Guernsey Authorities Seize $11.4M Tied to ‘Cryptoqueen’ OneCoin Fraud

In brief

Local authorities in Guernsey have confiscated $11.4 million (£9 million) held in a local bank account linked to the OneCoin crypto scam.
The Royal Court enforced an overseas forfeiture order under Guernsey’s proceeds of crime laws.
The recovery shows the limitations of asset recovery and the value of earlier detection, Decrypt was told.

Authorities in Guernsey, a British Crown Dependency, have seized $11.4 million (£9 million) in assets linked to the OneCoin fraud, one of the largest and longest-running crypto scams on record.

Officials did not detail the digital assets involved, but placed their value at just under £9 million, according to a report released Monday by Guernsey Press, the Bailiwick’s paper of record, citing proceedings at the Royal Court.

The seizure followed the Royal Court’s decision to uphold an overseas forfeiture order sought on behalf of German authorities in Bielefeld under Guernsey’s proceeds of crime laws, updated in 2024 to govern seized assets.

Authorities did not indicate whether additional assets linked to OneCoin remain under review. No new criminal charges were announced. The funds were reportedly held in an account at RBS International in Guernsey under the name Aquitaine Group Limited.

Decrypt has reached out to Guernsey authorities for comment and will update this article should they respond.

OneCoin’s collapse and the “Missing Cryptoqueen”

Ruja Ignatova emerged as the public face of OneCoin in the mid-2010s, promoting it globally as a revolutionary cryptocurrency despite the project lacking a functional blockchain. By 2017, as regulators and prosecutors closed in, OneCoin collapsed and Ignatova disappeared, vanishing shortly before U.S. authorities unsealed fraud charges tied to the scheme.

In the years that followed, investigations expanded across jurisdictions as prosecutors pursued associates and traced funds linked to OneCoin’s multibillion-dollar haul. Courts in the U.S. and Europe brought charges against senior figures, including Ignatova’s brother, while evidence showed proceeds moving through offshore structures and financial centers.

By 2022, international law enforcement elevated the case further, with the FBI adding Ruja Ignatova to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and Europol placing her on its most-wanted register.

More recent reporting has kept the mystery as an unresolved case, with claims ranging from sightings in Russia to theories that Ignatova may have been killed years earlier.

To date, Ignatova remains one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives, and her whereabouts are still unknown.

“OneCoin’s fraud predates modern on-chain detection capabilities. Today’s threat detection systems can identify suspicious patterns in real-time, including transactions funded by mixer services,” Ohad Shperling, CEO of modular Web3 security firm IronBlocks, told Decrypt.

Shperling noted that had these technologies “existed and been widely deployed” in 2014 when OneCoin launched, the scheme “might have been curtailed earlier through automated flagging of abnormal transaction patterns and unverified contract interactions.”

The recovery at Guernsey only represents “roughly 0.2% of total OneCoin losses” and shows that “formidable barriers to comprehensive asset recovery in cryptocurrency fraud cases” still remain.

Illicit actors still control tens of billions of dollars in crypto, but recovering it becomes difficult because authorities must either obtain private keys or seize funds at centralized exchanges, both of which are hard to do when suspects are not in custody, Shperling explained.

Fraudsters are increasingly employing “privacy-enhancing techniques, with privacy coins accounting for 42% of dark web crypto transactions in 2024,” Shperling said, citing data from Elliptic. This makes recovery “exponentially more difficult,” he added.

Still, Shperling said, there’s reason for “measured optimism” that recoveries could materialize over the next several years.

The more immediate opportunity, he said, lies in prevention, with advances in on-chain monitoring making it easier to flag potentially fraudulent activity “in their early stages, before they reach OneCoin’s catastrophic scale.”