What it actually was
OneCoin Ltd. began operating in 2014 and was based in Sofia, Bulgaria. It sold packages of "tokens" through a multi-level marketing network in which members earned commissions for recruiting other members. The packages were said to convert into OneCoins, and the OneCoins were said to be mined and recorded on a blockchain.
The Department of Justice's account, given at the sentencing of one of the founders, states that none of that was true. There were no mining pools and no computers mining OneCoin. OneCoin lacked a public and verifiable blockchain. The price did not come from supply and demand: OneCoin set it itself, and it rose from about EUR 0.50 to about EUR 29.95 by January 2019 and never fell. Internal records distinguished "mined coins", "mined coins (real)" and "fake coins".
OneCoin is included here despite having no genuine Bitcoin connection, because it did not have one and said it did. The founders used Bitcoin's reputation as the sales argument, marketing OneCoin as the "Bitcoin killer" and describing it in their own slide deck as a currency "born on the success of the pioneering and famous cryptocoin, Bitcoin". It was not a cryptocurrency. It was a database with a price attached.
On the record
Karl Sebastian Greenwood, who co-founded OneCoin with Ruja Ignatova, was sentenced on 12 September 2023 by US District Judge Edgardo Ramos in the Southern District of New York to 20 years in prison. The Department of Justice records that between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the fourth quarter of 2016 the scheme took in more than $4 billion from at least 3.5 million victims, that victims invested over $4 billion worldwide in total, and that Greenwood earned more than $300 million from it.
Ruja Ignatova has not been tried. She was charged in the Southern District of New York on 12 October 2017, a federal arrest warrant was issued, and she was added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on 30 June 2022. The listing was still live when this entry was checked in August 2026, and the charges against her remain allegations.
On 13 April 2026 the Department of Justice opened a remission process for OneCoin victims, with more than $40 million in forfeited assets available and a petition deadline of 30 June. Listing here is not endorsement.