Police finally catch Dr Ruja - in Hamburg! (Or not)

It's surprisingly hard to remember a face

Imagine my surprise when I got a message a couple of days ago, asking when I was planning to report that Dr Ruja Ignatova, the Missing Cryptoqueen, had finally been arrested.

What?! I asked.

Here’s what happened. Last week, as the early morning commuter train from Osnabrueck rolled into Hamburg train station, a dozen armed federal police officers – 3 of them armed – were waiting on the platform.

They boarded the train, and hauled off a woman and her travelling companion to a police station for questioning.

The person who contacted me was on that train. He’d spotted this woman, and noticed the similarity to the world famous scammer. ‘She looked like a twin’ he told me. After all, her face is now pretty well known. Dr Ruja is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. But she’s also wanted by the German authorities (she’s a German citizen after all). And her face is plastered over several German train stations.

Dr Ruja’s picture at a German train station. Source: BehindMLM

This woman looked ‘98 per cent similar’ to Dr Ruja, he reckoned. Although her hair was a little less dark. She spoke fluent German too (Dr Ruja lived in Germany from the age of 10). And she was acting strangely, insulting people, paying in cash for her ticket…

My contact checked with a couple of employees of the train company, who agreed with him, and contacted the police.

When the police boarded the train, she quickly switched from speaking German to English, and showed them a non-German passport. At the police station I assume they carried out some biometric tests. After all, Dr Ruja is believed to travel (if she travels at all) under an assumed name using a fake-but-real passport, possibly issued in Ukraine. Given she was convicted in 2016 for embezzling funds from a metalworks she owned years earlier, presumably the authorities do have biometric data for her.

Exciting stuff! I couldn’t find anything online about any of this. It’s strange to think that Dr Ruja is living in Germany, but it’s not impossible. People can live for years under aliases and never get caught. And once the cover story works for a while, they tend to get confident to the point of laziness. I even sent my contact this video of her speaking German, and he confirmed she had a very similar sounding voice.

So I contacted the German police – North Rhine-Westphalia – who’ve led the investigation into OneCoin. Hoping for some good news. A spokesperson there told me:

“According to what is now available, the event on May 15, 2024 can be confirmed here as such. The affected people were released from the federal police station after a police check. The result was a case of mistaken identity due to visual similarities with the person we were looking for, Dr Ruja Ignatova. However, the female person encountered was undoubtedly not the person they were looking for.”

Damn.

This is not the first time this has happened to me. It’s not even the first time this year. I am approached at least once a month with what appears to be an extremely credible sighting of Dr Ruja. The person is usually adamant it’s her. In no particular order, I have been contacted by people who are certain they have spotted Dr Ruja at:

-       A beach bar in Greece, sipping on a cocktail

-       Driving around London in a fancy car

-       In Brazil (after a sex change operation)

-       In a Thai beach house, hiding out

-       In a Sydney shopping mall  

-       Arriving at Heathrow airport

Often, it ends up simply being a woman of roughly the same age, with similar hair, similar features, and similarly expensive tastes. Unfortunately there are millions of women who fit that bill. Once someone appears on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, people start seeing her everywhere.

I feel sorry for this poor innocent woman. It can’t have been much fun to be dragged off a train by armed police officers, interrogated and tested – simply because someone thought you look a like the world’s most wanted woman. She must have wondered what the hell was going on. (It happens. A couple of years ago a Formula 1 fan from Liverpool, known only as Mark L, was sitting in Amsterdam having food with his son when Dutch police burst in, blindfolded him, and dragged him to a maximum security prison. They thought he was the mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro. "It would have been a genius of an Italian to have such a strong Liverpool accent," Mark L’s lawyer later said. He was shortly released.)

It reminds me of the various studies into the reliability of witness evidence in court. Decades of work has found that eyewitness testimony is highly persuasive in court, but also be error prone. This is also true when it comes to identifying mugshots – visibility, stress levels, even whether someone is a different race to you – can all influence recall ability. It’s a fascinating area, which obviously has implications for the legal system.

Dr Ruja’s Ten Most Wanted page. Would you recognise her?

This is, I imagine, a big problem for the authorities too. If I get contacted often, they must be too. Especially by anyone interested in getting the $250,000 reward money. I’ve been told that there are even chancers who phone the hot lines trying their luck – why not?

So next time you are certain you have just seen Dr Ruja in your local supermarket. A piece of advice. It’s probably not her.