The Missing Cryptoqueen update 7

Five things I learned from the US cop who led the investigation

One of the things Georgia Catt and I used to joke about is how everyone involved in The Missing Cryptoqueen seemed out of central casting. Every character was perfect for the role they played – as if handpicked by a movie producer.

There was Ruja, of course. The glamorous cryptoqueen who was the face of a multi-billion dollar scam.

There was Igor Alberts, the crystal buying, Aston Martin driving pony-haired MLM salesman who made $1 million per month in commission.

Me, with Igor Alberts and his wife Andreea

There was Frank Schneider, the well-spoken bureaucrat. A former spy turned shady private investigator.

Me and Frank under house arrest - before he vanished

There was the determined Glaswegian single mum investor – the unlikely hero who would not let it drop.

There was slightly nerdy tech guy from Norway who cracked the code, and worked out OneCoin had no blockchain.

I could go on. On more than one occasion Georgia and I would look at each other and say, ‘is this for real? Is this a set-up’?

But I always felt there was always one person missing. If this were ever made into a Netflix drama, there would need to be the plucky cop. The lone voice who realises this is a giant scam and becomes obsessed with the story – even if his superiors don’t really understand what he’s doing. Ideally he’d be a handsome former drugs enforcement guy, with a strong New Jersey accent who smokes, and says things like this is ‘the biggest case of his career’.  

And guess what – that’s exactly the person who literally started off the entire investigation into OneCoin.

Richard Reinhardt, talking to me in New York in January 2024.

I met Richard Reinhardt in New York earlier this year. He retired late 2023 after years working for the Internal Revenue Service – the IRS. We spoke for around four hours in an Irish bar, before opening hours, so it was nice and quiet. (Hat-tip to the owners). It was strange to meet one of the only people in the world who’s covered this story as much as I had. I think he felt the same.

We covered a lot of ground. The reality of making TV and podcasts is that those four hours is boiled down to just a few minutes, which means a lot of detail is lost on the cutting room floor. So here are five key things I learned from the interview, but which didn’t make the programme.

It was the IRS, not the FBI, which started the investigation

In my book about the OneCoin, I speculated that the US investigation into OneCoin may have started either when a UK fund administrator spotted dodgy OneCoin money being moved to the British Virgin Islands in early 2016; or when a compliance officer at the Bank of New York Mellon identified several large and concerning transactions involving some OneCoin related companies around the same time.  

According to Richard, that’s not quite right. This was one of the few cases where an agent – in this case Richard – instigated the investigation himself. He’d just joined the IRS’ cyber crime division. And some point in (I think) late 2015 he was going through various covert email accounts he had. “I get a OneCoin email and I'm just like, it just doesn't seem right. And then I looked at the IP address of where the email came from, came somebody in Georgia.” It was from a US promoter. He then finds people in the US buying OneCoin, and realises something is off. “Nobody had a clue what we were looking at…But that's how it all started off: [from] a junk email”.

In other words, a OneCoin promoter spammed an IRS agent about OneCoin, which is kind of funny. According to Richard, the moment everyone in the office knew for certain this was a giant scam was when Ruja announced on stage at London Wembley Arena that everyone’s coins would be doubled. “There’s no economic sense in that”.

Ruja’s London talk in summer 2016. Around 30 minutes in, she doubles everyone’s coins

It’s now widely assumed that the FBI were always the lead on the OneCoin case. But in fact they only joined a little later. This was initially an IRS investigation – and started off because a cop actually bothered to read the spam.

Ruja is an even more sophisticated criminal than we realised

I knew Dr Ruja was a smart crook. Aside from her multiple degrees and stint at McKinsey,  I’ve seen how she operates, spoken to many people close to her, studied her elaborate money laundering operations. But according to Richard, Ruja was another level to other criminals he’s investigated. “Ruja was very clever. So she had people everywhere….this is not your run of the mill criminal.” He describes her as a white collar criminal mixed with a mafia boss. Encrypted phones. Spies. Moles inside government. She also had a keen sense of danger. For several weeks before she vanished in October 2017, Ruja spoke on the phone with her boyfriend Gilbert Armenta. Gilbert had betrayed Ruja - and was trying to persuade her to leave Bulgaria so the US could arrest her. But Ruja had an intuition that something was up. I’ve heard hours of these calls. She was often prodding and probing, as if she half suspected Gilbert was lying. Richard – who was listening in – recalls that the day before she vanished, Gilbert accidentally went ‘off script’, saying something like “I’m just trying to get these cops off my back”. Ruja put the phone down immediately. She never answered another call and was never seen again. It was that quick.

They nearly got her in Paris

One month before her disappearing act, Dr Ruja spent a few days at Paris fashion week with her brother Konstantin. She stayed, as usual, at the Four Seasons Hotel.  (While there Konstantin managed to get a selfie with Cindy Crawford, which he posted on Instagram.)

Little known to Ruja, Richard and his colleague knew she was there, and had a difficult decision to make. Should we ask the French to arrest her? Richard felt they had enough evidence to get her extradited. Others weren’t so sure. And everyone knew that if the French police did arrest her and then release her, they’d never see her again. They all agreed, in the end, it was too risky. They’d wait. “Unfortunately, in hindsight… we should have got her to Paris...But the flip side is, would she be held until she extradited to the US? I'm not sure.” Given Frank Schneider was arrested by the French authorities and placed under house arrest, and then disappeared too, Richard was probably right to be unsure.

Yes it really was $4billion

I have always wondered exactly how big OneCoin became. The Department of Justice have maintained around $4 billion was invested – and I have seen the internal OneCoin accounting documents that number is based on. But even so, I’ve always had some small uncertainty about it, since those internal files could also have been yet another Ruja fabrication. Richard has no such qualms. He says that they were able to trace billions of dollars through the banks. “That [$4 billion number] was not a speculation on estimates. That's [a] paper trail…shell companies…accounts in Dubai…in the Cayman Islands”. Could it have been even bigger? Igor Alberts, OneCoin’s top salesperson for a period, told me he thought OneCoin pulled in as much as $15 billion dollars. “I would believe it”, said Richard.

The FBI wasn’t receiving credible sightings – but she will remain on their list  

When the FBI added Ruja to their top ten fugitives list in 2022 I assumed they’d receive hundreds of excellent leads. Definitely more than us, at least.

But according to Richard, up until he retired in late 2023, there weren’t actually that many good leads turning up. Yes, they received plenty of calls, he told me. But a lot of them were “completely off the wall”. Although he wasn’t privy to everything (the FBI runs the hotline, not the IRS) he only recalls two credible sightings over that first year. “I know of two that we acted on, but they turned out to be nothing”. I believe that one of them was in the British Virgin Islands, because I also got that same tip-off. We discuss what happened in the podcast, here. It’s very strange.

I always thought that if the FBI believed Ruja was dead, they would remove her from the list. “The FBI don’t keep people on the list for fun” Richard told me. However, to do that, they would need hard evidence she was deceased – a body, a death certificate. And in this murky world, that is obviously extremely unlikely. The fact Ruja remains on the list doesn’t mean the FBI knows she alive. They just don’t know she’d dead.

Richard still thinks about the case every day, even though he’s left the service. “I would love to know where she is…If she is alive, where is she? What does she look like? And then at the end of the day, how the heck did you pull off everything…Some of the biggest criminals in the world haven't been able to pull this off”. He says it’s a “bittersweet case” for him. The US authorities have managed to arrest and prosecute several of the top leaders - Sebastian Greenwood, Gilbert Armenta, Mark Scott, Konstantin Ignatov, Irina Dilkinska. It’s a victory for the authorities, and for the IRS. But there’s one big ‘but’. “There's so many people, including myself, that will not get closure on it until she's found.” I know exactly how he feels.