Ruja Ignatova — better known as the “cryptoqueen” — is now the only woman on the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, alongside murderers and gang leaders. Ignatova is the founder of OneCoin, a Bulgaria-based virtual currency the 42-year-old set up in 2014 and marketed as the “Bitcoin killer.” Only the 11th woman to be placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list, Ignatova vanished into thin air in 2017, allegedly with billions of dollars of investors’ money. A former consultant with McKinsey & Company, she also has a law degree from University of Oxford and apparently used her skills to defraud investors to the tune of $4 billion. Court documents show that in an email she reportedly wrote to a co-founder in 2014 saying, “take the money and run and blame someone else for this” — suggesting that this was her plan from the get-go. The FBI announced that a reward in the amount of $100,000 is being offered for information that leads to her capture.
