Onecoin's top leaders have been very careful not to get caught from obvious lies - if you don't count lying about OneCoin being a cryptocurrency. Their strategy seems to consist deliberately launching lies using their henchmen to spread them: for example the famous "shops opening for onecoin usage as soon as 30 % of coins have been mined". For some unknown reason the lie has been somewhat different depending where it has been spread: In Finland it has been said by our Finnish country manager Tommi Vuorinen that about 50.000 shops are eagerly lined up accepting onecoins. Abroad the figures have been much more ambitious, varying from 100.000 even up to 500.000.
Now her holiness, "our founder", CEO, Dr. Ruja Ignatova has been caught from a mayor lie. She has been presenting herself as a virgin to MLM (schemes). She claimed that while setting up OneCoin was the first time she decided to get involved with multi-level marketing (schemes) aiming to quickly expand the network of onecoiners. However the videos in my yesterday's update show indisputably that Ruja Ignatova was involved in the BigCoin scam in 2014 prior to OneCoin.
They must have thought that there would be no traces linking Ruja to the previous scam. I bet they just ran a couple of Google searches and after feeling safe enough crowned Ruja as the "CryptoQueen". I guess she was the only one among the pyramid's top scammers who had relatively clean name to use and some sort of credibility to be presented as a founder of new ground breaking cryptocurrency.
However, what happens in the Internet usually stays in the Internet as we saw with our very own eyes yesterday. To begin with the similarities between BigCoin and OneCoin are very awkward for them to explain. In this video below BigCoin is presented as "the pioneer to centralized cryptocurrency":
It looks like BigCoin was not a great success though one can also find some Google search results of it dated in 2015 in addition to the ones in 2014 (when Ruja was still involved in BigCoin). According to Google Trends BigCoin ran mainly in Vietnam. I guess that ponzi eventually slowly died. (It may have changed its name later on to "My Big Coin" which apparently is still online.)
The henchmen
OneCoin's top scammers have relied heavily on their henchmen to step up to explain all the unfilled promises and any unexpected "technical problems". OneCoin uses rumors a lot to build up false expectations. When the expectations fail to meet the reality the ponzi victims sometimes even come up with an explanation themselves.
These are only some of the bullshit that have been spread:
- Banks have been changed because the banks used have not been capable of handling the volumes of cash OneCoin brings in.
- Prepaid MasterCards are not working because there's some technical issues to be solved.
- Shops are lined up to accepting onecoins but it takes time to build the system.
- Ruja is a member in Mensa and has an IQ above 200.
- Ruja is a member in Mensa and has an IQ above 200.
The Finnish county manager Tommi Vuorinen has been caught lying several times already. It looks like he even goes into too much specifics while spreading the lies:
- Tommi Vuorinen had promised that the first shops accepting onecoins were to be opened by the 2 March 2016.
- Last year he declared via "press release" that OneCoin had bought Hermes Bank from a South-American island. After it was obvious that this was not true he simply deleted the lie from the press release.
Today Ed Ludbrook announced in his Facebook:
"OneCoin already has many more users than Bitcoin"
- Onecoins can not be used.
"we already have a unique relationships with Mastercard and UnionPay"
- Well, that's one way to put it. MasterCard and UnionPay seem to be very reluctant to have any relationship with OneCoin whatsoever. China UnionPay just recently ceased offering their services to OneCoin. What comes to MasterCard there has only been a prepaid card available. That deal went off after the prepaid card dealing drug dealer got caught. Somewhere in the turn of the year MasterCard has even insisted to have their logos removed from OneCoin's webpage.
More OneCoin stuff found mixed with some other scam
Sabway seems to be a scam that never really got of the ground. The site looks alarmingly similar to OneCoin's and you can still find some OneCoin stuff in the server:
Great work! The house of cards is officially beginning to fall! Too many lies to even sustain.
ReplyDeleteThanks, though I can't take all the credit since there's a lot of people gathering information about this scam and publishing it online. I follow up various sources to gather information and do my own research as well.
DeleteI had tried to dig up some information about Ruja's involvement in BigCoin before with out success. I decided to give it another go after I saw a picture showing Ruja in a BigCoin event. I would have thanked the person who uploaded the video but comments are not allowed there. Anyway it's a good thing that the video was found since the uploader maybe did not even know how embarrassing it would be to OneCoin.
The other video was uploaded in June 2014. Judging by the YouTube channel of the uploader it is probably an Asian band that was performing in the BigCoin event. In the video a man is probably handing the band's CD's to the ponzi scammers hence the video has been uploaded in to their channel.
I haven't investigated your other claims but I see you're citing the website sabway and suggesting OneCoin has something to do with tags website. Had you done your due due diligence here you might have uncovered (as I just did) that the sabway website is the result of someone copying the the Onecoin website and making appropriate changes.
ReplyDeleteMany websites can easily be cloned in a matter of minutes using a simple piece of software such as Web Dumper! If you click through most of the links on the sabway site you will see that they are not even working!!
Examining the source code of the subway site clearly shows that it is a direct rip-off of the OneCoin website! They haven't even bother to change the OneCoin meta data which can be seen in the source code header! Furthermore a WHOIS lookup on the domain name subway.biz shows it was registered on 25th November 2014 after OneCoin got started!
I'm afraid your lack of due diligence in this one area (which only took me a few minutes to uncover) leads me to call into question the other statements you have made about OneCoin and it's founder!
"I haven't investigated your other claims"
Delete- Well isn't that convenient for you.
This Sabway's web page is from 2009 so who's copying who?
http://sabway.biz/
The reason the site is not working is most likely because it was another scam dated back in 2009 and no longer operational. However there clearly is a connection to OneCoin. I don't know who's behind OneCoin's web page but he/she clearly does some sloppy job.
The connection between OneCoin and Sabway.biz was actually found over a year ago. Someone recalled being approached with a spam about a site similar to OneCoin's in late 2013 or early 2014. The person's comment can be found here (in Finnish, dated: 10. helmikuuta 2015 klo 10.23):
http://pjarvinen.blogspot.fi/2015/02/onecoin-verkostohuijaus-kryptovaluutalla.html
"I'm afraid your lack of due diligence in this one area leads me to call into question the other statements you have made about OneCoin and it's founder!"
- Really?