4. Miss OneLife

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover. US special agents are on a mission. from abuse. Move in now. From the BBC World Secrets. Yeah. Yeah. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Quick warning before we begin. This episode contains strong language. Miss One Life Organization. The first annual Miss One Line.

One coin, a fake cryptocurrency that has tricked millions, is still going straight. We've been told that there's a beauty pageant tonight to help promote OneCoin and its network, One Life. Sponsors include some of the world's most famous brands. This is our chance to attend a OneCoin event and see how it looks from the inside. Mamorous But first, we need permission.

And it's just my manager. Early April in Bucharest, Romania, 8am. We're looking for the organiser, a one-coin promoter called Christi Kalina. It's a bit of a way out, isn't it? Gulp. For the last two days we've been trying to contact Christy. He told us we could attend tonight's event, but now he's not answering our calls.

After a bit of digging around online, we find out he's hosting a private one coin conference this morning. Can we just stop just here? So we decide to just turn up. Yeah, good. Thank you. I figure that a bit of nerves are quite good though because you know gives you that adrenaline rush. We've driven here from Bulgaria. It took seven hours.

And if I'm honest, I don't think there's a one coin, one life beauty pageant tonight being hosted by Christy Kalina. Okay, here goes nothing. The art of a good scam is making people believe in things that don't exist. Hello. Hello. You're uh with the one life thing? Yes. Is Christy Kalina around? Christy Kalina works as an independent marketing associate with One Life, promoting OneCoin in the region and around the world. I've been to a lot of conferences in my life, unfortunately, and uh

It looks like a perfectly normal, legit, professionally run conference, doesn't it? The sort of sad eyes of the organisers, the depressing lanyards. It definitely could be a conference for absolutely anything. A bit like OneCoin itself, it looks just like the real thing. If you walked past, you'd think it was just another boring conference. Except, this is a conference to promote a scam that has convinced people all over the world to invest billions of euros. One family! You're amazing!

She looked like a queen. Like like a queen. And whose visionary founder, Dr. Ruja Ignaceva, hasn't been seen for two years. We're looking for the house of Dr. Rujia Ignatova. It's this one. Yeah, okay. Do you know where she is? No idea where doesn't know where she is. A few weeks ago, Dr. Rouge's younger brother Konstantin was arrested in the US, where he's awaiting a pretrial hearing. is bigger than we thought, isn't it? And now, apparently, there's a one-coin beauty pageant here in Romania.

Episode four Miss One Life. Hi Jamie. Jamie, hello. We phone we phoned you up. We're from London. Trump? London from the UK journalists about tonight's events. Okay. We're making a podcast for BDC. Very, very busy. We just want to know what what we need to do for this evening. For the evening? Yeah. Uh

You want to make picture, make uh white, we would like to do some this recording. Uh so we just like to get some sounds, some you know the event itself. Maybe speak to you. Look at it. You must call me in the bamboo in seven o'clock. Who have you voted for? I vote for Romania. Oh, right. Okay, Moldavia, Romania. Very nice.

Do we need a dress code or anything? It's cocktail attire, it's easy. Okay, we'll we'll we'll be in cocktail attire. It's easy. Alright, thanks Christy. Nice to see you, thanks. Alright. Very easy. We are now this evening going to be going to a beauty pageant, whatever happens.

But there is one thing we need to do first. Dress code is cocktail. Basically I've just got denim. You've got trainers on. I didn't even think this event was actually taking place. Tell you what, within about five minutes of shopping I feel like I've been doing it for six hours. Would you like a little purse as well? Okay, alright, because I sell them. Come on! I'm just gonna come straight out with the bow tie on, alright? Oh shit. Oh, for God's sake, I'm just I'm exhausted. Thank you.

Have a nice day. United States of America against Konstantin Ignatov. Ahead of the event, we sit down in our hotel lobby and go through the charges against Dr. Rouger and her brother Constantin. They were published in March by New York Southern District Court. These are the charges. Various charges about conspiracy to commit wire fraud and other types of fraud. Konstantin Ignatov has entered a plea of not guilty to count one. That's conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

But the documents make for interesting reading. Court, you know, making all these false claims, false promises. They explain in detail what the FBI has learnt about one coin. And it includes and other top leaders. Might not be something really clean or that I can normally work on or even be proud of, except with you in private when we make the money. But I'm especially good in this very borderline cases.

When the things become grey. Founder 2 proposes get members to think that they are mining their one coin via exchanging tokens for one coin. Cryptocurrencies do something called mining. To create new coins, computers try to crack mathematical puzzles and when they succeed, new coins are created.

Andatu emailed Rujia the following day writing, the concept of converting tokens into one coin is an important phase for validity and truth behind the one coin. The so-called mining of coins is a concept that's very familiar in the industry and a story we can sell to the members. When people bought one coin packages, they weren't actually given one coin. But rather tokens

Which they were told were used to mine one coin for them. So the more tokens you had, the more one coins you got. Rujia then wrote to Founder 2, we are not mining actually, but telling people shit. To which Founder 2 responded, how can this be investigated? And found out. On or about August 9th, 2014, Dr. Rudia sent an email to Founder2 in which Rudia described her thoughts on the exit strategy. The first option that she listed was take the money and run And blame someone else for this.

OneCoin disputes all allegations. To our claim that OneCoin is not a cryptocurrency, and that its nominal price is not determined by demand and supply, but is manipulated and set internally, they said, Onecoin verifiably fulfills all criteria of the definition of cryptocurrency, and also those of a transparent pricing that is in line with the common market.

The BBC Podcast series, they say, is based on testimonials of haters, former employees who were either fired or disgracefully dismissed for internal company violations, intellectual property theft and other violations. Thus the series will not present any truthful information and cannot be considered objective nor unbiased.

They go on to say If the accusations were only remotely correct, the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of people would be inexplicable. We will continue to put our claims to one coin, and if we get further responses, we will include them in later episodes. The FBI files also contain valuable new information about Doctor Rouge's disappearance. Bulgarian travel records show that on or about October twenty-fifth, twenty seventeen. Rusia flew on Ryanair from Sophia, Bulgaria, to Athens, Greece.

Dr. Rouge was last seen in Sozopol in around July 2017. That was on her private yacht, the Davina, the one we saw. On october seventh, she then failed to turn up at a one coin event in Lisbon. But now we know that her last known whereabouts was in fact Athens on the 25th of October 2017. And there's some more clues here. Last week I said that the US authorities charged Dr. Ruger in absentia in March 2019.

That's not the whole story. We've learnt that Dr. Rouger was actually indicted on the 12th of October 2017. But this indictment was sealed until March 2019. Two weeks after that first indictment that Dr. Rouge vanished. Is it possible she could have been tipped off? And later, at the bail hearing for Constantin for a bond of$20 million which was denied, the Department of Justice stated that.

According to our investigation, we do believe that the defendant is directly associated with significant players in Eastern European organized crime. These claims are yet to be tested in court, but we've heard similar rumours from multiple sources. And as we sit in the hotel lobby in Bucharest, we feel like we're in Alice in Wonderland. No idea how deep the Yeah. I've just been looking on Instagram by the way. I'm gonna get it up in a now. At all at the UK contestants.

Chloe King. So this is her this is our Instagram stories. Final tonight, I'll post a link in my bio soon where you can watch. There you go, clear the video. With the United Kingdom sash on. That's Miss USA And Brice Brice Lightner. What's really weird is we're sitting like reading this document

What about all of this fake stuff? Fake coins, fake mind coins. The exit plan is to just run and blame someone else and then you go on Instagram and there's this huge event being organized and people have travelled a long way and these This uh Chloe King's really excited about it. I mean it's just so weird that the tooth we're looking at both of these things together.

Better go and get ready. Should we should get should we go and get ready? We probably should, shouldn't we? Yeah we should. I'm a bit nervous.

One hour later and we are at the bamboo club. A little bit uneasy. We're in here waiting for the event to start. 70, I don't know, hundred people, champagne on every table, vodka on every table. We just about got in by the skin of our teeth I think. Oh there's four more bottles of champagne coming out. Everyone is incredibly smartly dressed. There's a big podium up front where obviously the walk-in's gonna take place but I've I don't feel that comfortable here. When we walked in we

had we had one person who said we weren't getting in this woman who was really did not like us. She obviously knew who we were and she said we weren't coming in. Then we begged Christie, he said he couldn't let us in, then we tried again and then he finally let us in if we didn't record

Someone just offering us some champagne and we said no. Just sent away a bottle of Moe. Oh dear. Okay, that's what we do. I'm just worried now that the word's got around that we're here. I thought we were just gonna blend in. We are not blending. in. I've done a lot of strange things with my work.

I went on tour with Tommy Robinson from the EDL and once spent a week on a free love commune. But nothing so strange as this. We put ourselves into the very furthest corner from the door. There are around 300 people at this This event, mostly men aged forty and over, who are swigging free bottles of moe and smoking thick cigars. There are one coin one life representatives from all over Europe.

I've been to several cryptocurrency events and people don't look like this. Half the people here look like successful car dealers and the other half Look like characters from The Godfather. And there's me and Georgia. We sit in the corner and stick out like two sore thumbs holding a massive microphone. Lights have gone down, yeah. I mean I'm not that happy that it's now dark for other reasons, but uh oh hang on music's gone. Oh my god! Really quite busy.

So very loud I know I'm not saying much but I don't I really don't know what to say. So this is the scene. There are 25 or so beauty contestants from all over the world in a constant procession on and off the stage. Round one is national costumes. They're taking in turns.

To walk to the front and then they stand there and they pose and they move around in that way that models do. And they stand there with the tremory legs in like high hills that look like pins. Miss Russia wears a sarapan, which is a sort of head-to-toe pin. Oh Christ. Miss USA strides on dressed up like the Statue of Liberty. Statue of Liberty is not the national dress of America. And Miss Brazil is wearing a peacock hat. US Navy. This goes on for hours round after round.

I think it's old fashioned either for beauty contests. And beauty contests are old fashioned and this is old fashioned for that. It feels a bit like an extravagant self-congratulatory. Private party, a sort of gathering of the faithful, which has very little to do with cryptocurrencies or the future of payments. I know, yeah, the cigar smoke is getting pretty overwhelming. As the night wears on, we become more Very uncomfortable.

And a bit boring. Very boring. One person aggressively questions us and suspects we're trying to secretly record everyone's conversations. Everyone is getting drunk and people are starting to stare at us. Suddenly had the realisation that we're in a in a room with one life people, they know we're media and they probably hate our guts. And it's just us two sitting. They know we're.

not stupid so I suddenly feel like we're a little bit uh in the lion's den here. We don't manage to speak to Christy Kalina again. That was because he was too busy being one of the Miss One Life judges. After about three hours we've seen enough. Montenegro! Miss One Life is weird, it's distasteful, it's gaudy, but and I'm gonna be honest here, it's a pretty impressive event.

In one of the intervals a minor Romanian celebrity takes the stage and says We're all from different countries, but we are all united by one coin. And as she proceeds to murder the Titanic Theme Tune, we edge past hundreds of watchful eyes and jump into the first. We've seen enough to know that one coin is still going and there is a lot of money here.

Oh and Miss France won, by the way. From the tranquillity of a studio back in London, we ring one of the sponsors of the event, the cosmetic giant L'Oreal. We weren't all that surprised when they told us they had never heard of Miss One Life. The Miss One Life organizers had said that L'Oreal was a sponsor, claimed it would be watched by 40 million people, and that it would be the biggest event in the world. None of that was true. But imagine if you're watching online.

How would you know? Onecoin is exploiting a flaw in our media. A flaw that allows people to artificially create credibility. Thank you very much for the invitation to be a speaker at the Economist Forum today. In twenty fifteen, Dr. Rouge spoke at a conference organized by the respected Economist magazine. Her speech was titled The Revolution of the Financial Sector Through Cryptocurrencies.

OneCoin was a sponsor. My name is Dr. Uzek Natovan. I hold a PhD in Rome. I have always been very interested in financial services and worked about six years with McKinsey. Actually when the crisis hit us really, really bad and it was um The following year, Dr. Rouge appeared PowerPose on the front cover of the prestigious Forbes magazine with another grandiose title, How the Financial World Can Be Changed with OneCoin.

If you type Dr. Ruja Ignateva into Google Images, it's one of the first things you'll find. Power stance, staring at the reader, black t-shirt and red lipstick, looking every bit the business superstar. Nice story with uh Forbes cover. Forbes cover. It was among the best women in the world. Did that give you some confidence? Yeah, that's what inspired us to do. But Dr. Rouge wasn't a Forbes star. What actually happened is quite surprising. It was a paid advertisement in Forbes, Bulgaria.

But in marketing materials, it looked like she was the cover star, the next Richard Branson or Mark Zuckerberg. And you'll never guess who performed a private birthday concert for Doctor Rouge at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. This is a video from Constantin's Instagram page. Constantin is dancing, filming himself with Tom Jones singing in the background.

We approached Tom Jones, the VNA, the economist and Forbes and asked about whether they received payment from OneCoin and what inquiries were made into OneCoin and Dr. Rouger. Forbes gave a statement that OneCoin has never been featured on the cover of Forbes or any of its licensed foreign editions. Onecoin has also never been the subject of any Forbes editorial piece.

Rather, OneCoin purchased advertorial space from the former third-party licensee of Forbes Bulgaria. The V said The V regularly hosts private hire events which offer a valuable source of income. This event was organised by an external PR agency, and at the time there was no press coverage to suggest allegations against OneCoin. We didn't hear back from Tom Jones or The Economist. We live in a time when the persona you create online is more important than who you are offline.

With our fragmented media, it's getting easier to create a fake reality by stitching together carefully edited content and footage and sharing it. Most people are far too busy to check the detail. By carefully associating herself with respected brands, Dr. Rouge was able to turn herself into something new. Forbes Bulgaria, The Economist, the VA, and Tom Jones all took money from one coin. Yeah, yeah.

Transform a little known McKinsey consultant called Rouja Ignateva into Dr. Rouja, the business superstar.

With a strong vision. Dr. Lucia Ignatova. Is this what Miss One Life was really all about? To create the impression that OneCoin was stronger than ever? There is one person Might know. It's the eighteenth of April. We've been back from Bulgaria now for over a week.

We couldn't be further away from um Bucharest One Life Comp Pad Beauty Pageant. We're in Hampstead Heath in North London and we're just waiting for Chloe King, aka Miss One Life UK, to turn up. I'm really excited to see her and um I guess she might know something really useful to us and she doesn't that she doesn't think is useful. Chloe's running a bit late and there's just enough time to put in a quick call.

Oh yeah, hello. My name's Jamie Bartlett. I'm calling from um the BBC. Making a a podcast series at the moment One thing has been bothering us particular who's called Doctor Rugia Ignatova. Doctor Rugia claimed she had a degree from Oxford University and there's a certificate of her graduation online. European and contemporary law She graduated in two thousand and four. But after learning about Forbes, I'm wondering whether that's made up too. Wow, that seems to be right. Thank you.

A um master's degree, a one year postgraduate degree. Two thousand three, two thousand four, she studied St Hilda's in a law degree and she successfully completed it. So she's not a complete con artist, is she? She did get a degree from Oxford. That's not made up. Gotta find out whether there's any truth to her being a holding a doctorate. And then we spot Claire. Hey, Chloe and Jamie. The last time we saw Chloe King, she was on stage wearing a Britannia outfit and high heels.

Now she's in CrossFit clothes and looks far more relaxed. Yeah. Chloe is in her mid twenties and says she wants to be an actress. I mean you won't remember us, but we were we were like just sitting in the corner so Where the where the contestants kind of like when they left the stage and went to the book. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we were cheering for ya. We were there like we were like were you just allowed in? Or were they you kinda get pressed?

tickets to see if my mum and my boyfriend could come and it was just really strange the whole ticketing process because if you know like if you do like a lot of Miss Universe world like the tickets go on sale well in advance and you can easily kind of get tickets but it was Strange'cause they were like, No, it's even though it's a pageant it was like a private audience.

First of all I just thought that was a little bit odd. And the whole Bitcoin thing, I wasn't really sure not Bitcoin, sorry, um that's another one, uh OneCoin I think it's called. It all seemed very different. To any other pageant I've been to before. I mean to be honest, I really didn't understand the whole cryptocurrency thing, so I'm sorry, I really just didn't. I mean I don't know understand it anyway.

All I know is that like it's this anonymous coin and I don't really know any much more than that. So Like how long before the actual pageant itself did you hear about it? You know, it was really strange because I only heard about the pageant just two weeks before I actually went there. How would that compare to a normal pageant then? You know like a year

or more before you do a pageant. Do you get paid for doing this? Do they offer you money for doing it? Um if you win, you obviously you win money. So the prices were quite good. I'm not too sure if I agree with the top five prices but I'll get to that in a moment. The winner won a It was a car worth one hundred thousand euros. If you didn't make top ten, I didn't make top ten. My prize was still fantastic, so they've given us one thousand Euros worth of

vouchers to travel to a certain number of hotels worldwide. They offered us that or they offered us the same value in their cryptocurrency. In one coin they are in one coin. Does anyone take it? Do you know? I'm not sure, but um I think the girls who got in the top five probably will because of this. The top five prizes were 20,000 euros worth of cosmetic surgery vouchers. What? Um but they said you can have that or you can t take the same value in the cryptocurrency.

Do you think any of the contestants actually understood what OneCoin was or what it was about? Um well I tried to understand it as much as I couldn't ask as many questions. But the way I understood it it was a cryptocurrency that you can only spend with people that just accept one coin. I w wonder whether anybody there mentioned someone called Konstantin Ignatov. Did you come across that name? No. Anyone bring that up? No.

So that's the person who is in charge of OneCoin, he's like the big boss. Yeah. But about two weeks before the pageant took place, he was arrested in the US. And he's currently in a New York State correctional facility awaiting charge for Oh my god, I did not know that. For f wire fraud, money laundering to do with one coin.

I did hear things about that like Basically I remember Miss Sweden Miss Sweden on the coach one day, she said she had posted something about Miss One Life and she had these comments from these people saying It's a complete scam, it's it's um a con, it's this and she told Ernest Ernest, by the way, is another organiser of Miss One Life. And Ernest was like, just ignore it, they're just like jealous or something like that.

Did you think of maybe looking into it further when you heard those rumours?'Cause you said as well it's something seemed to be I did and I tried to I did. I tried to like look at I was looking at the website and stuff and I was like asking uh the chaperones about it and she was just like, Don't worry, like Ernest will explain everything to you. Yeah, and it seemed sort of you know, nothing was weird. It seemed it seemed fine, yeah. It just it just seemed absolutely fine.

There's a w a woman in particular that we're sort of trying to find called uh Rujia Ignatova. She's the person that created this whole thing. Did you what do you mean by the whole thing? Like she created this the beach page one. No, no, the one coin, the whole company that runs it.

Four years ago or so she built this one coin from nothing and started marketing it and it grew very very quickly. She's like the founder and visionary and she has not been seen for two over two years. Okay. What's her name? Rujia. I'm trying to think, it rings a bell but I don't know. Hmm. I really recognise the name. Yeah. I'm trying to think so I think I might Yeah.

I have a recollection of someone saying, oh, there's someone really important at this event, like the whole organizer of everything. And I remember thinking, oh, I thought that was Ernest, but probably not. Is it possible that we were in the same room as Dr. Rouge? Didn't even know it. Here's a theory. Chloe King said that Miss One Life had been organised at short notice. What if it wasn't just about creating a buzz around one coin, but was cover for something else? Something bigger.

Like bringing together all the top people. I'm gonna come up with a straight question here about and I don't know how far you can answer it. All right. That sounds Since leaving one coin. Jen McAdam has been running several private WhatsApp groups where OneCoin insiders occasionally share useful bits of information. Which is where you think Dr. Rujia Ignatova is now. Well I think she's definitely in hiding. Russia? I mean she could really be anywhere. I'll tell you I'm We went to Miss One Life.

Romania in Bucharest. UK and she said that somebody really important S rumours going round. But that someone really important was there. Jamie uh uh we heard through contacts. So I'm not surprised to hear that. It's possible that she could have been there. There's a possibility. We're told that um she's unrecognizable now. Sorry, what do you mean she's unrecognizable? ¡Suscríbete al canal! She's changed.

Next. We meet the world's top OneCoin seller and learn a secret about OneCoin's meteoric rise. So the first month you say you're making you got ninety thousand. It went up to two million, it went up to two point six million. If you imagine uh this person recruits, this person recruits this person recruits. I mean how many lines down does this go for you? Thousands of levels deep.

Thousands of deep. And enlist the help of a professional in our search. Where is her yacht based at the moment? Sospole. Sosp what you want to be trying to do is getting the tracker off that. What do you mean getting the how am I gonna get the tracker off the yacht? We've been asking you to contact us either with any tips that might help us in our search for Rougea or if you've invested in OneCoin or no others that have. And we're already getting emails from all over the world.

I really appreciate the fact that Shu highlighted the scam of Century in the name of one coin. His words are read by an actor. In 2017, one coin became popular in Pakistan. I personally have invested almost 5,000 euros in total. I put in the last time I had. The amount is homongous for us, keeping in mind that we belong to a country that is not developed yet.

There are people who bought power packs which is almost forty six thousand euros. This is all I had to tell you. Cryptoqueen at bbc.co.uk Throughout this series, we will continue to put our claims to one coin. In their latest email to us they said We hold firmly to our position. All allegations are disputed. For now no further comments will be made.

The Missing Crypto Queen was presented by me Jamie Bartlett. It was co-written and researched by me Jamie Bartlett and Georgia Catt and Georgia Kat is the producer. Chris Barube is the storytelling consultant. Philip Sellers is the editor. And the amazing music you're hearing is by Phil Channel and Desislava Stefanova in the London Bulgarian Choir.

Okay, so the Rugby World Cup is now finally underway in Japan and right now on BBC Sounds you can hear the Rugby Union Weekly podcast with me Chris Jones and me Danny Kill. Yeah. We'll have all the ladies from inside the Home Nations Council. And I'm on the sofa with my Chris Ashton. Rugby Union Weekly, available now on BBC Sounds. We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the world.

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