Tag Archives: Onecoin

August 9, 2024 · 15:20

I missed this setting

That is the premise. So, why didn’t I think of this? We all have this and on the defence of Microsoft, they had the ‘slogan’ at the launch of Windows 95 ‘Without even thinking’ the premise was brilliant as was the innovation from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95, no doubt about it. And without even thinking applies to so many applications and conditions, it is a brilliant created stage (credit where credit is due). So here I was reading the BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9d1y0z4z9no) and that gave me the nudge to wake up. You see I wrote about Ruja Ignatova, now mentioned in ‘Fugitive ‘Cryptoqueen’ hit by asset freeze’ with the lines “Ruja Ignatova, known as the Missing Cryptoqueen, is now subject to a global freezing order which prevents her assets from being sold or moved.” I had written about it some time ago and now we see “The freezing order, made public on Wednesday at London’s High Court, is part of a group action brought by more than 400 OneCoin investors”, I looked at this ‘crypto queen’ somewhere in May of June last year, it could have been two years ago. 

What made me consider this is that it has taken 6 years to do this. The questions come to mind is why this took 6 years. Come to think of this, why didn’t my sneaky way of thinking consider this. And in that light it she had moved all ‘her’ cash in some trust setting in Switzerland or Saudi Arabia it might not amount to anything. Those two countries have massive protections in place and anyone of them transgressing on their banking laws are in deep trouble. It is like rowing towards the end of the Niagara falls without an anchor in place.

So why did this global freezing order take 6 years? There might be a good reason, but the article doesn’t hand out the reason. Then we also get “The freezing order does not just target Ms Ignatova but seven other people and four companies – all alleged to have been connected with OneCoin in some form” which gives me another setting. Is ‘alleged’ enough to put a freezing order in place? Don’t get me wrong it sounds nice, but when was alleged enough to prosecute people and companies? Doesn’t that require proof? 

Then we get to “Sebastian Greenwood, who is in a US prison serving a 20-year sentence for his role in the fraud. Also subject to the freeze are British businessmen Christopher Hamilton and Robert MacDonald, who appeared in court in London” which get us the added “The pair are accused by US authorities of laundering OneCoin proceeds, however attempts to extradite them to the US to face trial have failed”, now I do not known enough of either Christopher Hamilton and Robert McDonald, but why did the extradition fail? There might be a procedural or legal reason, but the BBC does not give us this. It might not hit the core of this story, which is Ruja Ignatova, yet in light of the time settings it becomes a liked interest, so why is it missing? 

There are a few speculative sights to this. The first is that she was murdered (read: executed) and whomever was left with the bundles of cash is pretty much singing ‘do wa Diddy Diddy’ on a sunny beach. The second one that I considered was that she has a new identity, living it up in the UAE whilst her cash is in an optional Saudi bank, gaining 5%-10% interest over several billions, and as such you can live like a queen in Dubai or Abu Dhabi living off $100,000,000 plus each year. She might have been seeding the non captured funds to assure her of non-capture and non-freeze cash. This is all speculation but the stage that we see with 6 years vanishing makes these two the most likely scenario’s. And there are more places she could go when the cash is securely non-freezable. 

This gets me back to the number one question. Why did the global freeze order take 6 years? There might be a really good (or correct) reason, but the BBC article does not give us that.

Something to consider especially When we consider the Khaleej Times exposed last June that ‘UAE scams exposed: How thousands of residents ‘lost it all’ in bogus investment schemes’ and this is one nation. They report “over 40,000 UAE residents have collectively lost hundreds of millions of dollars to fraudulent investment schemes” that is a serious amount of money and this is one nation. Don’t you think there is now a pressing need to up the effort to upgrade banking laws to take this factor out (or at least diminish it massively). I understand that a fool and his money are soon parted and that it is everyones responsibility to take steps to make it harder for these criminals. I think that the one clear lesson is that there are no free gifts (EVER). The second part is that nothing comes for free. Now we get that not all ‘currencies’ are the same. Look at Facebook. Their currency is data and a lot of people do not care about data, especially as they do not know what it could cost them. One question I have always in mind when someone offers me a deal to good to be true is “if it is too good to be true, it must be a false setting”, this has (up to now) prevented me a few times to lose my cash. The second thing is that if someone (an unknown person) comes to me with such an offer. My initial question becomes ‘Why doesn’t he (or she) go to friends first?’ The situation might have come up, or they might not have any friends. But when you deliver on ‘great’ deals you suddenly have more friends than anyone ever bargained for. 

This is a paranoia setting, but it is not paranoia when everyone is after your bank account. Just a thought to consider.

So whether your funds are in a fridge or not. Make space by removing the venison and make yourself an awesome Bambi burger, with forrest unions and mushrooms. Bon appetite and have a lovely weekend when you get there. I get there in 2 hours. Now I need to find some venison, I suddenly feel peckish.

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July 2, 2022 · 17:38

Crimes pay better

Yes, it is the old axiom again and for a long time there was an expression it was “Crime does not pay”, we saw the old remedy in this and we saw it repeated in movies, in TV. The simple given truth that crime does not pay. 

But the world evolved, capital crime left us, judges (or as some call them lobotomised lawyers) became pussies all whilst police and politicians became even less useful. So in the last 2 decades crime became massively rewarding. Not small crimes though, the bigger the crime the larger the chance of running away and for the few that did get caught places like Netflix offer large sums of money for the movie rights. You think I am kidding? Consider the BBC giving us (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61966824) ‘Missing crypto queen: Is Dr Ruja Ignatova the biggest Bitcoin holder?’ There we see “The scammer disappeared in 2017 as her cryptocurrency OneCoin was at its height – attracting billions from investors. Fraud and money-laundering charges in the US have led to her becoming one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives. The Oxford-educated entrepreneur told investors she had created the “Bitcoin killer”, but the files suggest she secretly amassed billions in her rival currency before she disappeared.” With the added “Details first surfaced in 2021 in leaked documents from Dubai’s courts, posted online by a lawyer who crowned Dr Ruja – as she’s known – the “most successful criminal in history”” so what gives rise to this article? Well that is the nice part. I first crossed virtual paths with her in ‘The citizen model’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/11/03/the-citizen-model/) it was November 2021. And there I wrote “apart from the stage of Fraud and scamming, she broke no laws, she was extremely careful not to break any. Then on 25 October that year she boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens, and vanished off the face of the Earth.” We got to the fact that a lease was signed in 2016 and we were in addition given “the lease was signed in August 2016, financial regulators in at least one European country had already issued a warning about OneCoin. A few months earlier, Dr Ruja had pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges in a German court, after bankrupting a metal factory she’d bought and leaving 150 people jobless in 2011” as such there were issues going back to 2011. And in 2022 (7 hours ago) we see she is now FBI’s top 10 people. The law required 6 years, 6 years where she lived as the queen she was labeled to be. Optionally having a high-rise floor in Dubai with views like this

As her ‘personal’ retirement place. Reading books, watching movies, drinking and having whatever she needs delivered to her floor, or the office of her personal assistant. 6 years and optionally 6 more years, or perhaps even 16 more years. Now you might want to go that way and try to become the next whatever it is you think you’ll be. Yet like quarterbacks, Nobel winners and Stanley cup holders, very few get there and those who do not will be made an example of, that is the only direction the law can go now. They need to rectify 6 years of blunders on one case alone. The UK (London) will have to adjust their secrecy policy on housing and there is a lot more that needs to happen. In the end there is no way telling where this goes, but the one criminal who got away with well over 5 billion might be the last one in generations to do so.

The simple truth is now becoming that either they make sure that the story of ‘Crime does not pay’ becomes a reality or chaos will be the next hurdle they face and as far as I can tell, there is no western government that can properly deal with any kind of chaos. They fear it more than crime. It is one of the hard lessons the UK learned last year, and a few other governments learned this lesson the hard way too. The pandemic made that crystal clear. And in a world where some freedom of movement remains, these criminals will be hard pushed to get to any place where they are not wanted, where they can hide in luxury like hermits, their houses beyond large, beyond well equipped and beyond reproach and that is where they will spend the next two decades as the world goes under through war, poverty and lack of resources. They got out in time and Dr Ruja Ignatova might be the last one to do so. In the mean time the FBI is looking for her in places where they have no jurisdiction, where they get no cooperation and they can look and state “She is not in the US”, which might have been the one mistake Ghislaine Maxwell had made. For some people crime paid better and it is still the foundation of their lavish lifestyle until 2050. After that people like Dr Ruja Ignatova will offer their life story for immunity and money to Netflix and some will treasure that approach because in a world of revenue cash is king, and most likely always will be.

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November 3, 2021 · 20:17

The citizen model

We have seen the stage where governments all over the world started the wave of ‘Tax the rich’. The stage is wrong on two settings. In the first, we are a nation of laws, most nations are that and taxation is part of law. This results in two groups of people, the criminally inclined people who rely on Tax evasion, not paying the tax and the people relying on accountants and lawyers to set the stage of tax avoidance, which is paying the minimum they have to pay. One is criminal one is not. The tax avoidance people rely on black letter law, not the spirit of the law, but on what the lawmakers wrote down as the playing rules of a game. The rich use tax avoidance, it is not semantics, it is a state where they use the law as they can, as they are ALLOWED to do. 

So what happened to bring this to the surface? 

Well, the BBC gives us a long story and a decent recap (at https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-59062959) where we see ‘The Cryptoqueen’s £13.5m London penthouse’. Here we are introduced to the works of cryptocurrency scammer Dr Ruja Ignatova. 

We are given a lot of emotion, but some of the facts sipe through. There is “facing charges connected to the siphoning of millions of euros from Dr Ruja’s €4bn scam – which consisted of selling something that didn’t exist, a fake cryptocurrency she called OneCoin”, a seemingly clear case, or is it? We add “the lease was signed in August 2016, financial regulators in at least one European country had already issued a warning about OneCoin. A few months earlier, Dr Ruja had pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges in a German court, after bankrupting a metal factory she’d bought and leaving 150 people jobless in 2011”, so we see a stage that tarted in 2011, 11 years earlier. A lease was extended 5 years ago with at least one warning out in the open. Then we get “According to the property deed its owner is Abbots House Penthouse Limited. An anonymous Guernsey shell company – one of 12,000 such companies that own properties in England and Wales – meaning that Dr Ruja’s name would not have to appear on the UK deed, or in public records in the Channel Island.”

Apart from the stage of Fraud and scamming, she broke no laws, she was extremely careful not to break any. Then on 25 October that year she boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens, and vanished off the face of the Earth.

So we have an Oxford educated woman who knew hat strides to walk and she vanished with up to 4 billions and the existence of the current laws allows her to remain unfound until she is old, grey and still worth millions at that point. She won’t care what they call her. She will not care as she lives in her private golden cage, surrounded by walls of anonymous stages and staff (mostly lawyers). Consider if the law is useless to capture a criminal who knows the laws, what do you think will happen to a lawful obedient citizen with equal if not more wealth? What I stated again and again for 11 years is that tax laws need an overhaul. All these emotional people shouting ‘tax the rich’ is fun for TV, but useless in the stage of the law, until they are correctly adjusted. 

And the deceived investors? The ‘OneCoin Investors Entirely Dismiss Class Actions Lawsuit’ headline shows it. They no longer stand a decent chance of getting their money back. Het getting found and serving 90 years in prison is the best they can hope for. And those chances do not look good at present. Consider a wanted person named Ghislaine Maxwell. It took forever to arrest her in Bradford, New Hampshire by the FBI on 2 July 2020. It took them years to get a handle on her and she was wanted in plenty of places. The ultra rich are not breaking laws, the are not wanted and they are allowed to move what THEY own. The stage is laughable, the FBI and other parties required years to make a case, in case of one convicted fraudster 11 years and nothing was gained, not even an arrest. So do you still think I was blowing some horn? The flaccid politicians who claim and not deliver, they are part of the problem and them not overhauling the tax laws for well over a decade is a first sign of evidence. Inaction surpassing a decade, consider that evidence and see where that takes you.

The BBC article (beside the added emotions) is quite the revelation, you should take notice, because this helplessness will continue for at least another decade and I do understand it is too early to say, but when deforestation does not end in 8 years, you’ll know I am right and we both get to take that knowledge to our graves, that is where we are all heading anyway.

The model citizen in a citizen model is a joke, because if the law decides what a model citizen is, we also hold the first clear legal evidence that it pays to be a criminal, did you realise that when you read the BBC article?

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