CHAPTER 35

FREEDOM

About 500 years ago, as international trade and mercantilism were starting to expand, there was a serious problem: No one knew who was in charge of the sea. A general agreement held that waters close to a coast—roughly the distance a cannonball could be fired—were under the jurisdiction of the closest country, but, beyond that, there was only force. In 1609, as the Dutch and Spanish quarrelled over access to the lucrative spice and silk markets in the East Indies, the philosopher Hugo Grotius argued that the sea should be subject to no legal jurisdiction at all: “For even that ocean wherewith God hath compassed the Earth is navigable on every side round about, and the settled or extraordinary blasts of wind, not always blowing from the same quarter, and sometimes from every quarter,” he wrote in The Free Sea, “do they not sufficiently signify that nature hath granted a passage from all nations unto all?” By the mid-nineteenth century, as global commerce accelerated, the “freedom of the sea” became an accepted principle of international law. In 1958, the United Nations signed the “Convention on the High Seas” and the informal cannonball rule was extended to 12 nautical miles.

If you stay 12 nautical miles (about 13.8 common miles) from a coastline, you are technically nowhere: No country has jurisdiction over you and no police force has the legal authority to arrest you. And even if you’re closer in, police operations at sea are expensive, and collecting intelligence on the private yachts and luxury cruisers is almost impossible. While there are a few exemptions—notably for piracy—the majority of planet earth is technically lawless.

In early 2021, as we pondered what to do with the Dubai address, an anonymous source got in touch claiming that someone he knew had spotted Ruja Ignatova at some point in 2019 on a boat in the Med—but couldn’t remember when or where exactly.

We might have filed that as just another “maybe.” Except it tallied with something we’d learned a year earlier when a private investigator called Alan McClean advised us to start looking in the last place Ruja was seen. “There’s a reason she flew to Athens,” he said. “The Mediterranean.” Two of Alan’s former colleagues were working there and he asked them to visit a few top-end restaurants with photos of Ruja. Incredibly, staff in one of them told them Ruja had been there around six months ago with a large entourage. We emailed the restaurant with a few more pictures the following day to confirm. “Lady in photo is familiar to staff,” replied the manager. “They all remember this lady with a party of 6–8.” That would have been some point in April or May 2019.

Soon after, another well-placed source told us she’d been spotted more than once in summer 2019 near to Saint-Tropez in France, moored somewhere out at sea in a large yacht, occasionally visiting land by speedboat.

So here is the latest theory: in late 2017, she was living secretly in Bulgaria, having gone to Greece before turning back and sneaking back over the border.

In 2018, she was living in Dubai—confident she would be safe. But, in March 2019, Konstantin was arrested, and she moved again.

In around April 2019, she was in Athens eating at a top restaurant with a small entourage.

She was spotted again, at some point that year, on a large boat on the Med.

In June or July 2019, she was seen getting on a speedboat and heading out to a yacht near Saint-Tropez.

There is a rule of three in journalism: if three separate sources tell you the same thing, it’s usually worth pursuing. And three unrelated sources were now saying the same thing: Ruja wasn’t dead, hiding in Sofia, or living in a Dubai mansion—she was in and around the Mediterranean. Was it really possible she could be living at sea?

Ruja had her own €6.9 million yacht, but that was still docked in Sozopol. (We checked often with sources in the town.) For Ruja to make a life on the waves, she would need more than a simple yacht, even one that cost €6.9 million. There are approximately 10,000 superyachts in the world, and a decent one will set you back at least €100,000 a week to rent. They are typically equipped with swimming pools, helicopter pads, speedboats, bars and chefs. All the stuff Ruja loved. She was rich, but was she rich enough for this? She had stolen millions but so much of it was tied up in properties, frozen in bank accounts, or held by mysterious companies run by phoney directors. She had assets, but assets are difficult to turn into cash when you’re a fugitive.

That kind of life would only be possible if she was even richer than anyone thought. And it’s possible she was.

Back in 2015, when Ruja is believed to have struck her Bitcoin deal with Sheikh al Qassimi, it was understood to be a fairly simple arrangement. She gave him access to €50 million worth of frozen bank assets and he gave her 230,000 bitcoin, worth almost €50 million, in return. At the time, a single bitcoin was worth a little over €200 and many analysts predicted the price would crash to zero. It was a risky deal but 230,000 bitcoin was better than €50 million “stuck in space” as she put it.

But Bitcoin didn’t crash to zero. By the time she vanished in late 2017, the price of a single bitcoin had risen to almost €5,000. And, in 2020, something remarkable happened. As the world economy ground to a halt due to Covid-19, Bitcoin exploded into the mainstream. There was no single reason for it. Low interest rates, flatlining economies, and growing fears about inflation as governments started printing money had investors spooked. And many of them started looking at cryptocurrencies as an alternative. Tesla boss Elon Musk bought billions of dollars’ worth and called fiat money “bullshit.” Jay-Z and Twitter boss Jack Dorsey set up a Bitcoin-based charity. PayPal said it would start accepting crypto. Everything Ruja had said at the London Event at Wembley in June 2016 was coming true. The future of money had arrived and everyone wanted to be part of it.

By mid-2021, the price of a single bitcoin had rocketed to over €40,000. 230,000 bitcoin were suddenly worth over €9 billion. Enough to make Ruja one of the richest criminals in the world.

We don’t know for certain if she still has the bitcoin. Maybe she sold some or all of it early on. Maybe she handed it over to the Bulgarian authorities or mysterious criminal gangs in exchange for protection. We tried to track her coins down on the Bitcoin blockchain—just like Bjørn Bjercke had done for OneCoin—but it proved impossible. Ruja was too smart to simply move 230,000 bitcoin in one or two chunks. I’m quite sure if she moved them around it would have been in small drips. Fifty here and 100 there would blend in the thousands of other Bitcoin transactions that take place every minute, and disappear.

In mid-2021, Georgia Catt and I asked an investigative journalist called Rob Byrne to help us investigate the “Med boat” theory. He contacted different ports and analyzed the movement of several superyachts, using specialized marine tracker software. None had been to our key locations around the dates we had. (Annoyingly, it turns out a lot of private yachts simply turn their trackers off, although it’s technically forbidden.) He even posted several photos of Ruja in the handful of private Facebook groups that cater to yacht crew, asking if anyone recognized her—although adding that she might look a little different these days. Nothing seemed to work until one day he got a reply out of the blue:

“Hi Rob. She is on the yacht I work on right now. Why are you looking for her?”

“Hey,” Rob replied. “Are you 100% sure?”

“Yes, she’s here, right now… she talk[s] about crypto all day… She use[s] 3 computers in her room but never in saloon.”

“OK, whereabouts are you?”

“We are in Greece right now. Anchored. We call her Jaru.” Ja-Ru.

“If there is any way you can verify she’s on the boat it would be really important. Or the boat name or where you are going next?”

“I’m sorry I don’t want to get her into trouble.”

And then, like so often, the line went dead: The mysterious boat woman vanished. There were hundreds of boats anchored in Greece, far too many to individually check.

New information might come to light that flips everything on its head again. With Ruja, anything is possible. Maybe all our sightings were honest mistakes, and the mysterious boat woman was playing a strange practical joke. Nothing would surprise me about this story any more. But at the time of writing, the most plausible theory is also the most unbelievable. As her countless victims—the people who believed her promise of a financial revolution—face ruin and heartbreak, and as those who helped her to get away with it face serious jail time, the Cryptoqueen is floating somewhere on the high seas with a new name, a new face, and access to endless amounts of this strange new form of money. Enriched by the financial revolution she helped to promote, she spends her time sailing leisurely from place to place, surrounded by opulence and luxury. One possibility is that she’s trapped somehow—in exchange for her safety, she is forced to use her knowledge of finance and cryptocurrency to help criminals move money around, passing her day in front of three screens just like she used to at McKinsey, shifting money between secret Bitcoin wallets, foreign exchange companies, phoney Maltese casinos and fake frontmen. But either way she makes land periodically and carefully, meeting with close family and friends for dinner here or there, where she reminisces about her crazy life and asks about Konstantin. She spends much of her time planning how and if she can see her daughter safely. It’s risky, but so was everything she’s ever done. And no one would look twice at the wealthy well-dressed woman as she hops on her speedboat and heads back out to sea: It could be anyone. There’s a flicker or recognition, perhaps, but all her papers and documents are present and correct. As untraceable but omnipresent as cryptocurrency itself.