ScamCoin

NEWCOMERS TO BITCOIN sometimes dismiss the cryptocurrency as a pyramid or Ponzi scheme. The OneCoin scam shows what it really looks like when a fake blockchain serves as cover for a multilevel marketing fraud that pays early investors with funds from new marks.

Here we see the near-messianic pageantry common to overhyped projects. We see Matryoshka armies of international holding companies and frontmen. We see starry-eyed everymen scrambling to invest every last family dollar in “educational materials” that come with “free” coins (to avoid triggering regulations). We see Curaçaoan banking consortia, Maltese gambling concerns, and a mysterious maven manipulating everything behind the scenes before absconding suddenly into the night.

Jamie Bartlett’s The Missing Cryptoqueen details the sleazy rise and unsatisfying fall of the OneCoin con while investigating the possible whereabouts of the swindler behind it all: a runaway wannabe-fashionista from Bulgaria named Ruja Ignatova.