The Missing Cryptoqueen

You’ve probably heard about The Missing Cryptoqueen. It was one of the best podcasts of all time, a BBC series that explored the story of Dr Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian-born German entrepreneur who founded a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme known as OneCoin, which The Times has described as “one of the biggest scams in history”. Since 2017 she has been on the run and in 2019 she was charged in absentia by U.S. authorities for wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering. Currently one of the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted”, she is also subject to an international Interpol warrant from the German authorities. In that podcast, Jamie Bartlett presents a story of “greed, deceit and herd madness” that is fascinating funny and frightening. I cannot recommend both the podcast series and his book highly enough.

Jamie has written about how Dr Ruja was a genius at brand association. Knowing credibility was critical to her scam, she made sure to place herself next to trusted brands. She famously gave a speech hosted by The Economist in 2015, for example, where she gave a platitude filled “keynote” that you can watch online here. Well, as it transpires, there was another trusted brand that OneCoin was, as Jamie puts it, “looking to snag”: Consult Hyperion!

Jamie writes that

In early 2017 OneCoin appointed someone to figure out what OneCoin needed to do to fix its growing technology mess. He asked Ruja’s London office, RavenR Capital, to come up with names. And the name suggested? ‘I would go for Consult Hyperion’ emailed one staffer, attaching a summary of the company.

When Jamie, an old friend, told me this, I was very pleased, as you can imagine. As one of the founders of Consult Hyperion, I have always been very proud of the culture of integrity that we built around our core deep subject matter expertise. We have such great people here and they have helped us to build a global reputation for being the best when it comes to helping scale players exploit new technology around secure electronic transactions.

(To be honest, even after all these years to still feels pretty good every time I see it confirmed and when I get a message on LinkedIn saying “hey , your team did a great job”, or someone says at a conference “those guys got us out of hole”, or a stranger in an airport lounge tells me what a superb analysis one of team delivered for them, I still get the same strange mixture of pleasure and pride that I did all those years ago!)

Jamie asked me what Consult Hyperion could have done for OneCoin, and I told him. We do due diligence on behalf of investors, we provide expert witnesses in lawsuits, we do risk analysis and penetration testing for some of the biggest names in financial services around the world. Having provided expertise in “crypto” to organisations ranging from Euroclear to the Department of Defense, there are all sorts of ways that we could have helped them prove that their scheme was awesome, their teams was great and they would storm the market.

But Dr. Ruja never called.

She never called for the obvious reason that we have some of the best electronic transactions consultants on the planet. It would have taken them at most around five minutes to discover that the supposed claimant to Bitcoin’s crown was nothing of the sort. As Global Ambassador for Consult Hyperion, it is henceforth my proudest claim that the cryptoqueen never called us and if we ever get a coat of arms, I intend to suggest “regina non vocavit” as our motto!