MYSTERY surrounds Ruja Ignatova, who’s wanted by the FBI for allegedly scamming billions out of investors and may have been murdered by the man who was protecting her. The ‘Crypto Queen’ vanished after her crimes came to light. Here's all you need to know.
Who is Ruja Ignatova? Ruja Plamenova Ignatova was born on May 30, 1980 in Bulgaria. Ignatova emigrated to Germany with her family when she was ten-years-old and spent part of her childhood in Schramberg. She graduated from the University of Oxford in England, before heading back to Germany to earn a PhD in private international law from the University of Konstanz in 2005.
Ignatova married German lawyer Bjorn Strehl, and the pair had a daughter together in 2016. Read more on news What did Ruja Ignatova do? Ignatova was first convicted of fraud in Germany in 2012, after her father Plamen Ignatov bought a company that was quickly declared bankrupt in mysterious circumstances. She was given a suspended sentence of 14 months imprisonment for her involvement.
The following year she set up what’s alleged to be a multi-level marketing scam called BigCoin, which was the original version of what ended up as OneCoin in 2014. These are commonly known as “pyramid schemes”, where people recruit new members with the promise of making money. Most read in Showbiz Each new member pays the person who recruited them, before they try to recruit people to do the same for them.
They can sound attractive, but they’re considered a sca.