Guernsey authorities recently confiscated more than eleven million dollars linked to the fraud of the Cryptoqueen Ruja Ignatova, according to the local newspaper Guernsey Press this Monday. This seizure, rigorously executed by the Royal Court, responds to an international forfeiture order issued by the courts of Germany regarding the massive OneCoin Ponzi scheme that occurred.
This judicial resolution, based on the local proceeds of crime laws updated in 2024, allowed for the seizure of specific funds deposited in an RBS International bank account. These assets, previously belonging to the firm Aquitaine Group Limited, represent a partial victory within the cross-border investigations seeking to trace the flows of money from the criminal network.
Although officials did not detail the exact nature of the digital assets involved in the operation, the action highlights the collaboration between jurisdictions against the fraud of the Cryptoqueen Ruja Ignatova. Furthermore, the origin of the money is related to proceedings in Bielefeld, showing that tax havens continue under a extremely rigorous and constant regulatory scrutiny for global investors.
OneCoin and the trail of millions lost in foreign accounts
Ruja Ignatova, who mysteriously disappeared in 2017 shortly before charges were filed in the United States, promoted her project despite lacking an operational blockchain in its system. However, the commercial scheme managed to capture billions of dollars at a global level, causing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to include her on its most wanted list.
Since the collapse of OneCoin, prosecutors have tirelessly pursued Ignatova’s close associates, tracing funds through complex financial structures in international offshore centers. Thus, international justice seeks to dismantle the economic infrastructure used to launder illicit profits, demonstrating that cooperation between nations is fundamental to combat financial crimes of such a significant and wide global magnitude.
Nevertheless, the recovery achieved in Guernsey barely represents 0.2% of the estimated total losses, showing the significant barriers to the complete restitution of the financial capital originally lost. According to Ohad Shperling, an executive at IronBlocks, criminals use advanced privacy techniques, which makes it extremely difficult for authorities to access private keys without having the suspects.
Is it possible to recover all the funds stolen by OneCoin?
Likewise, it is essential to consider that modern detection systems could have mitigated this financial damage if they had been fully operational during the scheme’s launch. In this regard, current monitoring allows for identifying suspicious patterns in real time facilitating that authorities act preventively against contract interactions that have not been verified, thus avoiding frauds of truly catastrophic scales.
On the other hand, the increasing use of privacy coins in dark web transactions exponentially complicates the recovery efforts for stolen digital assets. However, there is moderate optimism that technological and legal advances suggest a greater capacity to intercept suspicious monetary flows, allowing victims to maintain hope of recovering part of their lost investments in the future.
While the Bulgarian founder remains an unsolved enigma at the present time, international law enforcement agencies maintain their efforts to locate her and bring her to justice. Therefore, although the fraud of the Cryptoqueen Ruja Ignatova left a deep wound in the sector, the industry strengthens by implementing superior security measures and much stricter surveillance protocols.
