- Dr Ruja Ignatova had a mole inside an international investigation into her and Onecoin
- This is the claim made by The Missing Cryptoqueen creator Jamie Bartlett
- Bartlett was handed evidence that Dr Ignatova was able to keep tabs on Operation Satellite
Dr Ruja Ignatova, the Onecoin founder and probably the most famous fugitive in the world right now, had a mole inside the international police investigation into her own affairs. This is the astonishing claim made by the makers of The Missing Cryptoqueen, the BBC podcast investigating Dr Ignatova’s disappearance, the latest episode of which dropped this week. Presenter Jamie Bartlett was handed hard evidence that the Onecoin queen, who disappeared in 2017, was able to keep tabs on her own investigation, allowing her to stay one step ahead.
Operational Material Was Leaked From Secret Meetings
Dr Ignatova disappeared after taking a commercial flight to Athens in October 2017, after which it was revealed that her cryptocurrency scam took in $4 billion over five years. She has never been publicly sighted since, and Bartlett and his team were always amazed that she stayed so cool under the mounting pressure from investigations into her.
The latest episode of their podcast however has revealed exactly how she was able to be so cool – she had a mole inside a massive, international investigation into her and her activities. Operation Satellite was a huge investigation conducted by numerous law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the City of London Police, who held regular meetings to discuss how their investigations into Dr Ignatova and the Onecoin scam were going. However, the podcast reveals that the Bulgarian elements of this investigation may have been feeding information from these meetings to Dr Ignatova and her team.
Bartlett interviewed Frank Schneider, a former top spy from Luxembourg whose private intelligence firm started working for OneCoin in mid-2015, and who is currently under house arrest pending extradition to the U.S. to face charges relating to Onecoin. Schneider handed Bartlett a USB stick that had private phone conversations recorded by Dr Ignatova as well as slides from an FBI presentation at one of the Operation Satellite meetings.
Tech experts sourced the slides right back to a person with a ‘Bulgarian name’ who it seems was present at one of these meetings and leaked the information back to Dr Ignatova shortly after they concluded, allowing her to keep abreast of the efforts to track her and the Onecoin money flows.
Ignatova Had Links to Bulgarian Officialdom
Bartlett and his team were not able to conclusively prove the link, but the evidence obtained indeed shows that Dr Ignatova had access, somehow, to this information, and it undoubtedly aided her efforts to go underground before the authorities could get her.
Onecoin expert Tim Tayshun, who appears in The Missing Cryptoqueen, acknowledged that Dr Ignatova did indeed have contacts at the top of the Bulgarian political tree:
Ruja worked w/ Bulgaria’s most powerful woman, Tsvetelina Borislovava, the 2-time Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov’s long-time gf; even before Onecoin. Ruja was a CFO under one of her hedge funds, CSIF, which managed >$250M in investor funds. I think that connection opened networks pic.twitter.com/7f9Y5vkVTH
— Tim Tayshun (@ezCoinAccess) October 20, 2022
Whether these contacts are still assisting her in keeping a low profile, or there are other darker figures at work, remains to be seen.
