People in the crypto space for a long time will still remember how complicated the OneCoin scam was. On Tuesday, one of the people who helped start the fake project was sentenced to 20 years in jail, which seems like a bit of justice.
Reports say that on September 20, Karl Greenwood, who helped start OneCoin, was sentenced to 20 years in jail and told to pay $300 million.
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Karl Greenwood got a jail sentence
Karl Greenwood, from the UK and Sweden, got his sentence on Tuesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. US Attorney Damian Williams called OneCoin “one of the biggest fraud schemes ever pulled off” in a statement from the Justice Department.
The judge gave Greenwood a 20-year jail sentence for the idea of the considerable cryptocurrency scam that cheated millions of investors out of over $4 billion. Greenwood has been in jail since he was brought there from Thailand in 2018.
He admitted to fraud and money laundering in December and could have gotten up to 60 years in prison, according to sources.
People say that Greenwood made more than $300 million by getting a 5% cut of all OneCoin sales. He allegedly lived a life of luxury on his ill-gotten wealth and splurged on designer clothes, expensive watches, properties abroad, and a luxury yacht.
Irina Dilkinska, who used to be the head of legal and compliance at OneCoin, was allegedly charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money in the United States in March. A report said that Christopher Hamilton, who was involved in the plan, would be sent to the United States to face fraud and money laundering charges in August 2022.
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The OneCoin rip-off
Between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the fourth quarter of 2016, the multilevel marketing and Ponzi scheme OneCoin made €4.037 billion in sales and €2.735 billion in income. Even though the project was advertised worldwide, most people it hurt were Americans.
OneCoin had no real value, unlike real cryptocurrencies. The team behind OneCoin said their product was like Bitcoin, but it didn’t have a natural system. OneCoin didn’t mine any coins, didn’t have a blockchain, and made up fake prices that only went up over time. Still, they persuaded people they were getting in on the next Bitcoin before anyone else.
Victims were misled into believing OneCoin could overtake Bitcoin when it had no trade, mining, or verification methods.
Ruja Ignatova, who helped start the scheme with Karl Greenwood, promoted OneCoin as a natural Bitcoin alternative, but the project was initially worthless.
Ruja Ignatova, known as “Cryptoqueen,” went missing in 2017 after the US charged her with theft and laundering money. She was the public face of OneCoin. She sold the scam worldwide by holding flashy marketing events and making a lot of noise. The FBI is now looking for her and is offering a $100,000 prize for information that leads to her capture.
At the beginning of this year, there were reports that the wanted person had been killed in Greece five years earlier.