On Tuesday, former OneCoin director of legal and compliance Irina Dilkinska was handed over to US authorities by the Bulgarian government. OneCoin was a crypto Ponzi scheme that left investors counting combined losses of $4.9 billion. Dilkinska is believed to have created the shell companies the scam project used to launder the stolen money.
One of that firms is B&N Consult, which allegedly generated $217 million in revenue between 2015 and 2016 from offering ‘proprietary consulting services and software solutions.’ According to the US Department of Justice, OneCoin made multi-million transfers to B&N Consult in the name of “investment funds” with the help of lawyer Mark Scott, who is now charged with facilitating the laundering of over $350 million.
Unsuspecting Bulgarian Woman Allows Dilkinska to register Firm Under Her Name
The latest development, however, indicates that B&N Consult was not registered under OneCoin or any of its executives. Instead, a BTV report revealed on Thursday that Dilkinska had deceived a Bulgarian woman named Margarita Kaneva into agreeing to have the firm registered under her name.
Kaneva, who lives in the Roma neighborhood in Western Bulgaria, admitted to BTV that Dilkinska had paid her 300 leva, or around $175, to let the OneCoin executive use her details to register the company. Kaneva claims she has never heard of OneCoin, nor was she involved in laundering the stolen funds. The official address of B&N Consult is kaneva’s house in the Roma neighborhood.
Lawyer Says Dilkinska Saw ‘Cryptoqueen’ Five Years Ago
In an interview with the Bulgarian channel Nova TV, Dilkinska’s lawyer Nikolay Petrov claimed that his client only saw Ruja Ignatova alias Cryptoqueen at OneCoin offices in Sofia, where she was working.
Last year, the FBI added Ignatova to its ‘Most Wanted’ list. The Bulgarian-born German national co-founded OneCoin in 2014, scamming over 3 million people worldwide between the project’s inception and 2016. The self-proclaimed cryptoqueen touted OneCoin as bigger than Bitcoin, but it was later discovered that the company had neither developed a coin nor a blockchain. Following the revelation, Ignatova disappeared and has never been seen in public.
Several of her accomplices, including her brother Konstantin Ignatov and co-founder Karl Sebastian Greenwood have pleaded guilty to their involvement in the scam project.
Elsewhere, Cryptoqueen’s ex-boyfriend Gilbert Armenta was sent to prison for five years last month for laundering OneCoin’s illegal proceeds.
