NEW YORK: A co-founder of the fraudulent cryptocurrency OneCoin, a pyramid scheme that conned billions of dollars from investors worldwide, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering charges, US prosecutors said Friday.
Touted as a "Bitcoin killer,” prosecutors said the purported cryptocurrency co-founded by Ruja Ignatova and Karl Sebastian Greenwood in 2014 in Bulgaria was actually worthless. Though marketed as a cryptocurrency, it was never mined using computers and there was no public and verifiable blockchain. The value of OneCoin was not set by supply and demand, but by its operators, they said.