The hunt for a Bulgarian “cryptoqueen” wanted over one of the world’s biggest cases of fraud has spread to South Africa.
Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian citizen who was educated at Oxford, is the only woman on the FBI’s top 10 most-wanted list.
She allegedly swindled £3.6 billion out of millions of investors as part of a scam involving the fake cryptocurrency OneCoin.
German authorities have revealed in a new documentary about her case that they are focusing their search on Cape Town, although they are not sure of her whereabouts.
“We are working with the hypothesis that Ruja Ignatova is still alive,” Sabine Dässel, German investigator, said in the documentary, rejecting earlier theories that Ms Ignatova was killed and dismembered by Bulgarian ex-accomplices in October 2017.
The search is complicated by a recent FBI update on Ms Ignatova, which said she may have had plastic surgery to change her appearance, and which raised her arrest bounty to $5 million (£4 million).
The documentary cites security forces in Cape Town, who stated that Ms Ignatova had recently been spotted in Cape Town, although her exact whereabouts were unknown.
Fled on flight to Athens
Ms Ignatova fled Bulgaria in 2017 on a flight to Athens, and then disappeared.
But her brother Konstantin is known to have taken over her business and to have spent a lengthy period in Cape Town after she vanished. At the time, he posted pictures of his visits to the city’s best sight-seeing spots on his Instagram account.
Konstantin has since co-operated with the FBI investigation and has claimed that his sister carries half-a-billion pounds in stolen investor funds, which may have been used for plastic surgery, bribing officials and creating a new identity.
Ms Ignatova founded the OneCoin cryptocurrency with Karl Sebastian Greenwood, a joint Swedish-British citizen.
Last year, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said Greenwood had been jailed for 20 years over the scam and is required to pay back $300 million.
“Karl Sebastian Greenwood operated one of the largest fraud schemes ever perpetrated. Greenwood and his co-conspirators, including fugitive Ruja Ignatova, conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars with promises of a ‘financial revolution’ and claims that OneCoin would be the ‘Bitcoin killer’,” the office said.
“In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless, and investors were left with nothing.”