If only OneCoin had bothered to create any sort of blockchain token, they'd be just like every other altcoin and she could keep the billions (maybe pay a trivial fine to a regulator somewhere).
Her scheme preceded Ethereum, so she couldn't make use of the convenient Token Scam Construction Kit like the other similarly promoted ICOs that came a bit later.
Yeah that amazed me also that they failed to produce any kind of blockchain. All they had to do was start a new bitcoin ledger or whatever using the openly available bitcoin software, as several other coins did at the time. They did try to hire a techy at least once to do it, but he refused to take part in it after getting suspicious. But they didn't even bother to try and hire someone else?
Puzzling indeed. Afaik Dogecoin is pretty much a 1:1 clone of an old version of Bitcoin, and the founder made it sound like it was a weekend's worth of work.
Technically, Litecoin, which was Bitcoin with some parameters tweaked (like more frequent blocks).
Then later they also removed the supply cap, which is a pretty fundamental change from the premise of bitcoin, so it’s no longer a trivial copy, I would say.
I think the issue was that they claimed there was a blockchain, but it was all fabricated.
The claims of a blockchain also promised 1 minute transaction confirmation (better than bitcoin), which wouldn't have made sense for an Ethereum token.
Also, I think certain token projects can get the releasers arrested too.. I believe the Squid game token creators are wanted in a few countries
I think this whole story is hilarious, because the only reason OneCoin is considered a scam and other coins not is because they had fewer obtuse crypto layers of smoke and mirrors.
For decades onwards, people will remember that if you want to run a ponzi scheme or similar without getting locked up, you just gotta make it needlessly complicated.
Haha it feels like you perfectly described our entire financial system.
If you wanna run a scheme and not get locked up, just make it needlessly complicated!
Originally people wanted decentralized finance to get away from the grifting and complications of our financial system. Yet it's all scams and companies in trouble crying for help and/or regulation.
> The FBI is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to Ignatova's capture, said Michael Driscoll, the FBI's assistant director-in-charge in New York.
My first thought is: Being a bounty hunter seems like it'd be fun. How do I get started with that?
Anyone on HN who has some experience? Or stories related to people they know who became/are bounty hunters?
Ignatova is assumed to be traveling the isles of the eastern Mediterranean on a private sailing yacht, so not the most inconvenient place for your investigations :)
For those who didn't click: It's a BBC podcast. So not only is the content/ information well researched, but it's of very high production quality as well. With the influx of uncountable new podcasts every week, I think that's something to note here. It's a very well done podcast, not only content-wise - that's what I wanted to say.
Thank you - I've only ever used Firefox and forks thereof, but I ignore all the new bells and whistles that come with releases (since v2). This is one to which I should have paid attention!
That said, it seems most of the sites I touch do not have a 'reader mode' option. Perhaps I should and will visit those sites less!
Who else reads lots of the internet in source, to avoid responsivity and cetera? Try reader view, it's rad!
IME, that’s not quite true. Like with UI extensions, it depends entirely on a site’s willingness to adhere to interoperability standards, and some are structured in a way that disrupts reader mode.
The next part will be when someone explains to me what is fundamentally different between this and the sorts of things Andreeson Horowitz’s crypto division has been up to.
This was simply an explicit (although obviously not explicit enough to the people taken advantage of) scam from the start. There was no cryptocoin. No blockchain. There was just giving money to her and her associates.
Yes, good question and this is exactly why there are so many scams. There's such a hype that one can simply add crypto lingo to anything and people will buy into it. Not even the media bothers, once someone proclaims to be associated with "crypto" that's what they're labeled at.
It's quite common that crypto currencies have an almost religious following nowadays, but she was one of the first. Where bitcoin was propagated by tech savvy people, One Coin collected money from average Joes. They took the term 'crypto-queen' to the 'real-world'.
OneCoin didn’t deliver anything, there was no technology, no coin
Ironically this question is why so many people got scammed, they couldn’t tell the difference either, despite there being obvious and relevant differences
The pseudonymous creator of the Bitcoin blockchain made the effort to include a proof in the genesis block that the chain wasn't premined. That was before there was a word for it.
Maybe you are thinking of Ethereum? It is currently at 60% premine, the target ratio has been changed a number of times, but the ratio should be lower in the future.
Well, that lack of interest in the project in the beginning was certainly not for a lack of trying, and interest... well let's just say it picked up after a while.
Still, hard to criticize the founder for mining when no one else had interest in it.
That cryptographical proof against premining is quite interesting however. Someone must have thought the mere suspicion would have been enough to void any interest in the project. History suggests that wasn't the case, even if we can't know for sure. It might have been different.
Anyway, for what it's worth, all evidence suggests that (almost) all of that solo mining was likely burnt. That too suggests the primary risk was thought to be people losing interest in the project.
Surprised this taken so long given the scale and time-frames involved.
That said, wanted by the FBI and most-wanted are aspects I'm not converse with so might be that she was wanted by the FBI for years and now been bumped up the list!
Or, be more careful, and vanish. Purely a cynical PR ploy. FBI has a great deal to answer for. It was corrupt from day 1, and cannot shed its foundation.
As since the beginning, its main mode of operation is extortion. In Hoover days, a secret file of offenses ensured no politician could interfere with its funding or expansion. Undoubtedly, such are still kept: a docile pol is much, much more useful to them than an indicted former pol. How many federal bribery cases are brought?
For actual "law enforcement", the extortion victims are people who can be used to entrap "bigger fish". Once someone has cooperated with the FBI, threat of exposing that is effective substitute for any evidence of criminal activity. Made-up sworn testimony is the usual demand, normally against anybody not "cooperating".
We saw how mullahs were forced to run "radicalizing" groups to keep FBI supplied with terrorist perps. Usually, all weapons are supplied directly by the FBI plant, and all violence advocacy at meetings.
Local and state police agencies have been learning from crooked FBI methods for a long time.
Among recent FBI scandals is the revelation that fingerprint matches were, from earliest days, cooked. The fingerprint lab always knew what determination was wanted, and supplied that anywhere it could be made to seem to stick.
Same with all their forensic tricks: matching bullets to guns, handwriting analyses, what have you. Unbounded numbers of false convictions on fabricated evidence are just beginning to be revealed by the Innocence Project, fought tooth and nail by prosecutors.
Probably most agents were sincere when they joined. The crooked get the promotions.
Blaming low IQ people for their low intelligence is a form of discrimination. High IQ people should be shielding them, because there is a good chance we will eventually be low IQ the older we get.
Can’t tell if you’re joking. Discrimination means treating people differently based on who or what they are they are; “shielding” is discrimination. Elder abuse is its own thing that should probably be handled separately.
You're technically right but you must be aware that the colloquial usage of the term means that the unjustified selection has negative consequences. Shielding is positive. I can't tell how you could've missed that...
These products have been heavily marketed to minorities, and the only real difference between today’s crypto and OneCoin is that there’s a smokescreen of technology and VC money.
They didn't recruit in the slums of Manila or the Nepali countryside. I'm sure there were some poor people among the victims too but the majority wasn't. Just look at the amounts of money they gave them. What "marginalized" person from a developing country has thousands of dollars lying around to give to random people promising them high returns? Poor people get debt trapped with so-called microloans, happens to millions in Africa and South Asia.
The minority in this case were folks with more wealth than brains - in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. What poor person has the money to travel all the way to places like Dubai to attend a OneCoin conference?
No they absolutely did recruit in the developing world and in the type of “slum” you refer to. They took huge amounts of money in Africa.
Your comment shows you haven’t looked into one coin deeply. There were huge one coin conferences in Africa. For example Uganda was plastered with onecoin. https://youtu.be/NMt4KUSz_Fw
A youtube video by some random guy with 310 views is not a credible source. Surely you've seen some kind of evidence that isn't social media hearsay to make you so convinced. Pictures, videos? Can you tell us the name of the slum you're referring to?
>They took huge amounts of money in Africa.
"Huge" amounts. What sort of amounts are we talking about? Do you have a more concrete number and a source? Must be someone involved in the scam who told you because the perpetrators have not even been caught yet, let alone tried.
German authorities tried charging a single couple that collected over 320 million Euros for Ignatova on their own! Just to give an idea of what sort of sums we're talking about. The average each of the European victims invested is in the thousands, possibly over 10k Euros.
The media commonly cites 4 billion dollars that Ignatova and her accomplices collected in total. How much do you think they got out of that supposed Ugandan slum?
I actually looked at their powerpoints and put it in front of people to see if what they would say
I actually have a bit of empathy for people after that
They don't ask the questions like “where’s the block explorer”, or that verification is a pre-requisite in blockchain technology. in fact there is no verify to people, there is no “trust, but verify” there is just “trust”
and sadly, people trust scams more than properly structured investments because all they know are scams as thats familiar, and have been shut out of investments
We are going to be number one global currency because I truly believe we are number one. Our network is an ecosystem for everyone, number one worldwide.
I used to feel this way, very strongly, but spending time on the crypto subreddits has changed my mind. There is a substantial set of people who actively refuse to learn form experience and just keep seeking out scams. They do not have mental defects, they just actively refuse to learn from their experiences. It is not unlike the people in failed doomsday cults who continue to believe in their revelation after one or more failures.
Victim blaming is wrong, but it is more than fair to observe that there are people who actually are at fault for their situation.
Her scheme preceded Ethereum, so she couldn't make use of the convenient Token Scam Construction Kit like the other similarly promoted ICOs that came a bit later.