Georgia and I had heard rumors that Ruja owned a secret mansion somewhere in the city, a luxury pad inside a private compound. In a later court appearance, Konstantin mentioned a “Dubai mansion” that cost around “20 million dirhams.” He even said he’d visited it once. A Dubai mansion inside a private compound is exactly the sort of place someone like Ruja might like to hide. But no one knew where it was.
On February 15, 2018, just as he was taking over the top job from his sister, Konstantin often posted a selfie on his Instagram account. Konstantin posted selfies on Instagram—with his chiselled jawline and sporting physique, he’d once considered a career in modelling. He was wearing a black T-shirt, cap, and the modern selfie smoulder. “Just woke up and already have 200+ messages,” he wrote. “You crazy guys. Birthday mode on!!!” It was tagged in Sofia, Bulgaria.
But in the far distance there were skyscrapers visible, including one that looked like a bottle opener, and a mosque minaret. It looked more like the Middle East than the Balkans. Was it possible that Konstantin was in fact at his sister’s secretive mansion? It seemed like a long shot. But I noticed the date again: February 15, 2018. When Konstantin was stopped at San Francisco airport in 2019, the FBI found a power of attorney on his laptop apparently signed by Ruja herself. It was dated February 8, 2018. Just one week earlier.i
We drafted in a BBC open-source specialist called Aliaume Leroy to take a look at the photo. Even innocuous social media posts sometimes contain valuable digital bread crumbs and people like Aliaume specialize in making sense of them.
First, he labelled every distinctive image in the background of Konstantin’s selfie: every building, tree, lake and wall. He then meticulously searched through hundreds of photos using Google and Yandex reverse image search, looking for a match. It didn’t take him long to discover the “bottle opener” building was not in Sofia. It was the Amesco Tower in the Jumeirah Lake Towers waterfront district, Dubai. His only stumbling block was several confused hours trying to figure out why the skyscrapers around the Amesco Tower didn’t line up in the way he expected—until he remembered it was a selfie. Konstantin took the photo with the front facing camera of his phone, which created a mirror image. From there he matched up every other visible building and, using Google Earth Pro’s satellite imagery and basic geometry, started to calculate Konstantin’s likely “line of sight.” He went from buildings to lakes to trees to fences, narrowing down the location meter by meter. After days of non-stop sleuthing, he emailed me a password-protected document.
“Good news,” he said, in a gross understatement. His document included an exact address in the Springs 1 neighborhood of Dubai. “Konstantin’s photograph was taken in the back garden.”
“What?!” I said. “How on earth…” I wasn’t expecting an exact address.
“People don’t realize how much we can find from a photo,” Aliaume explained. “I knew I’d find the address as soon as I saw it.” I’ve hardly posted a single photograph online since.
Based on a careful analysis of the various states of construction of the bottle opener building, Aliaume could even pinpoint when Konstantin took the photo: some point between September 2017 and February 15, 2018. In other words, very likely after Ruja vanished.
Armed with the address, we found a 2016 estate agent listing for the property—the year it was sold to Ruja. The property is a 6,700-square-foot villa with five bedrooms, an infinity pool, sunken pool bar and five reception rooms. The asking price was 17 million dirhams—very close to the 20 million number Konstantin later mentioned in court. We also found a partial Dubai property register that had been leaked on the dark net, which luckily for us included the same address. The named owner was… Sebastian Greenwood. Ruja and Sebastian sometimes used each other’s names with their companies, including in Dubai.
Thanks to one careless Instagram post, we had the address of a secret Dubai mansion, which Konstantin visited weeks or months after Ruja vanished, and which on paper belonged to her closest business partner.
It was the strongest lead we’d ever had but it wasn’t conclusive. It’s possible Konstantin was in Dubai visiting Sebastian or staff at the OneCoin Dubai office, and via intermediaries Ruja had arranged for him to stay at her mansion. But based on the available evidence—the date on the power of attorney, the fact Gary Gilford distinctly recalls Konstantin saying he’d seen Ruja in person, the persistent rumors she was in Dubai around that time—another possibility is that Konstantin traveled to Dubai in early 2018 to visit his missing sister and pick up a power of attorney.
If this was the UK, we’d have staked the property out, monitored comings and goings, and, in the end, simply knocked on the door. But you can’t show up in Dubai with a microphone and doorstep people. According to the World Press Freedom Index, the United Arab Emirates ranks 131st in the world for press freedom and criticizing the ruling classes; harassing residents, or even working undercover, can land journalists in jail. Trusted colleagues, journalists who knew the region, wisely but firmly told us not to go. If Ruja was in cahoots with the authorities or paying someone off, they said, the police would find a trumped-up charge to arrest us before we cleared customs. And there were certainly signs she was being protected by someone. Following the Dubai bank freezes in late 2015, a public prosecutor issued a warrant for Ruja’s arrest in December 2016. But it was never executed. She even spent New Year 2016/17 in Dubai at her penthouse without any trouble.
Part of me wanted to ignore them: I could have pretended to be a foreign tourist and hung about expensive bars and Chanel stores, just in case she turned up on one of her infamous shopping sprees. But much as I wanted to find Ruja, I didn’t want it at any cost. It was bad enough worrying about Bulgarian organized criminals, former spooks and angry OneCoin promoters—I didn’t need Dubai intelligence agencies added to the list. Besides, a trip would be pointless, since the mansion was tucked inside a private compound protected by a large security detail. We tried via intermediaries to check the property out for us—but all we learned was that the bins were occasionally changed. We contacted neighbors, private investigators, former residents and even local Airbnb hosts: no one would talk. We even managed to get some Krispy Kreme doughnuts sent to the house via a food delivery app. We spoke to the driver over the phone as he banged on the front gate—but no one answered. (And even to this date, we don’t know if the property still belongs to Ruja or Sebastian—it might even have been sold on.)
But protection in Dubai is only ever temporary. According to former FBI Special Agent Karen Greenaway, if Ruja was in Dubai in 2018, Konstantin’s arrest by the FBI in March 2019 (plus her own indictment, which was published on the same day) might have changed her calculation. Maybe her relationship with Sheikh al Qassimi was turning sour. Soon after the enterprising Sheikh tried and failed to unfreeze Ruja’s bank accounts, he moved the company HQ and made himself sole shareholder.1 According to Dubai Commercial Court filings, al Qassimi then tried to cash the checks that Ruja had handed over when she sold him the company in 2015. When Ruja found out, she cancelled his power of attorney, and by 2019 the case started making its way through Dubai’s legal system.2 Entangled in a messy dispute, and now publicly wanted by the Americans, it’s possible that Ruja decided, for one final time, she had to get out.
One tantalizing possibility is that the Dubai authorities simply threw Ruja in prison the moment they saw the arrest warrant, and she’s sitting there right now while the authorities decide if it’s in their interests to extradite her. Maybe she’s refusing to hand over the password for the Sheikh’s bitcoin—and that’s what keeps her useful. That doesn’t rule out the secret Dubai mansion, but it makes it less likely to be the safe haven it might have been in 2018. That left us with one final, incredible, possibility.
i Konstantin later claimed in court that he thought the power of attorney was probably fake: forged by Irina Dilkinska. However, if Konstantin knew it to be fake, then why would he have kept it on his laptop?