Crypto Scammers Extradited From Bulgaria For $4 Billion Fraud, Feds Say
Even in the shady world of crypto, where hucksters can legally sell dubious assets, there are people stupid enough to commit black-and-white crimes. On Monday, another alleged criminal of that nature was extradited from Bulgaria to the United States, where she faces decades of possible prison terms.
The suspect: Irina Dilkinska, former head of legal and compliance at OneCoin, a supposed cryptocurrency company that actually bilked customers of more than $4 billion in a “fraudulent pyramid scheme,” prosecutors allege.
In a press release announcing the charges, Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Dilkinska “achieved the exact opposite of her job title and allegedly enabled OneCoin to launder millions of dollars of illegal proceeds through shell companies. “
Nearly five years ago, after Dilkinska’s co-conspirator Mark Scott was arrested, she sent a series of panicked text messages to other alleged parties to the scam, authorities said. “Watch this!!!!!”; “Something is going on!!!!!” she wrote to one of the people, alongside a link to an article detailing his arrest. “If this is true, I need the mega lawyers.”
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That outburst turned out to be predictable. On Tuesday, Dilkinska was scheduled to appear before US Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn.
Headquartered in Bulgaria, OneCoin was co-founded in 2014 by British-Swedish citizen Karl Sebastian Greenwood, and Ruja Ignatova, a German citizen who had a doctorate in private international law and was known as the “Queen of Crypto.”
The company scaled quickly by paying customers commissions in exchange “for recruiting others to buy cryptocurrency packages,” the charges against Dilkinska allege. OneCoin previously stated that more than 3 million people bought into the fake assets in more than 100 countries. As The Daily Beast reported last June, Ignatova marketed the cryptocurrency as a “Bitcoin Killer,” though she privately emailed Greenwood and appeared to acknowledge it was all a hoax, writing, “Take the money and run and blame someone else for this.”
Like many multi-level scams, OneCoin was hugely lucrative. According to the Department of Justice, “between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the fourth quarter of 2016 alone,” the company brought in more than $4.3 billion in revenue, generating “profits” of nearly $3 billion.
Dilkinska’s role, prosecutors said, involved working with Scott — a “former equity partner in a prominent international law firm” — to launder approximately $400 million using shell companies. Prosecutors eventually caught wind of the massive scam, and the operation unraveled.
In October 2017, Ignatova was hit with charges of fraud and money laundering, although she soon boarded a flight from Bulgaria to Greece “and has not been seen in public since.” Greenwood was arrested in Thailand in 2018 and later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering.
Meanwhile, when Scott was arrested in 2018, Dilkinska panicked and began “burning incriminating documents,” prosecutors said. (Scott was found guilty of conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to commit bank fraud in 2019.)
In the end, Dilkinska’s attempts to cover her tracks didn’t seem to help. She faces one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, each of which carries a possible sentence of 20 years behind bars.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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