A giant scam

BBC has an interesting story about OneCoin--how it started out as a blockchain currency without a blockchain, got hyped by a multilevel marketer, and is still selling despite the disappearance of the founder.

Bjercke would get an apartment and a car - and an attractive annual salary of about £250,000.

"I was thinking: 'What is my job going to be? What are the things that I'm going to have to do for this company?'" he recalls.

"And he said: 'Well, first of all, they need a blockchain. They don't have a blockchain today.'

"I said: 'What? You told me it was a cryptocurrency company.'"

The agent replied that this was correct. It was a cryptocurrency company, and it had been running for a while - but it didn't have a blockchain. "So we need you to build a blockchain," he went on.

and then

In May 2015, already a very successful MLM seller, Igor Alberts was invited to a OneCoin event in Dubai, where he met lots of people, all apparently making fortunes with this new currency. Dr Ruja herself made a powerful impression too, with her "princess's dresses" and her vision of a financial revolution. Igor returned with a new mission - and gave new instructions to all the salespeople in his downline: stop whatever you're doing, and start selling OneCoin. "We gathered the teams together and we started to work like crazy," he says. "We made in our first month almost €90,000 out of nothing. Bang!"

After Ruja disappeared, people started trying to track the money

I went to see Oliver Bullough, an expert on what he calls Moneyland - the shadowy parallel world where criminals and the super-rich hide their wealth. The problem, he explains, is that following the money isn't as easy as it sounds, because criminals structure their companies and bank accounts in such a way that their assets seem to disappear. "They still exist", he says, in his garden near the village of Hay-on-Wye. "You can still use them to buy things, you can still use them to buy political influence and nice houses and yachts. But when it comes to someone trying to find them - whether that's a journalist or a police officer - they are invisible."

...

Ruja bought a very large property in central Sofia. Technically it was owned by a company called One Property. One Property was owned by another company called Risk Ltd. Risk Ltd was owned by Ruja, but was then transferred to some unnamed Panamanians, but it was still managed by another company called Peragon. And Peragon was owned by another company called Artefix, which was owned by Ruja's mother, Veska. And then in 2017, the ownership of Artefix was sold to an unknown man in his 20s.

...

I show his results to Bullough, who immediately notices how many British companies there are. "British companies are the companies of choice," he comments. "They're very easy to set up and they look legitimate."

...

"This is supposed to mean that you can no longer use a British company to hide behind," he says, as he scrolls down the page. "Oh, hey presto, they haven't filed a person with significant control. That's illegal… That is an anonymous shell company, as anonymous as anything that you can buy anywhere in the Seychelles or Nevis or the Marshall Islands or Vanuatu."

So much for following the money. In an interconnected global economy, assets can simply vanish, and you end up chasing shadows.

And there are some hints that some Eastern European crime mobs got involved too. And several billions went astray--and not just from first-world investors. It turns out that multi-level marketing reaches all the way to poor farmers in Uganda.