In early June 2016, female entrepreneur Ruja Ignatova stepped onto the stage at the Wembley Arena, England, speaking to thousands of fans.

She told the enthusiastic crowd that OneCoin is on its way to becoming the largest virtual currency in the world, making it possible for people to pay anywhere.

At that time, Bitcoin virtual currency was creating a craze. Bitcoin was the first virtual currency to appear and remains the most well known. The increase in its value from a few cents to hundreds of dollars a coin in mid-2016 has led many investors to seek to participate in this new opportunity.

Ruja, Bulgarian, 36, told the audience at Wembley that OneCoin is the "killer of Bitcoin". "In the next two years, no one will talk about Bitcoin anymore!", Who calls himself a "virtual queen". She founded two front companies in Dubai and Central American country Belize to promote the currency.

Many people around the world have invested in OneCoin, hoping to be part of the new revolution. UK investors spent nearly 30 million EUR (33 million USD) on OneCoin in the first 6 months of 2016. From August 2014 to March 2017, more than 4 billion EUR (4.4 billion USD) was invested. on OneCoin from people in dozens of countries like Pakistan, Brazil, Norway, Canada or Yemen.

Money is only valid when many people think it is valuable. Whether it is banknotes, coins, shells, gems or matchsticks, things that have been used as money, it is only valid when people believe it. Many people have long tried to create a form of cryptocurrency, independent of the currencies issued by the state, but always failed because no one believed them. There will always be a head who can manipulate the supply and forge so easily.

Bitcoin is feverish because it solves this problem. The currency depends on a special type of database called blockchain, like the ledger that every Bitcoin owner has an independent but identical copy. Every time Bitcoin is sent to someone else, a record of that transaction will be recorded on everyone's ledger.

No bank, no government, not even the inventor of Bitcoin, can change or manipulate it. This means that Bitcoin cannot be counterfeited, intrusive or fraudulent using two different transactions to spend the same balance of an account.

Blockchain database in particular is the key to helping cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin work. For many, this is a revolutionary new form of currency. For Ruja, it was an opportunity for her to make money by selling this idea to many people.

In early October 2016, four months after Ruja gave a speech in London, blockchain expert Bjorn Bjercke was invited by an recruiting employee as a technical director for a cryptocurrency startup from Bulgaria. Bjercke will get an apartment and a car with an annual salary of about £ 250,000 ($ 320,000).

Bjercke asked his employer what his job was. "Well, they need blockchain. They don't have blockchain right now. I said 'What? You told me it was a virtual money company,'" Bjercke said.

The opponent acknowledged that the virtual money company had been running for a while but had no blockchain. "What is the name of the company?" Bjercke asked. After receiving the answer that OneCoin, Bjercke did not accept the job.

OneCoin website. Screenshots.

A few months later, Jen McAdam, a 48-year-old Englishman, received a message from a friend about the investment opportunity not to be missed. Sitting in front of the computer, she clicked on a link and participated in OneCoin's webinar.

For more than an hour, she listened to enthusiastic speakers about this exciting new virtual currency. "You're lucky to be watching this webinar. You get involved at an early stage, it will grow like Bitcoin and even bigger," a speaker said.

They mention Ruja's desirable resume: a graduate of the University of Oxford, a doctorate from Konstanz University, an expert at the famous management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. They showed Ruja's speech at a conference organized by Economist and that attracted McAdam. "Women's power. I feel proud of her," McAdam said.

McAdam then invested £ 10,000 and persuaded family and friends to invest £ 250,000. She excitedly watched the value of the money on the OneCoin website increase steadily, surpassing the 100,000 mark. She started planning shopping and traveling.

But by the end of the year, Jen McAdam was contacted by a stranger online, claiming to have studied OneCoin thoroughly and wanted to talk to investors. She reluctantly agreed to chat on Skype and they argued fiercely. However, that dialogue took McAdam's life in a new direction.

The stranger is Timothy Curry, a Bitcoin enthusiast and supporter of virtual currencies. He thought OneCoin would make a bad reputation for cryptocurrencies and told McAdam directly that it was a scam. Over the next few weeks, Curry sent her a series of information on how virtual currencies work through web links, articles and videos on YouTube. She realized that OneCoin does not use the same blockchain technology as Bitcoin. The numbers that keep rising on OneCoin's website are practically meaningless. They are just numbers entered by OneCoin staff.

According to OneCoin, the company's main business is selling educational materials for trading. Members can purchase educational packages from 100 EUR to 118,000 EUR or 225,500 EUR. Each package will include token code to "mine" OneCoin.

Investors need to use real money to register, with the current conversion of 0.1 EUR to redeem a token code. The more people participate, the more difficult it becomes to dig and the amount of code to spend. To mine OneCoin, you must have a lot of tokens, but to have a lot of tokens, you must "pay for school". The more people join OneCoin, the more money will be spent.

Central banks and financial management institutions in a number of countries such as Italy, Norway and Hungary accuse OneCoin of not being virtual money but a form of fraud using the Ponzi model: paying money from latecomers first come. People who come in the end often don't get the money, and when the system can't expand, the founder will either run away or get caught.

Although McAdam has awakened, other OneCoin investors have not yet realized the problem. Ruja travels around the world to promote his vision, from Macau to Dubai to Singapore, attracting new investors. OneCoin is still growing fast and Ruja starts spending the huge amount of money she makes: buying real estate worth millions of dollars in the Bulgarian capital Sofia and the Sozopol resort in the Black Sea or organizing a party on luxury yachts . In July 2017, Ruja also invited American pop star Bebe Rexha to perform at a private event.

The only way to exchange OneCoin for any other currency is OneCoin Exchange, an internal market for members. However, it closed unannounced in January 2017, worrying investors. The leaders of OneCoin in Europe promise this will be resolved at a meeting in Lisbon, Portugal in October 2017. But on the important day, Ruja, who was famous for being on time, didn't show up.

"Nobody knows why she's not there," one delegate said. Everyone frantically texted and called but did not respond. Some people worry that Ruja is killed or kidnapped by banks because they think most banks are afraid of the virtual currency revolution. In fact, Ruja disappeared by the time American officials asked her to arrest her. The number of victims deceived by Ruja reached over one million.

FBI records show that on October 25, 2017, just two weeks after not appearing in Lisbon, Ruju boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens and then disappeared. Ruja is said to have had plastic surgery and remained in Europe, most likely living by a fake name in Frankfurt.

Ruja's younger brother, Konstantin Ignatov, ran OneCoin after Ruja disappeared. The US Department of Justice claims evidence of a link between him and "organized criminals in Eastern Europe".

On March 6, Konstantin Ignatov was arrested by the FBI at Los Angeles International Airport on charges of fraud involving OneCoin. At the same time, US authorities accused Ruja of fraud through electronic communications, securities fraud and money laundering.

But the surprising thing is that OneCoin continues to operate and many people continue to pour money into it. OneCoin has always denied allegations of misconduct, stating that they have "fully met the criteria for the definition of cryptocurrencies".

Investors said they came to OneCoin for fear of missing out on a big money-making opportunity. They are jealous when reading stories about people who become rich thanks to Bitcoin and think OneCoin is the second chance.

Many people are impressed by Ruja's personality and persuasion. They feel she is reputable for addressing a large audience. They were shown pictures of Ruja's degree and a copy of Forbes magazine that she covered on the cover.

The degree is real, but the cover of Forbes is not: it's just an advertising page inside the magazine, you just need to pay to appear.

But it's not just the promise of money that makes people believe. When Jen McAdam invested in OneCoin, she kept saying that she was part of a "family". She was put into a chat group, where the leader disseminated information from the Sofia headquarters.

McAdam's team leader warned her not to talk to OneCoin skeptics. "You are advised not to believe anything from the 'outside world'. Don't listen to Google," she said. "They call it 'OneCoin' haters."

Professor Eileen Barker of the London School of Economics said there are similarities between OneCoin and the cult, where people believe they are part of something big that will change the world. Once joined, they could hardly admit they were wrong, no matter how much evidence.

On November 5, Ruja's younger brother, Konstantin Ignatov, appeared in court in New York, testifying for the case of a lawyer accused of laundering $ 400 million of OneCoin's earnings in the United States. A month earlier, Ignatov had accepted a plea agreement, admitting a number of fraud and money laundering offenses. Ignatov seems to imply that the older sister tricked him just like the other investors. Ruja disappears for fear that someone close will report her to the FBI.

"This scam represents the dark side of rapid technological change, the way new technology creates great opportunities and possibilities for people who understand it, but also an opportunity to take advantage of those who do not. understand the issue, "wrote Jamie Bartlett, a British journalist who investigated Ruja's whereabouts.

Bartlett argues that Ruja has identified a number of social weaknesses and exploited them. She knows that there will be people who aspire to make money or be tempted to bet on OneCoin. She understands that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish truths from lies when there is so much conflicting information online. Ruja also understood that by building a group of people who believed in OneCoin, it was difficult for law enforcement and media officials to discover the truth.

"And the most frustrating thing is that Ruja correctly guessed that by the time people realized the problem, she had run away with high money," Bartlett wrote.