The Missing Cryptoqueen update 6
OneCoin and Dubai - a match made in hell
What is it about bling-obsessed, money-laundering champs Dubai that appeals so much to OneCoin scammers?
Although Bulgaria was OneCoin’s base, and London was Ruja’s city of choice, Dubai was OneCoin’s spiritual home. The official company was technically based in the UAE, along with a regional office. Ruja herself lived in the Emirate on-off from 2014, and even owned a 5,000 square foot luxury penthouse in the exclusive Palm Jumeirah area, popular among rich Bulgarian expats.
I suspect she liked the weather, the luxury air-conditioned shopping malls, and the authorities’ lack of interest in prosecuting financial scammers.
So you won’t be surprised to learn that quite a few former OneCoiners have ended up there. According to a huge new investigation into Dubai property ownership by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), 27 Dubai properties are suspected to have been bought with the proceeds of the OneCoin fraud.
Along with Ruja’s penthouse, one of the 27 is the property we first identified as belonging to OneCoin co-founder Sebastian Greenwood, in episode 10 of The Missing Cryptoqueen podcast.
If you heard the podcast you might recall we managed to locate the property after analysing an Instagram post by Ruja’s younger brother, Konstantin. On 15 February 2018, just as he was taking over the top job from his sister, Konstantin posted a selfie on his Insta account. He was wearing a black t-shirt, cap, and the standard selfie smoulder.
‘Just woke up and already have 200+ messages,’ he wrote. ‘You crazy guys. Birthday mode on!!!’
This is the photograph, which was originally tagged as Sofia, Bulgaria.
We
We managed to locate Konstantin’s precise location from just this photo
As you can see, in the far distance there were skyscrapers visible, including one that looked like a bottle opener, and a mosque minaret. You’ll notice that it looks more like the Middle East than the Balkans. Which is why we were suspicious.
Here’s how we found it with the help of an ‘open source’ specialist called Aliaume. First, he labelled every distinctive image in the background of Konstantin’s selfie: every building, tree, lake and wall. He then meticulously searched through hundreds of photos using Google and Yandex reverse image search, looking for a match. It didn’t take him long to discover the ‘bottle opener’ building was not in Sofia. It was the Amesco Tower in the Jumeirah Lake Towers waterfront district, Dubai. From there he matched up every other visible building and, using Google Earth Pro’s satellite imagery and basic geometry, started to calculate Konstantin’s likely ‘line of sight’. He went from buildings to lakes to trees to fences, narrowing down the location metre by metre. After days of non-stop sleuthing, he sent me the full address of the property. We later also found a partial Dubai property register that had been leaked on the dark net, which luckily for us included the same address. The named owner was Sebastian Greenwood.
(So here is a tip: always be very careful of what you post online. It is surprisingly easy to geolocated images based on just a few distinctive features in the background.)
The Dubai links don’t stop there of course.
From around 2015 former top spy Frank Schneider was in charge of Ruja’s PR and security – although people close to him reckon he was more of an all-round fixer and problem solver. In 2019 The US Department of Justice indicted Frank on money laundering and fraud charges, and in April 2021 he was detained in France at gunpoint, and placed under house arrest, pending a US extradition request.
That’s where he was when I interviewed him – ankle bracelet and all – the following year.
Me and Frank, before he got rid of the ankle bracelet and went on the run
And yet at some point in (we think) May 2023 – on the verge of being extradited – Frank copied his old boss and vanished. His whereabouts are unknown. How he managed to get rid of the ankle bracelet is beyond me. Although I assume a former top spy has ways and means.
Dubai could have been one destination, given Frank’s links to the place. He’d purchased a decent sized property close to Ruja’s in the Palm Jumeriah in early 2018 – just weeks after Ruja vanished.
The good news is that in 2019 the UAE passed a new law requiring real estate agents to run background checks on all buyers and sellers – and report any suspicious transactions to the authorities. So at least Frank, Sebastian and Ruja’s properties will have been frozen, and these scammers were unable to cash in on these assets.
Wrong!
The OCCRP has found that Frank sold his $2 million Dubai property in 2022. When he was under house arrest awaiting extradition.
Why was it not stopped? And what happened to the money –did it flow back to Frank?
We don’t know.
Ruja’s penthouse was also sold in December 2019. By that point she’d been on the run for over two years, and her US indictment had been publicly unsealed for several months.
So why did the sale go through? And what happened to the money?
We don’t know.
And in our investigation, we also discovered that Sebastian’s mansion – the one we found via Instagram – appears to be still owned by him. And we also believe it is currently being rented out, too. All despite the fact Sebastian is currently serving a 20 year prison sentence in the US, and was required to forfeit millions of dollars.
Why has this property not been seized? What is happening to the rent money?
We don’t know.
It’s not just real estate that’s the problem. In the UAE, the authorities will often appear to act, before any investigation slowly turns into paperwork and vapour.
Several UAE banks had reported dodgy OneCoin transactions to the authorities as far back as 2015, when big money first started rolling in to Ruja’s many Dubai bank accounts. Ruja even had around $50 million sitting in accounts which were frozen, and a public prosecutor issued a warrant for Ruja’s arrest.
But it was never executed, Ruja happily spent New Year 2016/17 at her Dubai penthouse without any trouble. And the $50 million was later unfrozen by the authorities.
It gets weirder though. A legal dispute over who should get that money slowly made its way through the Dubai courts – and right up until 2022 there were lawyers in court claiming to represent Ruja, who apparently wanted her money back. According to court documents, the $50 million has now been given to an influential Sheikh who says he had a long-standing legal agreement with Ruja about all this.
While the OCCRP report shine a light on Dubai’s shady property market, it doesn’t say much about Ruja’s whereabouts. I have long suspected Ruja spent time in Dubai after her October 2017 disappearance. Some sources told me she was living there quite openly, at least for a while. And in almost any other country, Ruja selling her penthouse in 2019 and lawyers representing her in court in 2022 would make me think she is alive and well and living somewhere close by. But in Dubai that is not the case.
There are dozens of former OneCoin promoters there right now, many of whom have joined or started copycat schemes. I spoke to a former FBI Special Agent called Karen Greenaway who spent 20 years investigating transnational organised crime. She said if criminals are spending good money in Dubai and not causing trouble, the FBI rarely gets to extradite them. Especially if they are well connected. ‘I can tell you that from experience.’ She told me.
The UAE says it wants to clean up its act and tackle money laundering. It has made some moves in that direction. Although if the case of OneCoin is anything to go by, there is still some way to go. And they might start by answering these questions.