Since 2017, the FBI has been trying to track down Roza Ignatova, known as the Queen of Cryptocurrencies, and now they are offering a $5 million reward (about 1.8 billion Hungarian forints) to anyone who can provide information about her whereabouts. BBC writes.
A 44-year-old German-Bulgarian woman has been charged with organizing the OneCoin pyramid scheme, disguised as a $4.5 billion cryptocurrency trade.
In October 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Ignatova with one count each of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. A federal judge in New York then issued a warrant for her arrest. Two weeks later, the woman boarded a flight from Sofia, Bulgaria, to Athens, Greece. She has not been seen since.
The FBI placed her on its 10 Most Wanted list in 2022, initially offering a $100,000 reward, which was later increased to $250,000. That amount has now been increased twentyfold, and Ignatova is the only woman to whom the FBI will pay such a sum.
“We are offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Rosa Ignatova, a German national known as the Cryptocurrency Queen, for her role in one of the largest global fraud schemes in history,” she said. US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
The US authorities hope that the huge tracking fee will be able to solve the language of those who for one reason or another protected the woman. The FBI's task is made more difficult by the fact that Ignatova most likely did not disappear empty-handed, but with a huge sum of money, and it is also possible that she changed her appearance with plastic surgery in recent years so as not to disappear. Be known.
The German authorities have previously brought charges against Ignatova, and the Bulgarian authorities recently announced that if they did not find her, they would begin proceedings against her in absentia. By the way, OneCoin was managed from the Bulgarian capital, Sofia.
We wrote about Ignatova and OneCoin in detail in this article.
