OneCoin’s Legal Chief Receives Four-Year Sentence for Role in Cryptocurrency Pyramid Scheme

Jimmy Aki
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OneCoin’s Legal Chief Irina Dilkinska was sentenced to four years imprisonment by US Judge Edgardo Ramos on April 3 after pleading guilty to helping the Web3 company to launder millions of dollars in its fraud scheme.

The Judge also ruled that the Bulgarian national must forfeit $111.44M as retribution and submit to one month of supervised release.

OneCoin’s Legal Chief Transferred $110M to a Cayman Island Entity

As outlined in the US Department of Justice (DOJ) public notice, 42-year-old Dilkinska was hired as the Head of Legal and Compliance for the OneCoin platform, thus tasked with relevant regulatory frameworks and local laws. Instead, the OneCoin Legal Chief assisted the founders in facilitating an elaborate Ponzi scheme, including laundering a sum of $110M fraudulently obtained from unsuspecting victims.

Damian Williams, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that Dilkinsha’s involvement in OneCoin’s pyramid scheme was a breach of conduct and asserted that she should’ve have known better based on her profession.

“Rather than upholding the law and embracing her position as the Head of Legal and Compliance, she facilitated and committed money laundering, aiding in the exploitation of millions of victims,” he added.

OneCoin was launched in 2014 by Ruja Ignatova and Karl Sebastien Greenwood. At the time, the crypto revolution was just taking shape. The company was promoted as a revolutionary fintech company with a native token, ONECOIN, which could be mined and utilized as a payment currency. Instead of functioning as a decentralized blockchain like Bitcoin, OneCoin was internally managed by a group of friends. The scheme became popular as it promised significant returns and incentives to investors who referred new subscribers to the platform.

The Ponzi scheme grew tremendously to over three million users with $4.3 billion in revenue recorded in 2015 and generated $3 billion in profits from 2014 to 2016.

In 2017, the DoJ charged Ignatova with wire fraud and money laundering charges. She’s yet to be apprehended.

DOJ Aims To Bring All OneCoin’s Defendants to Justice

Since the US brought fraud and money laundering charges against Ignatavo in October 2017, many of OneCoin’s executives and associates have been handed jail sentences.

Recall that co-founder Karl Sebastien Greenwood pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering and was sentenced to 20 years by the US DOJ in September 2023.

While Ignatavo’s whereabouts remain unknown, a report claimed that she died in 2018. But the DOJ, alongside the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), is exploring every opportunity to arrest the co-founder, as they offer a $100K reward for intel that leads to her arrest.

However, US Attorney Williams expressed optimism in Dilkinska’s sentencing report, stating that all those involved in OneCoin’s fraudulent scheme, including Ignatavo, will be held accountable.

“As Dilkinska learned today, this Office will hold accountable every perpetrator of the OneCoin scheme, no matter where they may hide,” he said.

About Jimmy Aki PRO INVESTOR

Based in the UK, Jimmy is an economic researcher with outstanding hands-on and heads-on experience in Macroeconomic finance analysis, forecasting and planning. He has honed his skills having worked cross-continental as a finance analyst, which gives him inter-cultural experience. He currently has a strong passion for regulation and macroeconomic trends as it allows him peek under the global bonnet to see how the world works.