OneCoin legal officer faces decades in jail for laundering proceeds

abdelaziz Fathi

Irina Dilkinska, former head of legal and compliance of cryptocurrency scam OneCoin, is facing up to 40 years in prison for her participation in the massive fraud scheme.

United States federal prosecutors have charged the Bulgarian woman after being extradited from Sofia earlier this week. Irina Dilkinska allegedly helped OneCoin operators to create shell companies in order to launder proceeds and manage property belonging to founder Ruja Ignatova.

In a press release announcing the charges, the Department of Justice accuses Dilkinska of helping her co-conspirator Mark Scott in laundering over $400 million of OneCoin’s proceeds. Investigators say that Scott laundered funds through hedge funds in the Cayman Islands and sent the majority of these funds back to the unnamed founders of the scheme.

Among other things, the former executive used a shell company that was falsely described as offering “proprietary consulting services, support and software solutions” that generated €200 million in 2015 through 2016, to disguise the transfer of millions of dollars as purported “investments” into Scott’s funds.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “Irina Dilkinska, the supposed Head of Legal and Compliance for the OneCoin cryptocurrency pyramid scheme, accomplished the exact opposite of her job title and allegedly enabled OneCoin to launder millions of dollars of illegal proceeds through shell companies.  Dilkinska helped perpetuate a wide-ranging scheme with millions of victims and billions of dollars in losses, and she will now face justice for her alleged crimes.”

US prosecutors said that once Irina learned of Scott’s arrest, she destroyed incriminating documents and sent another co-conspirator incriminating messages.

Earlier this year, reports surfaced that OneCoin founder Ruja Ignatova was killed on a yacht in Greece in November 2018. The woman behind the biggest and most blatant frauds in the cryptocurrency history had simply vanished into thin air after stepping off a plane in Greece in 2017.

Per the report, a Bulgarian national called Georgi Georgiev Vasilev was drunk when he revealed that the notorious drug lord Hristoforos Amanatidis, aka Taki, was behind Ruja’s murder. A Bulgarian media outlet further claims that her body was dismembered and tossed in the Ionian Sea.

OneCoin was founded in 2014 by the Bulgarian businesswoman, who served as OneCoin’s top leader until her disappearance. Since 2016, the project has been a subject of investigations in the US and UK, and several countries have tried to catch scam operatives ever since.

The FBI added Ignatova last year to its list of 10 most wanted fugitives. Announcing a reward of up to $100,000 for information leading to her arrest, federal investigators accuse Ignatova of defrauding victims out of more than $4 billion.

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