Hacked - Double Whammy

Episode Date: October 31, 2021

Jordan Bloemen & Scott Francis Winder discuss Onecoin, a certifiable double whammy. If you like the show and want to make sure we can keep making it, please subscribe and if you can visit https://www.patreon.com/hackedpodcast and show us some love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In October 2016, this guy named Bjorn Bjork gets a call from a recruitment agency. And they are hiring on behalf of a cryptocurrency company. The crypto company is a few years old. They've got a pretty big footprint, growing evaluation, and its founder is profiled in all sorts of fancy magazines. There's billions of dollars slushing around in this thing. And the crypto company needs someone to do this one job, this one really big job. Is it steal all the cryptocurrency? They needed someone to do.

this one really big job. And it was to build that large established cryptocurrency company a blockchain. And the thing about cryptocurrency is that that job description is a really big red flag. It's like a restaurant that would take your money but does not have any food. Like I don't know what you do, but it isn't the thing that you say you do. So Bjerk turns down the job because he, like cryptocurrency engineer, was capable of seeing this company's pitch for exactly what it was and what it wasn't. A year later, the founder of that company would have vanished, and everyone would be standing around the, like, her-shaped hole where she used to be.

And they would all be either arrested or charged and several convicted, including to just this month, which is why we're talking about it. We call a person missing when we don't know where they are, but sometimes when we say a person vanished, we kind of know where they are. they're hiding. Yeah, they're somewhere with no extradition trees. And this founder, a woman named Ruggia Ignatova, the subject of our episode, vanished. This story happened like five years ago.

A lot of people might know it. I didn't. But we're going to try and provide a little bit of a primer into the very strange world of one coin. This is the double whammy. You're unhacked. Okay. We're talking about one coin, Scott. Have you heard about one coin?

I know, but I've heard about every other fucking Bitcoin heist. Okay, so we're actually not talking about a Bitcoin heist. Because Bitcoin Heist is like, that's the classic, right? Sure. Yeah, yeah. They're like, I'll manage your Bitcoin and then they're managing an untraceable thing. So they just vanish. Exactly.

We're talking about One Coin. The global footprint of One Coin is actually pretty hard to like calculate how much money was moving around this thing in total. There was like a class-assion lawsuit that uncovered. an estimated of revenue about $4.5 billion, but some sources who've worked close to one coin say that's way too low. It's probably creeping closer to like 20 billion. That's so insane. Which would make it one of the largest, like, I don't want to give away what it is, but the largest things of its kind, essentially. Let's call it financial crime. Yeah, largest crimes of its kind. One coin, interestingly, kind of kept going even after

One Coin had ended. Because of how it was like structured and organized, there were still satellites of people keeping this grift grinding forward for years after it collapsed. There's, um, there's an email pretty early on in this whole thing between Ruggia Ignatova, our main character and her co-founder, Sebastian Greenwood, that was cited by the Justice Department, where they had a really frank discussion about what they would do if one coin like collapsed out from under them. And she said that quote, oh, I would take the money and run and blame someone else. Which... Cut to chapter eight.

Cut to chapter eight. Yeah. If you choose that path, flip to chapter eight. And if we're talking about running and taking the money and blaming somebody else, we got to start with like maybe the harshest one in this whole story, a guy named Konstantin Ignatova, Ruge's brother. In 2015, Constantine is living in a little village in Germany where the two of them had grown up. He's living what he described as this nice, quiet, small life he was okay with.

He drives a for forklift. He volunteers at a dog shelter. All as well for Constantine in 2015. And one afternoon, his sister Ruzha comes knocking. Ruzha is the wonderkind of the family. She's this high-powered lawyer turned tech tycoon. She'd been on the cover of like Bulgarian Forbes. And she'd been riding high on the wave of her latest enter.

which was a cryptocurrency called Onecoin. One coin had made Ruzha rich and powerful, and at this point her day-to-day life looked like her just hopscotching all over the globe, giving these big talks to crazy cheering crowds, evangelizing the future of her cryptocurrency, One-Coyne, and getting more people to invest. And her message was always the same. If those Bitcoin people can do it, why can't you? So Ruzha offers her brother a job.

money he's making now to be her assistant. He's going to book her flights, carry her bags, and just spend time globetrotting with his sister, who he idolizes in the like privileged air of her extreme, extreme wealth. Ruggia Ignatova and Sebastian Greenwood started one coin in 2014 and her pitch was that it worked just like any other cryptocurrency. You can mine them. They used to make payments. You have an e-wallet. It's everything you've heard about. And like Bitcoin, the value can go up and down, which means if you buy in now, you could get very rich doing this. And to invest in one coin, you would go to an event where they talked about one coin. And you would buy a package from the person hosting the event.

Each package would include tokens, which can be assigned to mine one coins. And like, just imagine air quotes around every word I'm saying, because this was sort of how they presented it. So wait, can I just ask, this sounds a whole lot like a multi-level marketing thing. Like, hey, come to my house, buy in, we'll kick something up to you, everybody's part of it. You know, you get your first two coin mines for free. But if you want to buy more to get rich. No, Scott, you just misunderstand. It's a cryptocurrency.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And one coin claimed that one coin was mined by servers in two sites in Bulgaria and one site in Hong Kong. It had an exchange called X-coin-X, which was this internal marketplace where you could exchange one coins for euros. So you buy in. There's a conversion rate, and the conversion rate goes up and down, and you can buy out. You can get your euros back. Supply and demand.

Exactly. The euros would be placed in a wallet. You could wire transfer it out. But importantly, the marketplace had daily selling limits based on which package the seller invested in, which acted as like a limit on how many one coins you could. take out as cash. So you buy a package. It gives you these sort of coins in a wallet. You can exchange for euros, but only so many at a time. As more people buy in, the value goes up. And within your limit, you can withdraw your profits and you're going to get rich. Everybody

I hear gets rich with Bitcoin with crypto. And every day, these people are going to these events and they're buying and they're keeping an eye on the value and the value is going up. There's this little ticker on the site that you could watch. They're all getting rich and you, the cheering would go, want to get in now. And that's what all this was, was this whole thing was just shouted into microphones, like to giant crowds of hollering people. And all you have to do to be part of this is invest and you're going to get rich to. Get your own Lambo start today. So her brother, Constantine, takes this job and he joins his sister in the One Coin family. A subsidiary of One Coin Limited

has registered in Dubai and One Life Network limited. is registered in police. Scott, you're a savvy investor, and I know the answer to this. It should be obvious because we're talking about a story on a show called hacked. I'm not going to ask if you would invest in this,

but like, have you, because I know the answer to that. Have you ever found yourself in a high pressure investment situation like this? And if so, how'd that go? I, well, I got two sides to that story. One, of course, you always, you always end up in something where somebody's trying to sell you something always and it's funny

and it never goes well with me because I'm stubborn but the uh the the but the crypto side of it I've also seen and and heard you know dozens of friends and people that I know that are get excited about crypto I don't even really know what it is and get all jazzed on the potential for free money like uh the recent doge coin explosion like, you know, literally created as a joke. And then all of a sudden, all these people thought they were going to get filthy rich. And some people did make a lot of money off of collective. A lot of doge millionaires.

A lot of doge lambos. So you walked right up to the edge of what this is. And I have to give away what one coin was early. Otherwise, some of the other stuff I want to talk about turns into spoilers. Okay. I kind of have to unpack the nature of this grift. And there's a reason. I'm calling this one.

Oh, it's a grift, Scott. It's a pretty remarkable grift. Everybody has a grift, you know? There's a reason I think it's a double whammy. There's a reason I called it a double whammy. And it's rooted in the language of this whole thing. It's like, you kind of call it this, the language of it, the visuals of these people going to these events

where people are championing a life-changing financial opportunity. Sure. There's a hype man on stage telling you all about how great your life's going to be. Mm-hmm. Sounds wonderful. Very trustworthy, I'm sure. A Ponzi scheme, as I understand it, is an investment that fraudulently posts profits to keep drawing new people in. Correct.

And as long as it can continue to bring in more money than investors try to withdraw, it can continue to, like, grow and fester. Sure. Until it inevitably pops and hurts a lot of people. A pyramid scheme, as opposed to a Ponzi scheme, offers victims a chance to make money by bringing new people into the scam. And as long as they can keep getting new people coming in under them, it keeps growing. And this Scott is a double whammy. Oh my God. It's both.

It's pretty impressive. It's pretty remarkable what she pulled off. Somebody figured out how to like genetically breed the super scam. She made tamako. She put both together. Okay. So how is it a Ponzi scheme? After this was years underway,

Ruggia Ignatova reaches out to the guy from the start, Bjerk, asking him to build her a blockchain. And like chronologically, here's what that means. Okay, wait, wait, wait, let me, let me ask that chronological question because I'm now confused by it. Years after one coins existed, she says, I need a blockchain. That's cool. Yeah, no, it's super cool and awesome. All those years, and you've figured this out, that the value of one coin had been going up, the little ticker on the site that said what its value was, how many euros you could exchange it for, essentially what were in essence the returns of the people who had invested.

It was strictly based on how many other people had bought in. It was just the made-up number. It was barely even based on what other people had potted. It was based purely on what Ignatova and Greenwood said it to. Because there was no blockchain. That number was not a function of anything. It was just a dial somewhere that they were turning. Oh, my God.

And when one investor started panicking, and we're going to talk about her a little bit later and started reaching out to them and say, like, hey, can I see the publicly distributed ledger that makes this cryptocurrency and informs this price. After months of just harassing the person who had wrapped her into it, she finally gets informed that the blockchain is a

database inside of an SQL server. That's weird. Which means that an administrator controls it. Which means that A is not a cryptocurrency. B is not a blockchain. No. And that the rise in value was fully untethered from how many people were buying and

selling. She was just sort of making it up, which means the profits are by definition fraudulent. And which is why those buyback limits are so important. Sure. If you remember earlier, we talked a bit about how you could only take a certain amount of one coin out in euros, and it was dictated by how many you'd bought. That was essentially a friction mechanism to stop more money from going out than was coming in, because that's the thing that makes a Ponzi scheme collapse,

is when people try and take their money out. So if you limit that as a feature of memberships, you can modulate how much folks can withdraw, and you can maintain that growth forever. All pump, no dump. And it's quite, it's quite clever. It's evil as shit, but it's very clever. You got to be impressed at some level at like the creativity of it.

Like granted, it's like, you know, the same kind of creativity that lots of hackers deploy and like break into things. And it's like not a good outlet for creativity. But it's like she managed to create something terrible. But made like, big. one of the most terrible things. I will say, though, that, like, in the early days of crypto, I remember it was incredibly easy to buy it

and incredibly hard to sell it. And as a crypto investor, Jordan, you might know something about that. Yeah, I've got a lot of lost passwords with small amounts of money hiding behind them, but that's neither here nor there. It brings us to the other side of the double whammy, which is, how is it a pyramid scheme?

This brings us back to those packages that you would buy at these events to buy, you know, a one coin. You'd go to this big event, this crazy like Tony Robbins, Ted Talk shit, or person after person goes on stage and they evangelize this investment. Air quotes are back. If you buy in now, you're going to get rich. The investment comes in these packages, and they had different tiers, a couple hundred bucks all the way to like hundreds of thousands. And a feature was that if you sold them, you would get a new. a kickback in the form of more one coin, which could in certain volumes be then, as I said, converted into euros. And same as I'm getting a kickback for getting you to invest,

you get a kickback for some getting someone else to invest, and then you get a kickback for all their subsequent investees. Sure. And the more people you get in that like we all get rich, triangle shaped business beneath you, you get rich, which as you called earlier would actually technically qualified as a multi-level marketing scheme because those are like bafflingly legal. Except that the thing that distinguishes a pyramid scheme from an MLM amongst like a bunch of really carefully navigated legal distinctions is that with a pyramid scheme, there's kind of technically no product. You're just bringing people in paying commission to join into this thing.

And if you can keep doing that forever, it keeps growing. And in this case, there is technically no cryptocurrency. Well, lots of pyramid schemes have products, right? Like they're based on, you know, sale of cosmetics or sale of, you know, food storage containers. I'm trying not to use trademark names here. But they're often connected to selling of things. Yes. Yeah.

Which is the odd side fact, MLMs are incredibly predominant in Mormon communities. I didn't know if you knew that based on the sizes. I didn't actually know that. I didn't actually know that. Apparently they're very, very predominant in Mormon communities. So I've heard. Huh. Yeah.

There's two things that distinguish them. One is the product thing and that is the legal defense that most MLMs use. The other has to do with how you are compensated, whether or not you are given more money for embroiling more people versus just if you're buying in bulk and then selling to more people who are not actually using the product. Sure. This checks both of the money.

of those boxes because the product thing as you brought up, some pyramid schemes have products, but they also will pay people to embroil more people into the pyramid scheme. And the kickbacks technically qualify this as both, which means it is both a pyramid scheme and a Ponzi scheme. It's a double whammy. Double whammy. The thing about both Ponzi and pyramid schemes is that there are inevitably winners and losers. Ruggia Ignatova, depending on how you view this, is...

I call her a winner and all this, but she wasn't the only one. Let's talk about some characters. First, we got Igor Alberts. In May 2015, Igor Alberts gets invited to a one coin event in Dubai, where he met a whole bunch of people all apparently making fortunes with this new currency. And Igor Alberts, interestingly, was a very successful multi-level marketing seller. So he went into this knowing the structure of it. Sure.

And is why I had to kind of spoil already what this ends up being. Ruzha makes a really intense impression on him. He's got all the fancy magazine covers and this sort of story she's telling of a financial revolution. Igor is sold. He goes home with a new mission. He tells everyone in his downline, that's the like MLM speak for your employees. Drop everything else you're selling and start selling one coin. Quote, we gathered the teams together and we started to work like crazy.

And in the first month, they made 90,000 euros pretty much out of nothing. Quote, from him, bang. Quote from him, sorry? Bang? He just, bang. He has an energy, man. I don't know if I caught that, so I decided to get you to reiterate that. I was like, excuse me? He said bang?

Bang? Bang? You yelled bang, right? He said, bang. 60% of the income that Igor Alberts made from one coin, which at its height was 2 million euros per month because he's, again, at the top of an MLM funnel. Sure. 60% was paid in cash and the rest in one coin.

which is interesting because he then used even some of the cash he got paid to buy more one coin. Oh no. And it tells you that like this guy at the top of this crazy MLM, you know, sure system he's built out for himself. He actually fell for it.

Like he didn't know that the product he was selling was total horse shit. He knew he was at the top of an MLM period, a triangle for legal reasons. But he thought that one coin was real. And he thought that as the value of of it was going up. Yeah, sure, I want to get paid in one coin.

I'm going to get rich. And that's what cryptocurrencies do. They go up. Total gang. Hotal gang. Igor Alberts, since all of this has fallen apart, has since launched Dag coin, which, for legal reasons, I will not comment on whether or not it is a cryptocurrency or a double whammy or anything else.

Then, on the flip side of this, there's Jen McCatom. Jim McCadams is a woman from Glasgow and she finds herself at one of these seminars in 2016 and the host is talking about Dr. Rouge's glittering background her Oxford University, her Ph.D., her work at McKinsey running tape of speeches she's given and McAdams is very, very impressed. And she decides to invest a thousand euros at this sort of event.

They keep kind of pushing her a little bit. Maybe a thousand isn't going to cut it. The larger packages, you know, they're really going to to change your life. So she said, okay, I'll do 5,000 euros. They keep pushing and they keep going. They get her to do 10,000 euros. And now she's so sunk cost in this whole thing that she starts going to her friends and family and gets them to invest a total of about a quarter million euros of their money. She's fully in on this thing. And she's just sitting on that site watching that ticker go up and down. And while she was bought in, the value of her 10,000 euro package crept

up past 100,000 euros, 10fold return. She starts thinking, oh my God, when I finally cash out of this thing. I'm going to go on holidays. I'm going to have these shopping trips. And that is when the crypto nerds show up. Towards the end of the year, Jen McCabbs gets contacted by a stranger on the internet. He's this crypto guy who'd been studying one coin guy named Timothy Curry. And he'd been starting to reach out to people who'd invested in one coin. He wants to talk to her. Reluctantly, she says, sure, let's hop on a Skype call. And that Skype call immediately devolves into a very angry shouting match. Whoa.

Yeah. Curry, who is a Bitcoin enthusiast and like an early, you know, cryptocurrency advocate was on this sort of mission to show people what one coin was because he thought that in the early days it was going to give Bitcoin a bad, especially a bad name. It's not actually a cryptocurrency, it's something else and it's a scam and you should know that. I think the collective amount of fraud that lives in the crypto space is a, you know, it's a space is given the root idea of crypto a bad name. 100% it has.

And it's like for a guy who just has that sort of philosophical underpinning for why this is good, I get why you would start maybe going out and trying to denounce some of those things. Curry and Bjork seem like the good guys in all of this. So over the next several weeks, Curry just starts like, he doesn't drop it. He starts sending her all of this information about here's how cryptocurrencies actually work. There's links and YouTube videos. He introduces her to Bjorn Bjork, the blockchain developer from the start of the show, who they reached out to and said, these people don't have a, they don't have a blockchain.

There's no publicly distributed ledger. This isn't, I don't know what this is, but it's not what it says it is. And it takes McCadam like three months to go through all of it. But she starts to like develop these questions based on her new understanding. She starts reaching out to the leaders of her one coin group saying like, hey, like, can I see the blockchain? Can I see the ledger? Can I see any of this? And she keeps getting told this is something you don't need to know about.

She keeps persisting until she finally gets this voicemail that I wish I had the table of, but I don't, in April of 2017, where they say, quote, okay, Jen, they don't want to disclose this kind of information just in case something goes wrong with where the blockchain is being held. Oh, my God. And plus, yeah, there's an application. This is when you start, like, sweating if you're hurt. You just hit the buy the sell button. Yeah, you hit the cell button as fast as you can. Yeah. And quote, plus, as an application, it doesn't need a server behind it.

So it's our blockchain technology, a SQL server with a database. Jen was the person who uncovered that there was no blockchain, that this was all just being run off a database that Ignatova had admin access to. She cracked it kind of for herself. And she starts to panic. She starts to sell. And so do a whole bunch of people. Her friends, her family, everybody she knows.

And while no one has been arrested yet, The authorities are starting to kind of get word about this. The FBI had come by to speak with several of one coins like kind of top brass salespeople. Typically speaking, there's one way that these stories tend to end. And it's a bunch of people lose money and the person of the top gets arrested. But Ruggia Ignatova is anything but typical. And how this all kind of fell apart right after the break. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show.

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2017, the Croatian National Bank advised the public to exercise a high degree of caution against one coin. In April 2017, the Indian police arrested more than 18 people in Mumbai for organizing a one coin event. In April 2017, Germany's federal financial supervisory authority issued a cease and desist against one coin. In 2017, the Bank of Thailand issued a warning. And all around the world, kind of cumulatively, the noose started tightening around this thing. In 2017, Ms. Signatova sees this, and she starts to make contingency plans. She goes to Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia to get a passport. She had this sense that this thing was starting to kind of get shaky underneath her feet a little bit.

She had started to figure out, you know, I think the authorities are starting to kind of listen to these people like Bjork and Curry who were saying, hey, this is a giant scam and we can really clearly show you how. The authorities were like peering over the fence a little bit. But that's still not what made it, you know, fully collapse. What made it finally break is Ruzha flinched. Ruzha had been planning to elope with a married man named Gilbert Armenta. And she started to get suspicious, and this has nothing to do with one coin, that he was stringing her along. You know, like the classic kind of, I'll leave my wife for you, but they never do type thing. She thought that was happening to her.

Yeah. So as her brother would later explain in court, she had an associate rent the apartment beneath Armenta's Florida, like, you know, had and drill up through the floor so she could eavesdrop on him and figure out if he was ever actually going to leave his wife. And what she found out is that he was not secretly still in love with his wife. What she found was that Mr. Armenta was cooperating with the feds. Armenta pleaded guilty to wire fraud, money laundering, extortion conspiracy charges related to one coin, and he'd been cooperating presumably for a lighter sentence into their, you know,

investigation into her. She'd been betrayed by this man who, you know, had betrayed his wife to be with her, but she'd been betrayed by her love. And shortly after discovering that Mr. Amenta was an FBI informant, ignatova, flinches, and bolts. She flies to Athens with only her purse and one of her security guards. And from there, she vanishes off the face of the earth. And her disappearance sparks total panic. The one coin community starts to figure out that something is kind of wrong shortly after she vanishes

at this large gathering of European one coin promoters in Lisbon in October of 27th. And she's not there. And they're like, wait a second. Ruzha famously punctual kind of, you know, if you're not five minutes early or five minutes late kind of person, she does not show up at all. One coin leaners start freaking out.

They hire a private investigator to find her, but no one can find Ruzia Ignatio. Rija Ignatova doesn't want to be found. And so, after a couple of months, our original character, Constantine Ignatova, her brother, who had been hired a few years prior just to be her assistant, becomes the public face of OneCoyne. He starts going up on stage at these events to tell all of OneCoin's evangelists that, you know, this is fine, it's okay, I'm in touch with her, there's nothing wrong. It's all conspiracies that the feds are looking into us.

It's all fine. But it kind of just goes to show you how important the culture. to personality as to these things. Sure. No one buys it. He's this heavily tattooed mixed martial arts aficionado. He just doesn't have the same like...

Panash. ...vibe that she... Exactly. He's not the Forbes cover tech tycoon type. He's something else and it doesn't sell the story in the same way. And these investors start getting really, really anxious and they start wanting their money back.

For a normal person like Jen McAdams, wanting her money back, you know, tough. You're the victim of a scam. But some of those investors are dodgy. Mr. Gnatova later said in court that he was kidnapped at gunpoint and taken to the suburbs of Bulgaria's capital where they beat the living crap out of him and snapped some fingers. He was told if Rousha disappeared with the money that these people were going to come back

and kill him. A couple months later, record showed that he was called from a man identifying himself as a high-ranking member of the Hells Angels saying, you come to Zurich right now. And when he gets there, they take him into a building, shove a gun in his mouth, and threaten to kill him if he doesn't get their money. By the time he flies to San Francisco in February 2019, law enforcement agents were questioning him about his intentions in the U.S. They take his cell phone.

They let him in, but he's rattled. He knows that this isn't going to last much longer. He tosses his laptop into a trash can on the Las Vegas script because he's scared its contents would be used against him. And he was right. Two days later, Mr. Ignatova is arrested at LAX. And it's right at that same time, two years after she vanishes,

that the U.S. authorities finally give up, on this idea that they're ever going to find her, and they charge Ruggia Ignatova in absentia for wire fraud, security fraud, and money laundering. In the two intervening years, one coin had kind of limped along, essentially, getting handed from one soon-to-be-arrested person to the next. At one point, Ruge's mother stepped up on stage

to try and get more people to invest. And it wasn't until 2019 that the European domains were pulled, and one coin finally went down. They finally stopped it from spreading. And as I said at the top of the show, because of its global footprint, it's hard to know exactly how much victims pumped into this thing because it was cash based, based on an MLM model, and it spread internationally. And if your compensation was based on, like if you were being paid or if your investment returns or your gains on your triangle came to you in the form of more one coin. And aside from just the actual cash problem, the lost economic value of it would be probably monstrous. Not far from the Rwand border in Uganda, a 22-year-old Daniel Linehart scraped together the 700,000 Ugandan shillings, it's like 250 USD that he needed to buy into one coin.

He would go on to convince his entire family to invest the 3,000 USD they'd spend decades saving to open up a shop to instead put that money into one coin. This is after 2017 when this has all started to fall apart. And that investment is now worth nothing. And it's interesting to look at the sort of charts here where in Europe, at the start of 2017 versus 2016, when it started to collapse, there was less money invested. After the collapse begins, less money goes in. But in Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent, it's the other way around. Even after this thing had started to collapse in the West, more money was going into it year over year. Sure, they moved it.

There are a whole bunch of theories as to where Ruzha is now. A really weird, like, one-coin beauty pageant that was held in Bucharest in 2017 seemed to maybe point in that direction. We know she spent her childhood in Germany. There's a steelworks factory where she did a different grift years prior in Bavaria. She might have been there. The BBC, who did this really incredible deep dive, we'll talk about later, flighted Frankfurt is probably a likely destination based on family ties.

but with the funds that she siphoned off of one coin, she could really be anywhere. But her brother and her co-founder and her lawyer and a bunch of other one-coin evangelists who got just high up enough the food chain to peer in and see how this worked are currently grinding their way through all manner of wire fraud charges and legal woes, including someone just this month, the guy named David Pilk, and those charges are still rolling in. You can really only charge someone in absentia so much before it starts to feel kind. time. This has been a pretty well-told story in the media. It was fascinating to learn about.

I think it's going to be kind of a story over the next year or two. There's a book that was written by McCadams. I actually believe that's being turned into a film next year. Kate Winslet's going to play Rousha. Probably going to be awesome. Yeah. And if you did find it interesting, there's a really wonderful BBC serialized show that's the super deep dive into it. They go to all these places they talk to everybody. It's a really cool, really cool series and worth a lesson. We talk about social engineering a lot on this show, and it's there that the line between kind of typical hacking stories and plain old, like, con, grifty stories gets kind of blurry, right? And every person who set foot into these seminars was engineered in really fascinating ways.

And some of it was Ruzha's doing, because she was clearly an architect of these sort of engineering feats, and someone was done for her by the time that people showed up. Every single person who set foot in that building had spent years hearing about Bitcoin millionaires and crypto investors making it big, and they were primed to feel the emotion at the heart of every Ponzi scheme and pyramid scheme, which is if they can do it, why can't I? And with that kind of ringing loud enough in your ears, and maybe not the best understanding of what cryptocurrency is or is supposed to be or why other people bought into it. That message at that volume could be pretty compelling.

And Rousa did none of that. That was all done for her. She built her social engineering on that foundation. That Forbes cover, the one that they would like project on the wall and have a big canvas copies of and it was printed on every single little brochure that went out. It was an advertorial. She just paid for it out of pocket.

And her whole backstory was kind of an advertorial. Between the like stints at prestigious law firms, she was just embroiled in grifts and cons that she's sort of just like, made go away by clever PR, including another faux crypto scam three years earlier. But all of it just primed those people for this mass social engineering feat. It set them up to hear this story about how they could get rich too. It set them up for the double whammy. Patrons on Patreon. This one is for you. They're all for you.

Kyle Jenkins, so happy to have you here. Patreon user 2020 ever forget. Thank you. I owe you reply to your message. Benjamin White, thank you. Andrew Armington. Thank you. Torben Storm Jensen.

Cool name. Thanks. And hardwired. Hardwired for greatness. Thank you. If you like this story, Case of the Missing Crypto Queen by the BBC is a great deep dive.

It was a huge inspiration for this. I incorrectly referred to Jen McCadam as McCatoms. A couple times there. My apologies. Thank you for listening to everybody. Really appreciate you being here and excited to be back for the next one.