So who is this woman? if you're new to crypto you might have never heard of her before.
Her name is Dr. Ruja Ignatova, she was the founder of OneCoin, one of the biggest crypto scams to ever exist. Dr. Ruja was a University of Oxford graduate hence she was seen as a figure of authority, and used her credentials to convince rather smart people, into falling for her pyramid scheme. Onecoin is reported to have cost investors over $15Billion dollars and this scam is still going on till today.
Onecoin posed as being the next bitcoin and then they sold educational materials for trading, to investors for hundreds of thousands of euros. These materials should never cost that much and no one in their right senses would buy them if not for the fact that they were also promised "Guaranteed" returns on their investments, and Onecoin had a cult-like following. The members of Onecoin felt like a community and believed they were going to change the world. But no one got rich apart from those at the top of this scheme.
They had WhatsApp groups for "insider info", they had their slangs and their hand signs for greeting each other. Some sold their houses and other valuable assets to buy-in.
Dr. Ruja went into hiding in 2017 after the FBI launched an indictment against her and up till today no one knows where Dr. Ruja is. There are many rumors of her being in Russia, some say she did plastic surgery and is probably unrecognizable. After she went into hiding, her brother Konstantin, a tattooed, muscular looking figure, took over as the leader of one coin. He was soon arrested by the FBI and plead guilty to fraud. He says he has no idea where his sister is and he's even hired private investigators to look for her but so far, no one knows where Dr. Ruja is.
One coin is still active today as we can see from their website and raking in millions of dollars. They don't even have a blockchain and you can see lots of spelling errors on the website.
So what can we learn?
Do not idolize people, focus on the technology.
Be wary of so-called "communities", technology should work whether you have a community or not, it shouldn't be dependent on it.
Do your own research
Don't invest more than you can afford to loose
Be careful of joining cult-like followings, the members never really know they are in a cult.
If you would like to learn how to avoid falling for schemes like this then check out this guide. If you found this post interesting, subscribe, and upvote for more posts like this. Cheers!
I hate scammer.