flight FR6300 from Sofia to Athens on October 25, 2017.

Tracking down someone who doesn’t want to be found depends to a surprising extent on attentive members of the public. Every week, especially after our podcast was released and Ruja’s face was all over the internet, Georgia and I received sightings and tip-offs. Some were probably OneCoin supporters trying to throw us offtrack, such as one widely circulated rumor that Ruja had fled to Belize and was now living openly in Brazil. Others were honest mistakes. For weeks we investigated a lead from a builder who was certain he’d seen Ruja at a mansion he was renovating in north London, which happened to neatly align with a very credible sighting at Heathrow Airport. After a lot of digging, it turned out the home belonged to a wealthy Russian with a passing resemblance to Ruja. A former politician from Serbia told us she’d been hiding in Serbia all along, protected by powerful politicians. But he refused to say more unless we told him what we knew in return. According to an old friend of hers, Ruja was even at the OneCoin event we attended in Romania, pulling the strings from behind the scenes and sussing out the two BBC journalists in the corner holding a microphone in the air. It was sometimes nerve-wracking following leads. I had to delete social media accounts and scrub the internet of any clues about my personal life. And although Georgia and I tightened up our online security and only communicated via encrypted messaging apps and secure email systems (like Ruja, ironically), we often felt on edge. It didn’t help when someone started banging and screaming on my front door at 3 AM on the same day the podcast was released. “They’ve found me already?!” I shouted at my sleeping partner as I frantically dialed 999. But it was someone at the wrong house.

We knew the promoters wouldn’t be happy because many of them were still selling OneCoin even while we were investigating it. Predictably enough, they did everything they could to undermine us. Before the first episode aired, OneCoin HQ co-ordinated a mass complaint to the BBC about how unfairly we were treating them. That didn’t bother us: It was just more evidence of the cult-like grip OneCoin had over believers. But a more worrying moment occurred as the series starting climbing the global podcast charts. A top promoter called King Jayms filmed himself firing a gun, saying, “I’m not going to name no names but you know who you are.” A message below said: “Pretending I see the OneLife haters.”¹ Having told millions of people that OneCoin was a giant Ponzi scam, there was little doubt Georgia and I were now firmly in that camp.

The vast majority of people who got in touch were former investors who’d personally lost money and were grateful we were trying to uncover the truth. But nearly all of them said the same thing: OneCoin is still going. People are still investing. People are still losing everything. It was true. In mid-2020, Ruja’s mother, Veska, headlined a large OneCoin event in Romania, where she promised yet another re-launch of the e-commerce site Dealshaker. Facebook and WhatsApp were still full of people pushing the coin or advertising upcoming seminars. Where was the money going? Was Ruja still somewhere, secretly pulling the strings? No one knew. OneCoin was like a monster from a horror movie that simply refused to die.

Finding Ruja and preventing more victims getting fleeced started to feel like one and the same thing. As long as Ruja was still out there, believers still had hope. They could claim she’d never been convicted of anything and might one day return to fix everything. And, until then, our reports could be dismissed as “fake news” and “BBC propaganda.” Even in her absence, Ruja still held sway over so many people that actually finding her seemed the only thing that could kill OneCoin for good. When we started making the series, I never really thought we had any chance of finding Dr. Ruja. But it soon felt like we had to.

The first thing journalists usually do when trying to find someone is the old adage: “follow the money.” But that wasn’t much help here. Ruja’s web of companies and accounts encompassed practically every dodgy jurisdiction on earth. Despite frequent government initiatives and high-profile pledges to crack down on corporate secrecy and tax evasion, it’s still easy for rich people to squirrel money away. All her Dubai-based companies were dead ends. The best we could usually find was the names of frontmen—nobodies who’d been paid to keep her name off any public paperwork. Both RISG and OneCoin Limited were “owned” by unknown Panamanians who were untraceable. (In fact, when Ruja did her Bitcoin deal with Sheikh al Qassimi, it was via her “monkeys,” or “nobodies,” Caesar Degracias Santos and Marisela Yasmin Simmons Hay.) The director of RavenR Dubai and RavenR Capital, both firms at the heart of her plan, was the Pizza Hut guy Thomas Christodoulou. Her secret Maltese gambling firms were bulletproof, usually ending up with a Curaçao trust company. Her penthouse in London was owned by an offshore Guernsey company, which had three other Guernsey companies, called Aquitaine Services Limited, Certidor and Treodoric, as directors.

Following the money ended with us chasing Pizza Hut managers, formation agents and shell companies.

It was infuriating. Ruja was everywhere but nowhere. It was always rumors and speculation. No one had proof. There were no photographs, no documents. No one willing to go “on record.”

The task was made harder by the fact her appearance had almost certainly changed too. Ruja started having plastic surgery from mid-2015 and, by the time she absconded, looked very different from the woman who set up OneCoin with Sebastian and Juha three years earlier. A top London plastic surgeon explained to us how someone like Ruja could easily buy new cheeks, a new jawline, new nose, new lips. Although she would still be recognizable on close inspection (if you knew who you were looking for), he said, at a quick glance she could pass for anyone. One well-placed source told us that, by early 2018, Ruja had also lost several pounds and dyed her hair blonde. Worse: she was probably using an alias and travelling on a high-quality fake passport, possibly the Kyrgyz diplomatic passport she bought on Frank Schneider’s advice the summer before she vanished, possibly on a new Bulgarian passport she’d bought from bent border officials.

We also had to consider the possibility Ruja had been murdered and we were chasing an apparition—finding connections and clues that weren’t really there. Maybe angry investors got to her before the authorities. There were always rumors about “people above her’: Russian mafia or Bulgarian organized crime syndicates who’d spotted OneCoin’s success early and used it to launder money—and wouldn’t think twice about getting rid of her if needed. And although there was never any strong evidence pointing this way, given who she was and what she’d done, we couldn’t rule it out. After all, it seemed impossible that someone so high profile could simply vanish into thin air.

But the uncomfortable truth is that hundreds of criminals evade justice every year and go on the run just like Ruja. Europol, SOCA and the FBI’s Most Wanted lists include hundreds of criminals that are currently at large. Croatian Marko Nikolić is wanted for aiding a murder—and has been on the run since 2001; convicted Austrian killer Tibor Foco has been evading justice since 1995 when he escaped prison. Some vanish to faraway countries, while others take up new identities and fade into obscurity closer to home. Shane O’Brien murdered Josh Hanson in London in 2015, fled the country on a private plane and spent the next three years travelling around Europe with fake ID, new hair and fresh tattoos (he finally handed himself in to Romanian police in 2018). Others rely on the support of powerful backers: former Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek has been missing since June 2020 and is thought to be somewhere in Moscow under the protection of the GRU. Even the most high-profile can stay underground for decades. Matteo Messina Denaro, the capo dei capi of the Italian mafia, has been a fugitive since 1993 and is thought to still live in his native Sicily. Following a tip-off from Italian police, Denaro was arrested to huge fanfare in the Hague in September 2021. However, it was a case of mistaken identity. “Denaro” was, in fact, a Formula 1 fan from Liverpool.

According to specialists, the trick is discipline: you must avoid contacting family and friends if possible, stay away from official authorities and never slip out of character. If you have a new identity, plenty of money and an iron will, evading capture is not as hard as it seems.

But all it takes is a small lapse of judgment. And, in the end, everyone makes mistakes.

Gradually, Georgia and I were able to piece together a rough outline of her movements after her flight to Athens. There were gaps and unknowns, but after a careful assessment of the various sightings, rumors and tip-offs, by late 2020 we had a working document: a “best guess.”

When Ruja stepped off her Ryanair flight at Athens International Airport on the morning of October 25, 2017, she drove (or possibly flew) to Thessaloniki in northern Greece, where she part-owned a large tobacco factory.

She stayed in Thessaloniki for a couple of days. Maybe she visited the picturesque old town or found time for some shopping in the swish Tsimiski Street. Perhaps she even visited her factory and took a look around.

Then she did the last thing anyone would have expected: she turned around and went back into Bulgaria. One plausible scenario is that Hristoforos “Taki” Amanatidis, aka “The Cocaine King,” helped arrange safe passage by car via one of the well-known smuggling routes between the two countries. (Thessaloniki is on the road route from Athens to Sofia, less than 100 kilometers from the Bulgarian border. The Greek/Bulgarian crossing is one of Europe’s great cigarette smuggling hotspots—and is also known for people smuggling too.)

We don’t think she was planning to disappear for good at this point, but simply make people think she’d left the country so she could lay low in Bulgaria. She had plenty of influential contacts and several houses there, including the luxurious Sozopol mansion. Places where she could safely plan her next move.ⁱ

However, the German police raid on the Sofia HQ in January 2018 persuaded her that Bulgaria wasn’t the safe haven she thought it was. The authorities were not going to let this drop—and it wasn’t only the Americans who had her in their sights. And now it was only a matter of time before the EU’s most powerful country would discover the truth about her phoney blockchain.

Over the next several months, Ruja was spotted multiple times in Dubai—in a luxury shopping mall, at a restaurant, on a private yacht. After London and Sofia, Dubai was the place Ruja felt most at ease. She’d lived there on and off ever since 2014 and even held a residency permit. She owned a 5,000-square-foot luxury penthouse flat in the exclusive Palm Jumeirah area, popular among rich Bulgarian expats. How she travelled from Sofia to Dubai is unclear—possibly via a private jet, since it’s only a five-hour flight. Some sources told us she was living in Dubai quite openly at this time, confident that, even if the Germans or Americans did know where she was, the chances of extradition were practically zero. While the US authorities do manage to extradite the occasional criminal from the new “Costa del Crime,” it is the exception rather than the rule.

Former FBI Special Agent Karen Greenaway spent 20 years investigating transnational organized crime and knows this world inside out. If Ruja was in Dubai, reckons Karen, it’s “entirely possible” the FBI knew. But even they wouldn’t have been able to swoop in and arrest her. If Ruja was spending good money in the country and not causing any trouble, it wouldn’t have been in Dubai’s interests to hand her over. And if she had any connections with powerful people—for example, Sheikh al Qassimi—a formal request for assistance from the FBI would likely have ended up at the bottom of an unanswered pile of papers in an office somewhere. “It happens all the time,” says Karen. “The FBI cannot override [any protection Ruja might have]. I can tell you that from experience.”

Ruja living in Dubai in 2018 would certainly tally with the fact that neither Konstantin nor Veska ever seemed remotely worried or upset about her.

But if she was in Dubai, then where exactly?

Footnote

i A second possibility is that she took a connecting flight from Athens to Cyprus, where her two “owners” of RavenR Dubai and RavenR London lived. From there she could have travelled to Northern Cyprus, a well-known refuge for fugitives due to its lack of extradition treaties with the EU and America.

¹