Georgia Catt remembers the first time she heard the name One Coin. A friend had just gone all in on a Bitcoin-style cryptocurrency that seemed to be booming. They had poured in €70,000. “They were absolutely invested, saying it was going to be the next big thing,” she recalls.
To Catt, a BBC radio producer, the promise of vast returns on something virtually no one had heard of seemed too good to be true. She started researching One Coin, and ended up unearthing what she describes as the “perfect scam”: a multi-billion dollar con that combined a bogus currency with a cult–like recruitment programme that fed into a pyramid scheme.
Above all, she was surprised how little coverage there had been. “It was a hyper version of so much stuff playing out in the world right now: the hype around technology, the fear of missing out, how easy it is to construct credibility, distrust in the establishment and mainstream media.” Catt also thought the swindle would make a great podcast. She was right. The Missing Cryptoqueen – the show she and technology journalist Jamie Bartlett have made about One Coin – has been a huge hit, with its much-anticipated finale released today.
But who is the Cryptoqueen? Catt and Bartlett were hooked on the One Coin swindle, with its twists and turns and tales of ordinary people who lost it all. The first such person they meet, Jen McAdam, not only invested her own money but convinced her family to invest theirs too, to the tune of £220,000. But more than that, they were intrigued by its founder, Bulgarian-born Dr Ruja Ignatova, who went to ground in 2017, just as law enforcement were starting get wind of the company. Ignatova was due to attend an event in Lisbon, but boarded a plane to Athens and disappeared. Her brother Konstantin has since been detained by the FBI.
The podcast skilfully weaves the thrilling story of Ignatova – a glamorous, Oxford-educated entrepreneur who attracted vast audiences to her One Coin lectures – with that of her company, as Catt and Bartlett piece together what became of her. Their search has taken them to places as diverse as a beauty pageant in Romania run by One Coin and a town in southern Germany where Ignatova’s family once owned a metallurgic factory. Week by week, the story has veered off on strange tangents.
Its blend of on-trend true crime and cautionary tech tale also means that the story has continued to unfold during production. Last week’s penultimate episode was delayed by five days, when they decided to go abroad to follow a potential lead to Ignatova. Besides, says Bartlett, delving into something that is still very much live (One Coin continues to operate, despite evidence of nefarious activity) is unnerving. “It can be a bit scary,” he says. “If you go online there are all these rumours circulating. We don’t go into it too much, partly for legal reasons, but the rumours are about who is really involved, the shadowy people behind it, which criminal groups are involved – we’ve had that all in the background.”
Nevertheless, they have continued to dig into Ignatova’s background, keen to find out what made someone turn her talents to such an iniquitous scheme. “She is an unbelievably fascinating person,” says Bartlett. “She is incredibly brave in a strange sort of way, and a weird figure of obsession to the people that follow her. Our view of her went from ‘paper thin front person’ to ‘incredibly intelligent and highly skilled’ to where I am now, which is – as Ruja says herself in one of the FBI documents – ‘an expert in dealing in the grey area of life’, and finding gaps in rules and laws.” The podcasters wonder if the Cryptoqueen might be out there somewhere, listening to their podcast. “I reckon she is,” says Catt.
As they release the final episode – an “even more devastating” chapter of the One Coin scam in Uganda, says Catt – they hope to tie everything together. “We thought it was important to end with people really feeling the real human cost of something like this,” says Bartlett, adding that they owe a debt to the victims of the scam. “However nerveracking it has been for us, it’s been much scarier for them.”
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